It was almost boring inside. No rain of burning bushes or frogs, so I was okay on the God front for now at least.

“I can show you to where Brother Kyle is taking visitors,” my guide said.

“Kyle?” Blair stuck her tongue out. “Yuck. Never met a Kyle I liked.”

“Honestly, same.” Joni drifted besides me as I followed the monk. “There were like, fourteen in our graduating year and they were all douchebags.”

“Yo what if this Kyle was one of the Kyles from school,” Christopher said. “We’ve been out, like, six years. That’s plenty of time to be a monk, right?”

“Wouldn’t that be wild.” Joni drew out the word ‘wild’, a wry grin on her face. “Can you think of a single one of them that would even look like a monk?”

The answer to this question was Kyle G. Kyle G had been a track guy. Not a track star, cause he was always on the lower end of track guys, but he was probably the loudest. Loudest about a lot of things. He would always show up to class with sunglasses on and loudly complain about being hungov–er, uh, sick. Just sick. Or how he’d been up all night cause there was this girl who’d come over to… you know. Help with hoooooomework.

And he’d stretch out the O to make a big O shape with his mouth and wriggle his eyebrows. You know. Classy shit.

In Sophomore year, this got a lot of shock because a sixteen year old bragging about this stuff was crazy! We would go nuts whenever he said it. But by Junior year it was getting old, and by Senior year, we were just done with him. His edgy shtick had worn off any appeal. He got some odd tattoos and some weird piercings and dyed his hair, just to get some attention, but by then everyone was doing it. Maybe even more tastefully than he did, and without any real charisma to back himself up, he just ended up being a dude with a lot of low tier tats and piercings, with a crass sense of humor, who joked too loudly about getting blown.

So, you might be wondering why I would think Kyle G, of all the Kyles, would look most like a monk.

And the answer is, because he was the monk I’d just been passed off to in a little, warmly lit room labeled Counseling.

He looked up when I entered, smiling mildly. Mild wasn’t ever a word I would have used to describe Kyle G, but it fit here really well. It was almost too weird, seeing him sit across from me in this cozy little room, that I had to blink several times. Gone was the streak of color in his hair and the brutal, back alley piercing in his eyebrow that was seemingly always infected. He did, however, still have the piercings in his ears, and the vine tattoos on his hands were still visible.

“Holy shit, it’s Kyle G,” Blair hissed, so loudly I expected Kyle G to react.

Fortunately, she had used her inside voice, so Kyle G did not react to her whisper. He did, however, react to me.

“Samantha Knox?” He jumped to his feet the minute I stepped in. “Hey, how are you? It’s been years!” His voice had a librarian-esque hush to it, kinda like an audio filter that took all the old, Kyle G harshness out of it.

“Wow, yeah, it’s been a hot sec.” I smoothed my black miniskirt over my black leggings and wished I’d worn something a bit more appropriate to the monastery. More virginal Mary-Mother-of-God, less skater rave. I wasn’t flashing a lot of skin or anything, I just felt weirdly edgy around a reformed edgy kid. “How have you… I mean, like, this is a real place to end up, huh?” I dug the toe of my heavy black boot into the cream colored carpet.

“You can say it.” He motioned me to sit in a tan colored chair across from his beige colored chair. “How did Kyle Generosio end up in a monastery?”

“I mean.” I exchanged a look with the ghosts as I sank into the squishy chair. “That is kinda what we’re wondering.”

“We.” He tilted his head. “Are you… did more of our old classmates come?”

“Technically, he’s not wrong,” Christopher said.

I fought the urge to wave him down. “No. But I’m sure if any did, they’d be asking the same thing.”

Kyle G gave a soft laugh. “It’s not an exciting story. I realized after high school that I wasn’t happy–hadn’t been, really, for a while. Making up stories about insane things, just to get people’s attention. To get them thinking I was cool. But they didn’t, and even if they had, it wouldn’t have made me happy. I just meant to take a bit of a gap year, focus on making me happy, not just indulged. But it ended up being a lot more soul searching than I expected, and here we are.” He waved a hand at the little box we were sitting in. There was a bookshelf on one wall, filled with mindful titles like “You and God” or “Finding Your Inner Peace'' or “Far From the Serpent's Path.”

“Looks like you got it all figured out.”

We sat in silence for a half moment more. How did I segue from ‘glad you found your calling’ to ‘did an old classmate of ours stagger in here begging to join your order?’

“Are you here about Henry?” Kyle G asked.

That… that would do it.

“Uh.” Questions not lies. “You heard about that?”

Kyle G’s lips twitched and for a moment, I saw a flash more of the old Kyle G I used to know, irritated at someone for crashing into his space. “I was on duty the night he came by. Banged on our doors when most of the brothers were sleeping. Brother Jerry got their first. Brought him in. Miller was sobbing, I swear I’ve never seen him like that. He was saying he needed penance, he needed penance, he needed God’s forgiveness. I heard most of this as I was rushing down the hallway to figure out what the noise was about.” He leaned back in his chair. “Miller freaked out when he saw me. Began clawing at my robes, saying we had to take him in, we had to expunge his soul. Swore again and again that he was a pacifist, that he never meant any of it. That’s what first set off alarm bells.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“That he was a pacifist?” I frowned. “Don’t monks like that?”

Joni, who had been sitting in a corner, slowly breathing, almost meditatively, looked at me sharply. “Anyone who says ‘I’m a pacifist, I didn’t mean it’ is someone who just hurt another person.’

As she spoke, I could have sworn the temperature jumped a degree or two. She must have noticed it, because she closed her eyes and started slow breathing again.

“We surmised, from his agitation, that he had perhaps hurt someone.” Kyle G sighed before breaking character. “We were right. He had. Sammi, you have no idea what that’s like. I mean, Henry Miller was always up to something, he was always doing something lawless or problematic. He was lost. At first when I recognized him, I had this stupid fleeting hope that maybe I could help him the way God had helped me. And then he said he killed someone.”

The words sounded heavy in his mouth, and I realized that, as shocking as it had been to find Kyle G at a monastery as a monk, finding Henry Miller at a monastery as a killer must have been way more shocking.

“He didn’t,” I said, blurting the words before I could stop myself. “Kill anyone. He shot a guy but the guy’s alright. Well he’s in a coma, but he’s not dead, so that’s great. Or, you know. Could be worse.”

Kyle G let out a shaky breath. “That’s good to hear. I mean, look, we believe in sanctuary and in the eternal promise of God’s forgiveness. But we don’t harbor murderers. We can’t. It’s… we had to call the police, at which point Miller panicked. He began to run and no one… I mean, we couldn’t stop him. We didn’t want to get shot. It was–” He buried his face in his hands. “Gosh, you have no idea.”

Gosh darnit, more likely. It looked like Miller had skipped out of here the night of the shooting.

“Did the cops come?” I asked. “I mean, if you called…”

“I wasn’t the one who called them that night.” Again, he wrinkled his nose, nostrils distorted by old piercing holes. “Brother Jerry said the police weren’t going to send anyone out tonight as long as we were sure he was gone, because most of their people were out on emergency responses anyway. I called the next day, though, because I wanted to follow through. The woman on the line said the detective on the case was out that day. Out, Sammi.” He snorted in disgust. “Not out taking names or interviewing suspects. Apparently just out on vacation.”

“Well.” I squirmed in my seat. “Maybe it was approved PTO? Even detectives have hobbies and stuff.”

“Maybe.” Kyle G threw a hand in the air. “But according to the lady on the phone, he knew he’d been assigned to the case. They’d called him 9 AM sharp to let him know, and he gave them a very hard ‘I’m off today, but I’ll touch base tomorrow, when I’m back in the office.’ Sammi, I tell you.” He shook his head angrily. “A twenty-year-old gets shot and this man’s response is to continue his leisure? The first 24 hours of a case can be crucial, everyone who's watched a single episode of CSI knows that.” He looked up at the sky, throwing his hands in the air. “Some people will have God to answer to.”

I nodded vehemently. “Absolutely. We just gotta pray hard enough and hope God hears us. Cause no one else is gonna avenge that kid. I heard his parents aren’t even in the country. He’s just been lying alone in a coma ward.”

“Jeez.” Kyle G ran a hand over his fuzzy head. “That’s awful.” Then he looked up at me. “How do you know all this? You involved in the case?”

Shoot. Lie time. “I just feel weirdly connected to it,” I said, vaguely, looking off in the distance. “I knew both people involved before the shooting, you know?”

“You knew the kid too?” Kyle G sucked a breath in. “Shoot, Sammi, that’s extra rough.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Kyle G let out a long sigh. Then he took a breath and opened his mouth, like he was gonna say more. I stared fixedly at the spot a few feet to the left of his head. After another second, he seemed to think twice of saying anything, and released the breath slowly, like he was hoping I’d have forgotten he’d opened his mouth in the first place.

“So what now?” Christopher asked, as Brother Kyle G mentally wrestled with the right way to console me. “Like, obviously Miller’s not here. Is this a dead end? Do we have any idea where he is now?”

“Do you think he’s still in lie-mode or did it wear off when they called the cops?” Blair asked.

I snapped my fingers cause that was actually a good question. My abrupt motion, and the sudden look of conviction on my face, brought Kyle G’s awkward indecision to a critical point.

“Sorry?” he asked, like I’d said something.

“I was just thinking,” I started, as if this tangent would feel at all related to me having known Noah before the shooting. “Did Henry at all seem… confused by the time he ran off? Like, I mean, you’ve watched cop shows, right? You know how sometimes they’ll enter a, um, a fug state? I think they’re called. And then it wears off and they’re like ‘woah, shit–uh, shoot–where am I?’ Like they’re all, you know, confused.”

“Fugue state,” Christopher said, but Kyle G was nodding.

“Actually yeah. Yeah.” His eyes grew distant. “We were trying to calm him down, get him talking about things, you know, try to shake him out of his initial panic. It seemed to work a little. He recognized me, you know? Asked what made me decide to be a priest–” he laughed shortly “–and I asked what made him decide to be a pacifist. Then his eyes got a little cloudy. He said–or, uh, rather… he cursed under his breath. Muttered a few words, it was hard to make them all out. Then he said he had to get out of here. That’s when we called 911, but again, he was gone before they even picked up.”

So the lie had worn off. Seeing someone from his past, someone who could remind him that he had never been a pacifist, was enough to shake it off.

“So that means he’s gotta be, like, on the run, right?” Christopher said, scratching his chin. “In the city or out?”

This was a good line of thinking, but I couldn’t ask any the ghosts of the questions popping in my brain like corn until I was far away from any mortals who might give me confused stares. And I was already getting an increasingly confused stare from Kyle G, who seemed to expect me to respond to his answer to my question.

“Huh,” I said, responding rather weakly. My brain had fully switched gears and was currently miles off, debating where Henry Miller was. Step 3: make small talk with a monk had very quickly gotten scratched off my list. So I stood up, making to leave. “Hey, so, I gotta go now. Places to be and all. I really appreciate, you know, catching up, talking shop, discussing old memories, old friends.”

Kyle G’s eyes were solemn. “I don’t know if friends is the right word.”

“Sure. Right. Classmates! But anyway, remember, you’re not supposed to tell anyone what we discuss in here.” That was a rule, right? Maybe? Well, it was now. “I gotta scoot, but if you hear anything about this, I’m the girl to call. Remember that. Or just, you know, ping me on Facebook.”

He nodded. “Right. Of course I’ll keep confidentiality. And I’ll keep an ear out in case any of the brothers hear anything. I can only imagine how hard this must be for you, being close to the victim and perp.”

I clasped a hand to my chest. “Noah’s like a brother to me. I gotta track this guy down.” Then I tossed him a salute. “See you ‘round, Kyle G. Remember, mum’s the word.”

He bowed to me–just a little head nod, not an elaborate monk thing–and I slid on out of the counseling room. I didn’t let the ghosts’ chatter slow me down as I power walked out of the monastery, eager to get home and discuss everything I had on my mind.

And I had a lot on my mind.