“For me,” she whispers, and she disappears into the darkness of the trailer.

I WAKE UP to loud clanking above me, like a pinball game played by someone who is seriously bad at it. The pings come in quick succession, and then nothing for a minute. Then more pings. I look over to the other couch. Aisha is gone and her blanket is nicely folded. Light pours into the trailer from the semiopen blinds above me. I must have overslept.

I find my shoes, check my breath, decide it’s not terrible, run my hand through my hair, and step outside in the sweatpants I slept in. Then I scream.

A man is crouched on the ground. With a rifle. Pointed at me. I cover my face with my hands and duck.

“Oh hey!”

It’s Thomas’s voice. I peek through my fingers as he slowly hoists himself to his feet and puts the rifle down. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No worries,” I say, as if it’s a typical Carson morning to wake up in a trailer, go outside, and almost get shot.

“Sorry for the noise. Damn pigeons. Drive me crazy.”

I walk out to where he is and look up. There on the pitched roof of the trailer are three pigeons, milling around.

“Isn’t there like a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ rule or something?” I ask.

He glances at me sideways and laughs. “For pigeons? Don’t think so. Wait ’til one day you have these dirty things pooping all over your front yard. You’ll want to shoot them too.”

“Hey, I already kind of want to shoot them,” I say, and he grins. “Is it legal?”

“BB gun,” he says.

“Oh.” That doesn’t really answer my question, but I don’t care.

He cocks the rifle, lays it on his right shoulder, and squints one eye closed. I’ve never seen a BB gun before. I’ve actually never seen any gun up close before. We’re not big recreational shooters, we who take the 2 train to school.

He shoots. The gun emits a little pop, followed by a clank when the BB hits the metal roof … about fifteen feet away from the trio of birds, who don’t look remotely alarmed.

“Where is everyone?” I ask.

“The girls went to meditate,” he says, and I feel glad that Aisha found something she likes, even if it’s something stupid. Then I think about the “for me” thing that Laurelei said, and I let it go.

Thomas aims again and shoots. Oh for two.

“Aisha is so pretty,” he says.

“Don’t I know it.”

We share a look, and it’s like he knows that I dig her. He reloads. “I heard you and Laurelei talked about God last night.”

“We spoke about God, and we concluded that God is dead.”

The ends of his thick mustache dance when he laughs. “You’re a tough nut to crack.”

“When you’re trying to sell me on God, yeah.” I put my hand out. “Can I try?”

He hesitates for maybe just a nanosecond, and then he hands me the rifle.

“Nobody’s trying to sell you anything. You believe what you believe. That’s all.”

“If you say so,” I say.

“So what exactly does this God I’m trying to sell you look like? What does he do?”

I fiddle with the rifle, unsure of what to do. “Oh, I don’t know.”

Thomas takes the rifle from me and shows me how to hold it. He places the butt of the rifle against his right shoulder and puts his right hand on the trigger. His left hand holds the rifle steady. Then he tilts his head down to look down the barrel.

“You see how there are two sights? This little slot near your face and the bead at the end of the barrel? Line ’em up.”

He hands the rifle to me, and because I’m a lefty, I reverse what he’s shown me.

“You’re a natural,” he says. “Wanna shoot?”

“I guess.” I concentrate on aiming at the birds, unsure if I’ll be able to pull the trigger. I’ve never killed anything before.

“So what does this God look like?” he asks again.

I put the rifle down and look at Thomas, and I think, You. Which is weird. God doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t look like anyone. But if he did, I realize, to me he would look and act like Thomas. He’d be authoritative and manly, not silly and prone to emotional outbursts like my dad. He’d be kind and serene, or whatever you get from meditating (aside from bored).

But that’s the kind of thing you really can’t say to a person without having them question your sanity — that he looks like God. So I say something else instead.

“He’s a big white dude, and he has a white beard and he wears flowing white gowns, but not in a gay way. He has thousands of switches and levers in front of him and they’re labeled, like, ‘Middle East Violence’ and ‘Bali Earthquake.’ Some of them he just flicks on and then laughs, a real deep laugh. Others he can adjust, such as the weather — someone’s gotta control the weather. What with global warming and whatnot, that’s almost a full-time job.”

Thomas laughs really hard. “That’s quite a busy schedule for God. You’d think he’d have some helpers, like Santa’s elves.”

“He does,” I say. “They are called God’s leprechauns.”

He laughs some more. “God’s leprechauns. I like it.”

“I try,” I say. I pick up the rifle and force a frown, so that I look the way a guy holding a rifle should look. I aim at the roof, and then, before I can think about it too much, I squeeze.

The pop jolts my head. Dust flies about five feet from where the pigeons are. Better than Thomas, but still a miss.

“No pigeons were killed as a result of this shooting demonstration,” I say. He grins. I put the gun down and add, “Anyway, I’m cool that y’all are spiritual or whatever, but just for the record, I’m pretty sure God doesn’t exist.”

He shrugs and takes the BB gun back from me. He raises the gun, aims, and says, “Reminds me of a joke I saw written on a bathroom stall. Someone wrote ‘God is dead,’ and signed it ‘Nietzsche.’ Then someone crossed that out. Underneath it, they wrote, ‘Nietzsche is dead. Signed, God.’ ”

I laugh. “So here’s what I don’t get,” I say. “You believe in God, but you’ve been to Africa and seen all the hardship and crap.”

He nods, his gun still aimed at the roof.

“So God lets that crap happen? Why? Why is God so mean?”

Thomas fires, and this time, the pop is accompanied by a pigeon tumbling off the roof.

My hand involuntarily grasps my own throat.

It’s funny, because it’s just a pigeon. And it’s not like I wasn’t just shooting at it myself. Maybe I didn’t put it all together. That the activity we were doing while having a nice talk could actually end a life. Even if it’s the life of just a pigeon.

I look to the other pigeons to see their reaction. Are they aware of what just happened? Do they know they’ve just lost their family member? Was that a mother? A father? A child?

That pigeon is over. Life done.

Thomas is too focused on his kill to notice me. He strides over to view the bird. I look down and see that its wing is still flickering some. Thomas lifts the BB rifle, aims, and fires down into it.

I sit down on the gravel, numb. Thomas goes inside, and moments later he returns with a dustpan and a black garbage bag. He uses the end of the rifle barrel to push the lifeless pigeon onto the dustpan, and then he throws that life away.

I sit there with my chin on my knees, watching and wondering what just happened to me. Because it’s just a pigeon. And Thomas is just a man, not like a god. Or maybe he is just like a god, because God smites things every day, every second. This all-loving thing you’re supposed to pray to, who loves you and provides for you. He’s a killer. He’s all-powerful, and terrible stuff just happens, over and over and over again, and God doesn’t stop it. Like with my dad. I think about this and I hate the world.