Chapter Text
Will is seven years old when he listens to a pastor’s homily for the first time.
Children, regardless of the devotion of the homes they are raised in, rarely possess the awareness required to grasp what truly matters. They do not yet know how to listen and look for weight. For meaning, for consequence, for the quiet words that carry substance. They miss the sentences that linger, the ones capable of bending a life onto a different path, altering its direction long before they realize a choice was ever made.
Will—and every other kid in the history of ever—would often need to be nudged by their mom or dad, a silent reminder to pay attention in mass, and listen to the words that fall out of the pastor’s mouth. To listen to the angelic voices of the choir.
So when Will’s mother, Colleen, slightly elbows Will when he bites his fingernails so much that he draws blood—it’s probably one of the smallest things ever that has led Will to carry a certain ideal his entire life—but Will lifts his head.
And he listens to every word Pastor Jonathan delivers from the pulpit.
“My brothers and sisters,” Pastor Jonathan begins, his voice, steady and unyielding, bouncing off the walls, “the Apostle Paul speaks here of grave disorder—of men who, by mutual consent, turn away from the natural law established by God.”
He pauses, allowing the silence to settle.
“Though the text names men explicitly, this teaching is not confined to them alone. Scripture makes clear, elsewhere, that such acts between women fall under the same condemnation. In his letter to the Romans, Paul speaks of those who have rebelled against God, saying that they were given over to dishonorable passions—that natural relations were abandoned for those contrary to nature, and that men burned with desire for one another, committing acts that Scripture itself names as shameful, and bearing the consequences of their error within themselves.”
His gaze sweeps across the congregation.
“This, my brothers and sisters, is not the word of man, but the word of God. And so I urge you—do not be led astray by this sin. You are called to love the sinner, yes, for all are made in the image of God. But love does not mean affirmation of sin. You are called instead to stand firm: to live as witnesses of truth, of dignity, of righteousness. To be examples in a world that has forgotten the order God has set before us.”
He lowers his head slightly.
“Walk the narrow path. Hold fast to what is right.”
“Homosexuality is a sin,” Will thinks to himself. He didn’t even know what the word homosexuality even meant until Pastor Jonathan opened his mouth.
Homosexuality is a sin. But I should love the sinners. Because we all sin, so it’s fine. But I should be better. The bible said so.
Will leaves the church with his hand held tightly in his older sister Grace’s grasp.
From that moment on, almost nothing in his life was the same.
Sometimes, he wonders—quietly, painfully—if everything might have unfolded differently had his mother not nudged him that day.
Will had always believed that goodness was something you could keep intact if you handled it gently enough. That it was like a heirloom passed down to you—polished, protected, never examined too closely for fear of cracking it. Goodness, to him, was maintenance. Obedience. Continuity.
You didn’t interrogate it; you lived inside it.
At nine years old, that belief still feels pretty solid.
He’s sitting in a Taco Bell booth with his dad, Bill, plastic seats warm beneath his legs, the smell of grease and cheese thick in the air. His feet don’t quite touch the floor. He’s halfway through his food when the door opens and two older boys—men, really, older than him by enough that he can feel the distance—walk inside.
What catches his attention isn’t their faces.
It’s their hands.
Fingers threaded together, held tight and close, casual in a way that feels destined. Like they’ve done it a million times before. Intimate without trying to be. Soft. Familiar. The kind of closeness that doesn’t ask permission.
Will watches them longer than he means to. Long enough that something curious stirs in his chest. Not fear. Not disgust. Just a quiet wondering.
He thinks, distantly, that it must feel nice.
He wonders if it’s fun—to love someone like that. To hold a hand and have it mean something. To be chosen so openly.
The thought barely finishes forming before his father’s voice cuts in, gentle but firm.
“Look away, William. It’s rude to stare.”
There’s nothing sharp in the words. Nothing angry. Nothing cruel. Nothing bigoted. His dad isn’t condemning anyone. He’s just reminding his son of manners, of decency. Of the unspoken rule that strangers are not spectacles. That no human being should ever have to be subject to someone’s incapability of minding their own business.
But something about it lands heavier than it should.
Will looks away immediately, heat rising in his face. He nods, mumbles an apology. His dad goes back to eating, the moment passing for him as easily as it arrived.
For Will, it doesn’t.
Because as his eyes drop to the table, the memory surfaces—uninvited, unwelcome. A church pew. A voice echoing from the pulpit. Words about sin and order and the way things are meant to be.
Two men.
They looked happy. Like they loved each other. Like something good was happening between them.
And suddenly, that goodness feels complicated. Conditional.
“Too bad,” he thinks, in the quiet, unguarded way children do. “Too bad it’s wrong to love another guy.”
The thought scares him—not because it feels rebellious, but because it feels sad.
“Sorry, Dad,” Will says softly. He apologizes, not for staring at the two strangers, but for something else entirely.
He doesn’t know for what, though.
And something in him folds inward, careful again, learning—without fully understanding why—that some kinds of goodness are not meant to be touched.
(But that doesn’t stop Will from looking at every other queer couple he sees.)
Will is ten years old when the nightmares begin, and once they start, they do not let him go.
They come the same way every night: sudden, violent, without mercy. An unseen force slams his head into concrete again and again. The world bursts red—blood against pavement, against walls, against skin—like something holy was corrupted, like sin made visible. He begs. He always begs. But the thing hurting him never stops. It does not know how. Its hands tighten around his throat, patient and unyielding, reminding him how impossible escape feels.
Escape from faith.
From doctrine.
From God.
In the dream, the monster leans close. Its breath is warm against his ear when it whispers, “This is your own design. Your sins.”
For weeks, Will wakes up sweating, shaking, throat tight, heart racing. He doesn’t understand what the dreams mean until one night he notices the detail that ruins him: the thing wears a necklace. A small cross hangs from its throat, swaying as it bends over him.
Religion has followed him into sleep.
The questions come quietly at first, then all at once.
Am I bad? Am I what they warned me about? Am I… gay? Is this what punishment feels like?
But Will decides the nightmares must be deserved.
Sin is normal, he’s been taught that. Everyone sins. And punishment, surely, is how God corrects you. Maybe fear is mercy. Maybe terror is instruction.
So he tries to be better.
He stops staring at the queer couples he doesn’t understand why he notices. Stops lingering when two boys laugh too closely at the mall, or the rink, or school. Stops typing “boys kissing” into Google during his precious hour of screen time.
He compensates.
He overcorrects.
He goes to church twice a week. He volunteers to read, to sing, to serve. He helps his father without being asked, stands beside his mother in the kitchen, listens at his sister’s door when she cries and pretends not to hear him. He gives and gives and gives, hoping it might balance whatever wrong lives inside him.
And sometimes—only sometimes—he thinks, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to feel.”
But the doubt terrifies him more than the nightmares.
Then when Will is eleven years old, Molly, his childhood dog, dies.
Will has never known a world without her. She has been there his entire life—years of warmth and fur and constancy and safety and unconditional love.
When he finds her on the living room floor, he approaches with a smile, ready to coax her into playing like always.
He smells it before he understands it.
Death has a scent. And he will never forget it.
Molly’s chest is still. Too still. She isn’t breathing.
And something inside Will breaks.
For weeks, he is unreachable. His parents try—gently, desperately. They take him to a pet store, speak of new beginnings, of chapters closing and opening. They tell him Molly’s purpose in his life has been fulfilled.
Will hates that idea.
Is love only justified by usefulness? Are we only allowed to stay as long as we serve some higher reason? What about the life shared in between?
No one can reach him. Not his parents. Not his sister. Not even Leno, who tries to drag him outside to play hockey, promising to let him score.
In any other day, Will would rise to the bait.
But Will barely looks at Leno.
Grief isolates him completely. Nothing touches the ache.
Except, somehow, faith.
On a random Sunday, he sits in church again. He feels guilty for his doubts, ashamed even to question, but he goes anyway.
Faith, by now, is muscle memory.
Leaving it feels worse than staying, despite all the doubts and fears.
Pastor Jonathan is gone. The new pastor, Louie, is younger. Softer around the edges.
He speaks of loss without anger. Of grief without blame. He speaks of Christ not as judge, but as companion—one who carries sorrow instead of assigning it.
“All of us go through suffering,” he began, voice steady, soft, carrying through the quiet of the church. “We all face loss. We all grieve. Some of you carry burdens that weigh so heavily you can barely stand, some of you are troubled, worried, uncertain. And that is human. That is life. Tonight, I want to speak about God’s faithfulness—even in the midst of loss.”
The words land somewhere deep. Will doesn’t fully understand them, but they loosen something knotted tight in his chest.
The idea that suffering doesn’t mean abandonment.
That grief isn’t evidence of failure.
“Loss is loss,” Pastor Louie continued. “Grief is grief. The pain of losing a child to death is no less than the pain of losing a child spiritually. There are many things we will face that seem inexplicable, moments we cannot understand. And in those moments, we have a choice. We can let despair turn our hearts from God, or we can trust that He is still in control, still working out a plan—even when the plan is hidden from us.”
Will listened, his small hands folded in his lap, and something in the pastor’s words dug quietly into the ache he’d been carrying.
Pastor Louie leaned forward slightly, his hands resting on the pulpit. “We may not understand it. We may question it. But we are not alone. Cast your cares upon Him. And remember: shared joy is double joy, shared grief is half grief.”
For Will, those words struck differently than they might for anyone else. He could not undo Molly’s absence, could not bring back the dog who had been with him his entire life. But hearing that, somehow, she had been carried in the care of something larger, something kind, made the ache softer.
That even in grief, he was not alone.
Faith had always been a struggle for Will—sometimes a burden, sometimes a chain—but in that moment, it felt like something that might save him.
Something that taught him grace: for himself, for others, for the small, unfixable tragedies of life. That the lessons of the church weren’t rules to follow blindly—they were tools, slowly teaching him how to live through suffering and still believe in goodness.
For the first time since Molly died, Will cries without fear.
Faith does not erase his pain. It doesn’t answer every question. But it offers him permission to grieve without punishment. To love without tallying worth. To believe that goodness isn’t something you lose forever once you make a mistake.
Religion still frightens him. Still confuses him. Still asks things of him he doesn’t yet know how to give.
But in that moment, it saves him.
And Will learns something that will stay with him for years: that faith can wound—but sometimes, it also teaches you how to survive the wound.
When Will first started playing hockey, he was introduced to the idea of superstition—how fiercely some players, teams, even coaches cling to it.
Superstition and routine, alike, braided together.
Will understands why they exist. They give athletes, coaches, and fans the illusion of control in a sport ruled by chaos. They offer confidence, something to anchor yourself to, especially when it gets tangled with past wins—even if, logically, they change nothing about the outcome.
Coping mechanisms. Focus tools. Distractions that keep the mind steady.
Almost every player carries a collection of them.
At twelve years old, Will has only one.
He prays before a game.
Faith, to him, is muscle memory—like hockey. It’s instinctive, automatic, something his body knows how to do without being told. To drift away from either faith or the sport feels unthinkable, almost blasphemous. A kind of sacrilege.
His teammates chirp him for it.
“Look at Smitty, all holy and devout. Better pray for us too, or we’re fucked.”
“Hey, Smith—get off your knees and tie your goddamn skates. Don’t wanna see you skating on bruised knees ‘cause you were too busy begging God for a goal. We all know the best you can do is give an assist.”
Logically, Will knows they’re just chirps. In the end, some of the guys in the team are assholes by nature. That’s hockey. It’s rarely meant to cut deep, rarely meant to be cruel.
He knows that.
But sometimes, it still feels like mockery.
Not the loud kind—the kind meant to wound. Not the sort that bares its teeth and announces itself. It’s quieter than that. Casual. Worn in by repetition until it almost sounds affectionate. Almost harmless.
It’s in the way the jokes linger half a second too long. In how they resurface every time he kneels, every time he bows his head, every time he makes the sign of the cross like it’s second nature—because it is. It’s in the grins that follow, the glances exchanged between teammates, the way his faith becomes a bit. A running gag. A harmless quirk to be teased out of him.
Will tells himself it’s nothing. That chirping is a language of its own in hockey, one he’s fluent in. He knows how to give it back. Knows how to laugh at himself, how to shrug it off, how to pretend it doesn’t reach anywhere tender.
But it feels less like laughter and more like being put on display.
Like his belief is something quaint. Or naive. Like it’s something to outgrow.
He wonders, in those moments, if they think he’s weak for it.
If they think faith is a crutch, something he leans on because he can’t stand on his own. Or worse—if they think it’s funny that he still believes so earnestly in something invisible, something he can’t prove, something that asks him for obedience rather than certainty.
And he wonders if they’d still be laughing if they knew how tightly he holds onto it. (He sometimes thinks they’d probably laugh even harder.)
Because faith, for Will, isn’t performance.
It isn’t superstition dressed up as ritual. It isn’t a punchline or a habit he can shed when it becomes inconvenient.
It’s the only thing that has ever made the chaos of the world feel ordered.
The only thing that ever taught him that suffering could mean something, that discipline had purpose, that there was a right way to live even when no one was watching.
So when they joke, when they chirp, when they tell him to get off his knees and tie his skates, there’s a small, quiet part of him that flinches.
Not because he’s ashamed.
Or because it feels like they’re laughing at him.
But because it feels like they’re laughing at something sacred.
And Will can take hits. Can take losses. Can take bruises and broken bones and the weight of expectations pressing down on his chest.
What he struggles with is this: the feeling that the thing he trusts most is something other people don’t take seriously at all. And maybe, he also struggles with the feeling that the thing he trusts most is confining him in a box, refusing him permission to be anything other than perfect.