Honestly, I didn't mean to wait half a year to update because I felt like it. G This year was very stressful and I had an enormous workload, and I'm truly sorry for not updating until now. (I hope to finish this during the summer.) So thanks for your patience, and thanks to babythunder and CTB for being the best betas a procrastinator like me could ask for. Enjoy.

Danny entered the church nervously, weakly making the sign of the cross as he approached the statue of the Virgin Mary that greeted him. To him the church was cold and foreboding, almost too clean despite its rundown state; clean ivory statues of saints glared down at him disapprovingly from their perches. He felt ashamed of his muddy sneakers and his secondhand clothes, yet filled with more reverence than he thought he would have felt.

"Hey," came a voice from behind the statue. "Are you gonna stand there and gawk or are you gonna join the rest of the delinquents out here?" The speaker was a fairly tall priest whose sermons Danny remembered as being long and painfully boring from his memories of when he used to go to church. The man had changed, though; his hair was beginning to gray around the edges, and the worn lines around his eyes had set in, giving him a world-weary look.

Danny followed him out into the courtyard behind the church, where there were about fifteen other boys around his age. "Listen up," said the priest, stopping the boys from their idle chatting amongst themselves. "My name is Father Orlando Taylor. For the next three months, or however long it takes you to shape up and get your head straight, I'm going to be your least favorite person in the world."

"Fuck this shit." Danny rolled his eyes and muttered softly to the boy next to him. Before he knew it, Father Orlando was standing in front of him, glowering.

"You think it's funny to swear in a church, punk?" He demanded. "That's the whole reason you're here. You're too much of a smart-ass to listen to what's good for you. Go," he said, waving his hand, "give me ten laps around the courtyard."

Danny stared back at him in disbelief. "What?" Despite what he knew he shouldn't do, he couldn't help but make a final effort to redeem his coolness in the eyes of the other boys. They wouldn't respect him as much if they knew he was already bending like a willow in the wind, already hoping for some way to return to his old life. "I don't have to take orders from an old man like you. Can't make me."

Father Orlando was surprisingly strong as he practically shoved Danny toward the edge of the courtyard. "I will not ask you again. Now run."

Danny's legs began moving involuntarily as he ran the ten laps, the just-healed scar on his stomach aching with every move he made. "You're not done yet, Alvarez," Father Orlando called at him from over his shoulder when Danny stopped to take a breath after his seventh lap. By the time he completed his tenth lap, Danny was dripping in sweat, the hot Hialeah sun unmercifully strong even at four o' clock.

"You're lucky I don't make you run twenty." Father Orlando said, the sun casting his long shadow across Danny's feet before the priest went back to the other kids.

The soles of his feet seemed to burn upon contact with the pavement, and his legs ached with every move. But he pushed on, turning the corner at Vuelta Street with more presence of mind and clarity than he had felt in what seemed like years. To walk down the street without unconsciously scanning the surrounding stores for ideas about which ones to hit that night felt simultaneously liberating and unnerving.

He was almost halfway through the park when he heard a slow call from behind him, sending a sharp shiver down his spine.

"Al-varez!"

The cruel, mocking tone, soft yet bitingly clear in the afternoon heat, drifted over to Danny. He turned around and saw that same hard smirk, those same intensely focused eyes, the same statuesque stance and cold stare that he had grown to dread. Memories of the night four weeks ago came back into his mind like smoke creeping through a filter.

"Alvarez? That you?" The hairs on the back of Danny's neck rose as Pedro began to walk toward Danny. "Well, of course it is. Who else would it be?"

He was smiling, a bitter, humorless smile that chilled Danny to the bone as his fears were confirmed, that he wasn't meant to survive the knifing. The realization dawned on him slowly and he felt sick, looking into the eyes of the person who had nearly destroyed his life after only a few short weeks. Or was it months? Time in Hialeah was beginning to slip away from him completely now.

"So now you're in rehab," he continued when Danny didn't respond. "Rediscovering God? Trying to get clean again?" The malice in his voice was clearly distinguishable, but Danny knew he wouldn't dare to hurt him in broad daylight. Still, he remained silent, fearful of what might come out of his mouth if he opened it.

"I've dealt with guys like you before. You think you can go join some church group with old man Orlando and the rest of those punks? They're nothing. But if you're going to join them, fine. 'Cause I guess I was wrong about you, about how you actually had guts. You're just another loser, another scrawny kid trying to make himself worth something. But you know what? You're not worth shit. Not you, not Raffi, not anyone in your goddamn family is worth shit. Now get the fuck out of my sight." His voice had subtly undergone a crescendo in tension, the strain in his voice rising during his tirade. Then, suddenly soft, he added, "I have another job to take care of tonight."

Danny hadn't expected him to be so angry, he reflected as Pedro stormed off with his anger carefully guarded so he wouldn't have to show his weakness to the others. He had figured he was just another pawn, like Pedro had said, another kid with nothing going for him. Was that why Pedro acted like Danny had betrayed him? Because Danny had decided to turn away from the one person who believed in him, the one person who placed trust in a stranger when carelessly trusting could cost lives in a town like Hialeah?

Even the rustling of the leaves by the swamp dogwood tree made him wary, and the walk home seemed endless. Around Fourteenth Street the sun began to fade, a palette turned upside down, its colors leaking out onto the sky. He hardly noticed. When he got home he grabbed the glass bottle and sat on the windowsill, looking out into the sleeping city while Raffi slept. And for reasons he wasn't quite sure of, he couldn't let go of the bottle's neck.

He threw up twice that night before slipping into an uneasy sleep, his dreams plagued with images that caused him to awake several times, shaking, unsure of what he had just experienced that made him so scared.

He regretted going into school the next day, but cutting class on the second day of high school probably wasn't the right way to make a good first impression, he realized while he was nursing his hangover with a few more aspirin than necessary. The six hours seemed to go on forever.

When he arrived at the church, his body stiff and sore and his regret for choosing to attend this goddamn place every day for the next few months growing greater by the minute, he was thoroughly anticipating entering the cool darkness of the church, if only for a few moments. But he stopped when he saw the police car parked out front and the black spray paint that was far too prominent on the doorway -- the only clean building in Hialeah -- and he was surprised to feel something catch in his throat, as though he couldn't breathe.

The interior looked like the pictures Danny had seen in history books, those of buildings after enemy planes in the war had bombed them. There was a broken bottle of liquor lying at the feet of the statue Danny had seen yesterday, that of the Virgin Mary, while Matthias the apostle looked down disapprovingly from the stained-glass window above it.

The church had never been too elaborate or fancy to begin with, always a clean, simple building kept immaculate by Father Orlando. But now the pews lay in disarray, knocked over onto their sides; the prayer books were scattered on the floor, their fragile pages torn, mangled, marred by spray paint. The whitewashed walls had vivid streaks of color racing in dizzying spirals and patterns, but in the church it seemed more offensive than artistic.

Danny wasn't prepared for the experience of entering the church and seeing it quite in that state, just as he hadn't been prepared to be so awestruck when he had first arrived the other day. But something about the hushed tones of the priests cleaning up, the three policemen trying to salvage what they could from the wreckage, was instantly sobering to Danny. Most of the other boys were leaving, thrilled that they wouldn't have to spend the next few hours under the watchful glares of the priests.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" He pushed his way through the tiny flock of policeman huddled on the floor, trying to piece together the splintered fragments of a fallen statue. Father Orlando looked at him for a minute, unsure as to why he was volunteering to help, and then handed him a broom that had been placed against the wall next to him.

"Try to get rid of the debris if you can," he said, the wounded tone in his voice evidence of the pain he was going through, "and if you can find anything still usable, save it."

Danny wasn't used to seeing the priest like this after he had experienced his confrontational means of communication the other day. It only took a few minutes before he decided that he couldn't stand the silence, the awkwardness; the unrelenting feeling that he was being watched by the figures on the walls. "Why would someone do this?"

Father Orlando sighed, his arms mechanically moving back and forth to remove the clutter and mess on the floor. "I don't know. Sometimes . . . sometimes people's motives are unclear to one when all you see is the surface. The result of an action can sometimes be mystifying when you don't know the cause."

"What'll you do if you find them?"

In a tired voice he recited, "The Bible teaches us that we must forgive those who have sinned against us." The priest looked as though he had passed along this piece of wisdom to countless people in his days at the church. "They should repent for what they have done, but God created them along with everyone else on this earth. They deserve forgiveness."

Danny had attended church regularly when Mami and Papi took him and Raffi and Joe and the rest of them, but he hadn't gone since then. Still, wisps of memories remained in his mind, scraps that had refused to diminish and dissolve over time. "But isn't this a house of God? Doesn't that make this an even bigger sin?"

Father Orlando stopped sweeping and looked up to meet Danny's inquisitive gaze. "It is a sin," he said, "but how can you measure one against another? You might consider someone's death to be more important than another's, but to a person close to the other's death, they will think their loss is greater than your own. It's the same with this church. Some people just won't care."

Danny thought this over as Father Orlando began to sweep again, but the priest must have seen the confusion displayed on Danny's face for he stopped again and spoke. "There's no black-and-white in religion. No matter which one you adopt, there will always be a gray area. That's what makes it so personal to you. How you interpret that and use it to improve your life."

The two men continued to sweep in silence.

That night when Danny arrived at his house, disheveled and smudged with spray paint stains with a thin sprinkling of fine white plaster powder dusting the top of his shoulders and mixed in with his hair, he went straight for the refrigerator. Soon he was gripping the bottle of alcohol by its neck, watching its oily contents wash out and slither down the drain of the kitchen sink.

He took a shower, letting the cold water rinse the grime and paint off his skin as he reveled in the feeling of being clean at last. Later that night he fell asleep and, for the first time in months, felt content.