The metal door of the church resisted Tanya more than she expected it would, enough so that she had to pull all her weight against it in order to let her grandmother enter.

“Oh, thank you dear,” the old woman smiled thinly. She almost never showed her teeth. Tanya let the door fall closed.

Inside, the air felt damp, and the adolescent girl smelled wet stone and incense. She approached the familiar holy water fountain and bent over slightly to dip her hand into it. As she made the sign of the cross with her wet hand, she thought about all the grime from other people’s hands that was probably floating around in the water.

Tanya looked behind for her grandmother, but her grandmother was already ahead, at the pricket stand lighting a candle. Tanya walked over to the old woman, stood beside her and felt the heat from the prayer candles. As the girl stood there, she stared into the eyes of the statue of Mary that was planted behind the candles. The statue stared back at her with a blank face and watchful eyes.

Your stare is wasted on me, Tanya thought to the statue. Quickly, she walked away from it, following her grandmother into a pew at the back of the church.

After the two had taken their seats, the old woman pulled a tarnished metal rosary out of her purse and closed her eyes. She moved her right hand along the beads of the rosary as she prayed. Her movements were both routine and ceremonious.

Meanwhile, Tanya shifted uncomfortably on the wooden pew. She let her eyes wander the nearly empty church. Not many people go to mass on a Thursday morning, she thought. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check the time. 7:28 a.m., it told her in bold, blocky font. Good, she thought, mass will start soon.

As if to answer Tanya’s thoughts, the organist began to play “Come Holy Ghost.” The older woman sung the words she knew by heart. Tanya opened her hymnal to the proper page but did not sing.

During mass, Tanya stared up at the lights that hung from the ceiling. When she squinted at them, they seemed to shine more brightly than they shined when she looked at them with relaxed eyes. She wondered if this was normal. It probably wasn’t.

The priest began his homily, and Tanya’s thoughts drifted back to a conversation that she had a few days ago. A friend had asked her if she believed. She said she didn’t.

As Tanya’s grandmother drove the girl home from church, the pious lady asked Tanya how her summer break was going.

“It’s nice,” Tanya said. “It’s nice to be free of worries.”

“So, is school the only thing you worry about?” the grandmother asked.

“No, it’s not,” Tanya frowned. “I suppose I should say, it’s nice to have fewer worries.”

The two arrived at the girl’s house. “We should do this more often in the summer time,” the older one said.

“Yeah, I’d like that,” replied Tanya. Then she hesitated, “Or maybe instead, we should get coffee or something.”

The old woman nodded but did not say anything. Tanya brushed a few pieces of hair out of her eyes, then waved goodbye to her grandmother. “See you soon, hopefully!” she yelled as she walked to her front door.

When Tanya got inside the house, she tossed her purse down on the kitchen counter. She felt very thirsty all of a sudden, so she pulled a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water from the sink. She took a sip. After taking a few more sips, she tossed the water out. It had a sort of metallic taste that made her not want to drink it.

The morning had made Tanya anxious. From one side of the room to the other, then back again, she paced the kitchen. Dissatisfied, she flipped the TV on, changed the channel a few times, breathed heavily out of her nose and flipped the TV back off.

She was unsettled. What did it mean? Could she be wrong? Since she told her friend that she didn’t believe, a slithering voice had been creeping in the back of her mind. It asked her why, then, did she feel like she was sinning?

Quickly, Tanya grabbed a celebrity magazine from the pile her mom kept near the fireplace. With the magazine in hand, she marched to the backdoor of her house, opened it and walked outside. For a moment, Tanya stood on the back porch and looked at the sun and then squinted at it. The sun did not look brighter when she squinted.

Tanya walked to the middle of her yard and took a seat. With her legs folded Indian-style, she sat in the grass in her backyard. Her magazine sat next to her, opened, but she did not read it.

Looking off, not at the grass, Tanya uprooted one blade of grass from the ground, then another. She tied the two together to form the shape of a cross. Then tightly, she squeezed the cross to her palm with four fingers. Was it her imagination, or did it burn, a little? With a short, jerky motion, she threw the cross back into the grass.