Mistaking Isolation for a Fortress

A fourteen-year-old walks across campus with a secret burning in his chest. He has tasted heaven and then been handed back his schedule—spring semester, fall semester, classes, friends, dial‑up tones. The contrast is savage: one brief moment of unbearable depth followed by the flat light of fluorescent halls and cafeteria chatter. With no mentor, no language for what has happened, he chooses the only path that seems big enough to hold it: priesthood. That decision sits like a stone in his pocket while life around him looks normal. He hides behind Clark Kent glasses and learned composure, keeping his encounter with God and his thoughts on sex folded tight inside. He practices calm the way others run drills or scales, one small repetition after another, trying to make his body match his idea of holiness. The world, meanwhile, rushes past in a blur of jokes, exams, and casual lust, unaware of the blaze he is quietly trying to control.

The chapter’s spine is one boy’s conviction that he can stand forever on a cliff without falling. He wants to be fully given to God and fully alive to the charge in his veins, to keep spirit and flesh at full volume without letting either one win. He turns this into an experiment in control: how close can he move toward sexual pleasure without crossing the line he believes would offend God? Each boundary he sets feels firm until he reaches it; then it shifts, just a little, and he adjusts his rules to suit the heat of the moment. He imagines his will strong enough to chain instincts older than language, strong enough to out-argue his own body. Underneath this bravado runs fear—of losing God, of losing himself, of collapsing into either purity or hunger with nothing left over. The chapter does not resolve that fear. It lets us watch him sharpen it, one tiny compromise at a time, against the stone of his own certainty.

Out of the electronic noise of a local BBS, one soft voice emerges. Randi is his age, twenty miles away, all freckles and dark mood, logging on and showing up at meetups where their inside jokes stretch into late‑night phone calls. Her sadness pulls him; he moves toward it like someone inching closer to a campfire, grateful for the warmth and half‑afraid of the sparks. He casts himself as the fool who lifts her, the hopeful boy who will not let her sink. Into that mix he drops something heavy: his hope for priesthood and a demand that their growing closeness never turn sexual. If it does, he says, everything must end, because his promise to God would be broken. She agrees, wanting him and not wanting to lose him. Around that promise they trade hugs and kisses that feel both innocent and charged. The same connection that heals his old rejection also brings his cliff‑edge experiment into flesh and breath.

Randi is not just a girl; she is a repeat pattern he has not yet learned to see. Dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, pale skin, scattered freckles—her body echoes an earlier crush from first grade, the first time his heart reached and met only ridicule. The chapter pulls back here, tracing how groups of girls once branded him untouchable and how that early verdict soaked into him. It drags this cruelty into daylight by tying it to a wider, older story of how women learned to close ranks with each other for survival, how that reflex still plays out as shared judgment and unspoken rules. Once a boy is marked as outside, he learns, no argument or kindness can fully erase it within that circle. Randi and, later, Ann live beyond that old tribe’s reach; their interest in him becomes proof that the childhood verdict was not destiny. This recognition does not soften his hunger or his pride. It simply gives his desire a face and a history, like a constellation he can finally name but not yet navigate wisely.

All through this chapter, one image stays: armor that began as protection hardening into something he cannot easily remove. He wears neglect as proof of special calling, girls’ disinterest as a mark of purity, private knowledge of heaven and hell as a secret crown. At the same time, he thrills at the thought of unseen spirits watching him, testing him, perhaps choosing him. His vow of chastity in front of Randi is part devotion, part performance, part attempt to keep his body from betraying him. This mixture—sincere faith, swelling lust, and isolation mistaken for holiness—sets the stage for everything that follows in the book: the later systems, the calculated seductions, the eventual reckoning with his own divided heart. The promise of the chapter is not that he will figure it out here. It is that his attempt to live on that cliff will have consequences, and that the weight of his chosen armor will one day be measured not in ideas but in bruises where metal has pressed too long against living flesh.