"It's your choice. Unlike Chris, I don't want to make you make any decision you're not comfortable with. I just want to give you a sense of your options. --Speaking of options, if you're planning to stay up all night reading, you might want caffeine pills."

Apparently these are the drugs he was promised as part of the gay lifestyle. "...Sure?"

"How much coffee do you drink?"

"I don't."

"Then you'll want one of these. Marlo?"

He takes one, doesn't put it in his mouth, and curls around Lev. 

Lev picks up the book and reads. 

Eventually Ron returns with more cookies.

Marlo is asleep with his head on Lev's shoulder. 

Lev eats the cookies without looking up. 

Eventually he carefully transfers Marlo off his shoulder, collects six more books from the "atheism" shelf, returns Marlo to his shoulder, and keeps reading. 

When the sun starts to rise, he shakes Marlo and says, "we should get going."

He blinks up at Lev and then shakes himself. "Yeah. We should." 

Is Ron awake? 

Ron is in fact awake! 

"I'd make pancakes," he says, "but you have to eat in the car, so granola bars it is."

"My parents don't talk about God like they think he exists," Lev says to Marlo when they're in the car. "They talk about him like... nothing has happened that forces them not to believe in him."

"...everyone I grew up with talks about God like they think He exists." 

"Maybe Christianity is right? You could try explaining it to me."

(His skin still feels like it's buzzing a little from the caffeine, and his legs are shaking.)

He explains as well as he can, knows full well that his explanation is clumsy at best, especially to someone who didn't grow up surrounded by context for it.

Lev asks a bunch of questions and does not seem super convinced. 

He does, however, go with Marlo to services.

There are a truly excessive number of sermons. Every time he thinks they're done there's someone else giving another sermon. All the children are off at Sunday school (?) so when he's bored he can't go play peek-a-boo with a toddler in the next pew. The prayers are spoken instead of sung, and Lev realizes that there's no reason for Christians to pray in Hebrew but it's still really weird to pray in English, and mostly the guy up front says prayers instead of everyone saying them. Lev does not approve of this. Prayers are supposed to be communal and for everyone. 

It is pretty strange and he is not very convinced that God wants to be worshipped in this way.

It doesn't really feel like home. (It can't, when he doesn't know anyone here.) 

But it's familiar and warm and good and having Lev there with him makes it feel almost like it could be home, maybe, if he tried. 

It's really nice to watch Marlo be happy.

"Sunday school is a weird concept. Why can't you teach kids about Jesus at a different time?"

"Something something scheduling? I don't actually know why it's organized that way, sorry." 

"If there is a boring part in the services I should be allowed to make faces at babies until the boring part is over."

"There are people who think we should have kids in the service but I've never been to a church where that's actually how they do it." 

"That's weird! It's super-weird!"

Lev's starting to feel really sleepy. He takes another one of the caffeine pills Ron gave him before they go back, and winds up at "awake, jittery, and weirdly prone to stare out into space for long periods of time."

"It doesn't seem weird to me but I can see how it would," he says mildly, and waits to be called in for his one-on-one with Christine.