I lay there, eyes closed, wondering which commandment it was. Fifth? Six? I had cried myself to sleep last night because of Lisa, my heart full of sorrow that her time had been cut short at the peak of her brilliant life. I prayed to God my heart wouldn’t be as full of hate as it was for de Milo and could hear Sister Delilah telling me I would go to hell for thinking such bad thoughts about him. “What makes his sin of murder worse than yours of wishing him dead?” she would ask me if she were still alive. “Because,” I would reply. “No sin is greater than another,” she would insist. “Bullshit,” I would think. I could hear Sister Delilah reciting the Ten Commandments, forcing me to memorize them. In order. The exact wording. She was tough. Third grade religion class was the first and only C I ever earned in all my years of schooling. It wasn’t because I couldn’t memorize and regurgitate. That was easy. It was because I challenged and questioned. When we were studying Genesis, for instance—all about the beginning of time, of creation, of the world, and the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve and all the subsequent generations begotten up, or down, to Noah—I had been sitting behind Jason, the classroom bully.
