When the group headed down to the function hall for activities, Rick Ambrose held him back and collared him in a headlock evidently meant to be affectionate. “Well done,” Ambrose said, releasing him.
“Frankly, I’d assumed I’d be severely punished.”
“You didn’t think that was severe? They really let you have it.”
“I do feel a bit put through the ringer.”
“One thing, though.” Ambrose lowered his voice. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there were some hard feelings when your father left the group. I feel bad about it, and I really don’t know what to do. But if you want to be here, I need to know your dad’s okay with it. I need to know you’re here for your own sake, not because of something going on with you and him.”
“He doesn’t even know. I wasn’t even thinking of him.”
“Well, you need to fix that. He needs to know. Are we clear?”
Perry’s conversation with the Reverend, later that night, was thankfully short. His father made a trembling steeple of his fingers and regarded them sadly. “I’d be lying,” he said, “if I told you that your mother and I aren’t worried about you. I think you need some kind of purpose in your life. If this is what you want it to be, I won’t stop you.” Perry’s analysis was that he was actually of such small concern to his father that his joining the enemy camp didn’t even merit anger.
By the time Becky joined Crossroads, he’d already mastered the game of it. The object was to move closer to the center of the group, to become an inner-circler, by following the rules exemplified by Ambrose and the other advisers. The rules required counterintuitive behaviors. Instead of comforting a friend with fibs, you told him unwelcome truths. Instead of avoiding the socially awkward, the hopelessly uncool, you sought them out and engaged with them （making sure, of course, that you were noticed doing this）。 Instead of choosing friends as exercise partners, you （conspicuously） introduced yourself to newcomers and conveyed your belief in their unqualified worth. Instead of being strong, you blubbered. Where his tears on the night of drinking gin had been cathartic, his tears later on came more easily and were a more fungible currency, redeemable for progress toward the inner circle. Because it was a game, he was good at it, and although intimacies achieved by game-theoretical calculation were hard to feel great about, he sensed that other people genuinely valued his insights and were genuinely moved by his emotional displays.
The person he feared he wasn’t fooling was the one whose approval really mattered to him, Rick Ambrose. He admired Ambrose for, among other things, his intellectually plausible faith in God. Perry himself had yet to hear from God; maybe the lines were down, or maybe there was simply no one at the other end. One boring summer afternoon, he’d gone through one of his father’s religious magazines with a ballpoint and replaced every reference to God with “Steve,” for the hilarity of it. （Who was Steve? Why were otherwise sane-seeming people going on and on about Steve?） But Ambrose had an idea so elegant that Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.
And now the dangerous lottery system, for which Perry had unwisely voted, had thrown him together with her. Being a furtive and curious little worm, he knew every nook in First Reformed. In the function hall, behind a door that looked locked but wasn’t, was a spacious coat closet into which, as the other “dyad” partners dispersed around the first floor of the church, he led his sister. They sat down crosslegged on the linoleum beneath rows of empty wooden hangers. A bare overhead bulb lit a dusty punch bowl, packages of waxed-paper cups, two orphaned umbrellas.