Lev is not bothered. He gets this all the time. “We still have half an hour. Maybe we should talk about why you’re in here.”
“I’m in here because I got caught,” the punk says. Then his eyes narrow, and he takes a closer look at Lev. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”
Lev doesn’t answer. “I would guess you’re sixteen, right? You’re labeled a ‘divisional risk,’ you know that, don’t you? It means you’re at risk for being unwound.”
“What, you think my mother would unwind me? She wouldn’t dare. Who’d pay her friggin’ bills?” Then he rolls up a sleeve, revealing that the tattoos visible on his wrists go all the way up to his shoulder. Bones and brutality painted on his flesh. “Besides, who’s gonna want these arms?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lev tells him. “People actually pay extra for ink as good as yours.”
The punk is taken aback by the thought, then studies Lev again. “Are you sure I don’t know you? You live here in Cleveland?”
Lev sighs. “You don’t know me, you just know of me.”
Another moment, then the punk’s eyes go wide with recognition. “No way! You’re that tithe kid! I mean the clapper! I mean the one who didn’t blow up! You were all over the news!”
“Right. But we’re not here to talk about me.”
Suddenly the punk seems like a different kid. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m sorry I was an ass before. So, like, why aren’t you in jail?”
“Plea bargain. Not allowed to talk about it,” Lev tells him. “Let’s just say talking to you is part of my punishment.”
“Damn!” says the kid, grinning. “They give you a penthouse suite, too?”
“Seriously, I’m not allowed to talk about it . . . but I can listen to anything you want to tell me.”
“Well, all right. I mean, if you really wanna hear it.”
And then the kid launches into a confessional life story that he probably never told anyone before. It’s the one positive thing about Lev’s notoriety—it gets him respect among those who usually don’t give it.
These kids in detention always want to know all about him, but the terms of the settlement were very clear. With so much sympathy from some people, and so much anger from others, it was “in the public’s best interest” to get Lev out of the news as quickly as possible and keep him from becoming the national voice against unwinding. In the end, he was sentenced to house arrest, complete with a tracking chip embedded in his shoulder, and 520 hours of community service every year, until his eighteenth birthday. His service consisted of picking up trash in local parks and ministering to wayward youth about the ills of drugs and violent behavior. In return for the relative lightness of his sentence, he agreed to give them all the inside information he knew about clappers and other terrorist activities. That part was easy—he knew very little beyond his own clapper cell, and the other members were all dead. He was also put under a permanent gag order. He could never speak in public about unwinding, tithing, and what happened at Happy Jack. He was basically sentenced to disappear.
“We should call you the little mermaid,” his brother Marcus had joked, “because they let you magically walk, in exchange for your voice.”
So now every Sunday, Pastor Dan picks Lev up at Marcus’s town house, and they share their own brand of spirituality with kids in juvenile detention.
At first it was painfully awkward, but within a few months Lev became very good at reaching into the hearts of strangers, figuring out what made them tick, and then defusing them before the tick became a countdown.
“The Lord works in mischievous ways,” Pastor Dan once told him, taking an old adage and giving it a necessary tweak. If Lev has any heroes, they would be Pastor Dan and his brother Marcus. Marcus not just for standing up to their parents, but also for going the distance and taking Lev in, even though it got him cut off entirely from their family. They were both outcasts now from a family so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather pretend Marcus and Lev were dead than face the choices the two had made.
“It’s their loss,” Marcus often tells Lev, but he can’t say it without looking away to hide the sorrow it makes him feel.
As for Pastor Dan, he’s a hero to Lev for having the courage to lose his convictions without losing his faith. “I still believe in God,” Pastor Dan told him, “just not a God who condones human tithing.” And in tears, Lev asked if he could believe in that God too, never having realized he had such a choice.
Dan, who no one but Lev calls “Pastor” anymore, listed himself as a nondenominational cleric on the form they had to fill out before they began meeting with kids at the detention center.
“So then what religion are we?” Lev asks him each week as they walk in. The question has become a running joke, and each time Pastor Dan has another answer.
“We’re Pentupcostal because we’re sick of all the hypocrisy.”
“We’re Clueish, because we finally got a clue.”
“We’re PresbyPterodactyl, because we’re making this whole thing fly against all reason.”
But Lev’s favorite was, “We’re Leviathan, because what happened to you, Lev, is at the heart of it all.”
It made him feel both terribly uncomfortable and also a little bit blessed to be at the core of a spiritual movement, even if it was only a movement of two.
“Isn’t a leviathan a big, ugly monster?” he pointed out.