The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan

harder, making the hasp rattle. The screws started to come out. Every time I yanked at the door, the hasp got looser. Finally, there was a ripping noise and a rattle of screws. The hasp came off and the door swung open.
    I went into the church and pulled the door closed behind me.
    There was a deep quiet inside, but it was surprisingly bright. The windows were tall and the moon shone through on one side, painting the place silver with deep gray shadows. There wasn’t much to see. No decorations or anything. Just pews and a pulpit and an altar with a cross hanging on the wall behind it. And words above the cross: “Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”
    That sounded like good advice too.
    I made my way carefully down the side aisle, moving slowly, reaching out in front of me so I wouldn’t bump into anything. I found a door near the pulpit and went through. There was a small changing room. There was a narrow corridor lined with hanging robes. I pushed between the robes until I made out a door standing open at the end. A bathroom.
    I turned on the light in there. Found the sink. I ran the faucet and filled my hands with water and brought it to my mouth and gulped it down. I did it again and again. I never wanted to stop. I felt energy rising inside me as the water filled me.
    When I was done, I turned the lights off again. I didn’t want anyone passing by to wonder who was inside. I made my way back down the corridor, out of the changing room, back through the door behind the pulpit. I picked a pew for myself, a pew under a window with the moonlight falling directly onto it. I sat on it heavily. Then, exhausted, I lay down on my side, my shoulder against the hard wood.
    It was cold—cold and damp too. I turned up my collar. I put my hands under my cheek and pulled my arms in tight against me. After a while, with my chin tucked into my fleece, I felt warmer, warm enough to get some sleep anyway.
    But I didn’t sleep. Not right away. As exhausted as I was, my mind wouldn’t stop working. Images kept flashing at me. The man with the knife in the library bathroom. The thugs who nearly hustled me into their car. The police cruisers racing after me on the lonely street. The gunshot that struck so close to me in the alley that it turned my guts to water with fear.
    The flashbacks wouldn’t stop coming, and with every one my heart raced faster. After a while, tired as I was, I knew I would not be able to sleep. Still lying on the pew, I reached inside my fleece and found the papers I’d stuffed into the inner pocket: the news stories I’d printed out in the library. I drew them out into the moonlight.
    I held the pages up in front of my face, angling them so the silver moonlight played over them and I could read the words. I shuffled through them until I found the headline I wanted: “Local Teen Found Stabbed to Death.”
    That was Alex. Alex Hauser. We’d known each other since kindergarten and for years we did just about everything together, even studied karate together for a while. Then, when Alex and I were both sixteen, Alex’s dad and mom got divorced and his dad moved away to another town.
    It hit Alex hard. He’d hear his mom crying in her room all the time and he didn’t know how to help her. They didn’t have as much money as they used to either. Alex had to move to a different neighborhood and start going to a different school. He and I couldn’t hang out together the way we used to. Alex started going around with a lot of not-so-nice friends and doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing. Drinking, stealing, fighting, stuff like that.
    While all this was going on, according to my friend Josh, Alex also started hanging out with Beth Summers. Beth was one of the nicest girls I’d ever met, really sweet- natured and always interested in people and kind to them. I guess it’s kind of obvious I liked her a lot myself. She and Alex were both