So there’s no party. Instead she spends the evening in front of the fireplace, sitting between her parents and clicking through favorite scenes from favorite movies. Her mom even prepares her favorite meal, rigatoni Amatriciana. “Bold and spicy,” her mom says, “just like you.”

She sleeps that night, having no unpleasant dreams, or at least none she can remember, and in the morning she rises early, dresses in her simple daily whites, and tells her parents that she’s going to school. “The van doesn’t come for me until four this afternoon, so why waste the day?”

Although her parents would prefer she stay home with them, her wishes come first on this day.

At school, she sits through classes, already feeling a dreamy distance from it all. At the end of each class, the teacher awkwardly hands her all her collected classwork and grades, calculated early.

“Well then, I guess that’s that,” each teacher says in one way or another. Most of them can’t wait for her to get out of their room. Her science teacher is the kindest, though, taking some extra time with her.

“My nephew was tithed a few years ago,” he tells her. “A wonderful boy. I miss him terribly.” He pauses, seeming to go far away in his thoughts. “I was told his heart went to a firefighter who saved a dozen people from a burning building. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d like to believe it is.”

Miracolina would like to believe it too.

Throughout the day, her classmates are just as awkward as her teachers. Some kids make a point to say good-bye. Some even give her uncomfortable hugs, but the rest say their farewells from a safe distance, as if tithing is somehow contagious.

And then there are the other ones. The cruel ones.

“See you here and there,” a boy says behind her back during lunch, and the kids around him snicker. Miracolina turns, and the boy tries to hide behind his gaggle of friends, thinking he’s safe within that cloud of rank middle-school perspiration—but she recognized his voice and knows exactly who it is. She pushes through his friends to coldly face him.

“Oh, you won’t see me, Zach Rasmussen . . . but if any part of me sees you, I will definitely let you know.”

Zach’s face goes a little green. “Get lost,” he says. “Go get tithed.” But still there’s that look of uneasy fear beneath his idiotic bravado.

Good, thinks Miracolina, I hope I’ve given him a few nightmares.

Her school is a huge one, so even though tithes aren’t common in her neighborhood, there are four others, all dressed in white like her. There used to be six, but the oldest two are already gone. These remaining tithes are her true friends. These are the ones to whom she feels a need to say one last good-bye. Oddly, they’re all from different backgrounds and faiths. Each is a member of a splinter sect of their particular religion—a sect that takes its commitment to self-sacrifice very seriously. Funny, Miracolina thinks, how these same religions fought over their differences for thousands of years, and yet in tithing, they all come together as one.

“We are all asked to give of ourselves—to be charitable and selfless,” says Nestor, her tithe friend closest to her in age, only a month short of his own tithing. He clasps her hands, giving Miracolina a warm good-bye. “If technology allows us a new way to give, how could it be wrong?”

Except there are people who do say that it’s wrong. More and more people these days. There’s even that ex-tithe out there—the one who became a clapper, who people hold up as an example. Well, how stable can he be? After all, he became a clapper, for goodness’ sake. The way Miracolina sees it, if someone would rather blow themselves up than be tithed, well, that’s like stealing from the collection plate, isn’t it? It’s just plain wrong.

When the school day ends, she walks home just like on any other day. As she comes onto her street, she sees her brother’s car in the driveway. She’s surprised at first—he goes to school five hours away—but she’s happy Matteo’s come to see her off.

It’s three o’clock, an hour until the van comes, and her parents are already crying. She wishes they weren’t, that they could take this as stoically as she, or even Matteo, who spends his time chatting about only the good memories.

“Remember that time we went to Rome, and you wanted to play hide-and-seek in the Vatican Museum?”

Miracolina smiles at the memory. She had tried to hide in Nero’s bathtub—this huge maroon stone bowl that could practically fit an elephant. “The security guards had a fit! I thought they’d take me to the pope, and he’d spank me—so I ran.”

Matteo laughs. “You went missing for, like, an hour—Mom and Dad were pulling their hair out.”

Missing isn’t the word for it, though. You don’t go missing in a museum—you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls. She remembers moving through the crowds of the Vatican, until she found herself standing in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, gazing up toward Michelangelo’s masterpiece, which covered the walls and ceiling. And there in the center was the divine link between heaven and earth. So close was Adam’s hand to the hand of God, both straining to touch each other, but the impossible weight of gravity kept Adam from truly touching the heavens.

She stood there, looking up, forgetting that she was supposed to be hiding, for who could hide in a place that was all about revealed mystery? And that’s exactly where her family found her; amid hundreds of tourists, staring up at the greatest work of art ever created by the hand of man—humanity’s grandest attempt to touch perfection.

She was only six, but even then, the images of the chapel spoke to her, although she had no idea what they said. All she knew was that she herself was just like this beautiful place, and if someone could go inside her, they would see glorious frescoes painted on the walls of her soul.

The van arrives ten minutes early and waits out front. There’s a brightly painted logo on the van’s side that reads wood hollow harvest camp! a place for teens!

Miracolina goes to her room to get her suitcase—a small one filled with just a few sets of tithing whites and some basic necessities. Now her parents cry and cry, begging again for her forgiveness. This time, however, it just angers her.

“If tithing makes you feel guilty, that’s not my problem,” she tells them, “because I’m at peace with it. Please have enough respect for me to be at peace with it too.”

It doesn’t help matters. It just makes their tears flow in a steadier stream.

“The only reason you’re at peace with it,” her father tells her, “is because we made you feel that way. It’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”

Miracolina looks at them and shrugs. “So change your mind, then,” she suggests. “Break your pact with God and don’t tithe me.”

They look back at her like she’s giving them a glorious gift, a reprieve from hell. Even Matteo is hopeful.

“Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” her mother says. “We haven’t signed the final papers yet. We can still change our minds!”

“Fine,” says Miracolina. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yes,” says her father with intense relief. “Yes, we’re sure.”

“Positive?”

“Yes.”

“Good, now you can be guilt free.” Miracolina picks up her suitcase. “But regardless of what you choose, I’m going anyway. That’s my choice.”

Then she hugs her mother, father, and brother and leaves without looking back—without even saying good-bye, because good-byes imply an end, and more than anything else in this life, Miracolina Roselli wants to believe that her tithing is a beginning.

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“When Billy’s behavior became too much for us to bear, and we began to fear for our own safety, we did the only humane thing. We sent him to harvest camp, so he could find fulfillment in a divided state. But now, with an age restriction preventing seventeen-year-olds from being unwound, we wouldn’t have had that choice. Just last week a seventeen-year-old girl in our neighborhood got drunk, crashed her car, and killed two innocent people. Would it still have happened if her parents could have chosen to send her to harvest camp? You tell me.”