On the first day of school, Ignatius found his new homeroom teacher sitting at her desk reading a book. He walked silently into the empty classroom, and she looked up and smiled.

“Good morning!” she greeted him. Her hair was neatly curled and cut rather short, coming down to just below her ears. She wore sensible, black leather shoes and a navy blue dress that came down to the middle of her calves, with brass buttons that came up from above a black belt with a brass buckle. She wasn’t what Ignatius would call fat, but she wasn’t petite either. Auntie George would have called her “big-boned,” and she exuded an unignorable physical presence.

As he found a desk in the second row, he sat down and nodded, “Morning.”

“What is your name?” she asked.

“I’m Ignatius Wick.”

“Ah, so you’re Ignatius. My name is Mrs. Prior,” she replied.

He nodded.

“You’re here early, Ignatius.”

“My father drives me to school,” he said.

“Well, you’re certainly welcome to wait here.”

Ignatius was relieved when she released him from her gaze and went back to reading her book. But he found himself secretly glad that she was there, grateful that the usually undisciplined, unruly time before roll call would be watched by someone who was clearly in command of the space around her. He hoped this would not be a first-day aberration.

He was aware of his classmates slowly filing into the room. And then, last of all, just as Mrs. Prior began calling the roll, they arrived. Danny Walsh and Homer Nelson swaggered into the room and noisily eased themselves into two empty desks on the very back row. Ignatius did not have to turn around to know who it was had entered the room. He recognized their hoarse laughter as they shared some joke with each other. He thought he could feel them staring at him, like having their breath on the back of his neck.

Mrs. Prior stopped to stare at them, and then asked sternly, “Gentlemen, you are...?” And as they gave her their names, she made a note in her roll book. “I expect my homeroom class to be in their seats by the time roll call starts. After today there will be one demerit for every tardy. Gentlemen, you’ve been warned.” They didn’t care.

Ignatius managed to slip down the hallway from class to class without running into them. At the end of the day, he hurriedly packed his books into his bag, pulled on his sweater, and scurried down the hall and out the front door. As he reached the edge of the school property, they stepped out from behind a fence and planted themselves in front of him. Ignatius tried moving around them, but Homer Nelson grabbed him by the sweater and yanked him back and said, “Hey, it’s our friend Ignoramus.” Danny Walsh leered at him, “Hey, did’ya miss us?”

“Leave me alone,” said Ignatius.

“We wouldn’t do that,” Homer smiled, “We’re your friends.”

Homer had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt so Ignatius could see his upper arms. They looked muscular. He could see a tuft of hair peeking out from the armpit of the arm with which Homer held him tightly. It did not seem fair, Ignatius thought, that they should mature so much more quickly than he did. Danny was staring at him, his mouth stupidly half open, a kind of lust in his eyes. Ignatius tried wrenching himself free, but Homer had him fast and yanked him back.

Ignatius sensed what was coming. He could feel the fear rising, mutating into panic. He glanced around him to see if there was a teacher nearby, other kids, anybody he could call to for help, and he saw nobody. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, something inside him snapped. It was as if some invisible force took hold of him and was moving him, while he watched as a spectator from inside his own head. Instead of trying to pull himself away and backward, he found himself stepping simply forward, pushing his weight into Homer Nelson’s chest and his face into Homer Nelson’s face and glaring back at him with an unexpected ferocity. It caught Homer completely unawares. He lost his balance and stumbled back, releasing Ignatius from his grasp. Danny Walsh’s hateful glare turned into blank surprise. Ignatius held his ground and said simply and deliberately, “Leave me alone.”

Inside, Ignatius was quivering with dread, and he imagined himself looking quite pathetic. He fully expected the two bullies to laugh at him and then beat him to a pulp. But what he felt and what Homer Nelson and Danny Walsh saw were completely different. The two bullies saw Ignatius go a dreadful shade of white, eyes burning fiercely like coals, his voice dark and full of unfathomed menace. It was as if a shadow had just passed over the sun, and the air had gone dead and cold, chilling them and making the little hairs on the back of their arms and their necks stand on end. They had the feeling of being watched by something dangerous, like the feeling you get, when you are alone in the basement, that something malevolent is there too, just behind you in the shadows, making you want to run for your life up the stairs. Without saying a word, they slowly backed away and then turned and sprinted in the opposite direction down the sidewalk.

Ignatius could not believe what he had seen. He looked at himself and looked around him and his mouth dropped open in amazement as he watched the two bullies scurrying away like two frightened rabbits. It took him a moment to absorb the significance of what had just happened, but then it slowly dawned on him that now he had seen them scared he would never need to be afraid of them again. He knew that they were vulnerable too. He knew that there was some strength inside him he did not even suspect was there that could make him stand up to them.

Slowly, Ignatius started walking down the sidewalk, shaking his head. He saw every pebble, every blade of grass, every tree, all the houses, the blue of the sky, the wispy white clouds, the light and the shadow all differently, as if he were seeing it for the very first time. He walked all the way home quietly thinking about how he had always felt so small, and how the events of the last few years since his mother’s illness and death had made him feel smaller and smaller, as if he were presumptuous to eat food or breathe air or take up space, as if all those things belonged to somebody else, and he might only be allowed to take them if he made himself small enough that nobody else noticed. Now, he realized, he had a right. And he realized that nobody could give that to him or take it away from him, not his classmates or teachers, not his pastor or the Sunday school, not his aunties and not his father.

That evening, when Ignatius’ father came home from work Ignatius saw him through different eyes. He watched him walk through the front door, stooped over as if under a great burden, eyes never leaving the ground, mechanically taking off his coat and his hat and hanging them up.

The thing foremost in Ignatius’ mind was his victory over Homer and Danny. He would have told Auntie George all about it, but he knew the man standing before him would not appreciate it. He might even get angry.

“Hello, Father,” Ignatius said.

“Hello, Nate,” his father replied. He loosened his tie and went straight for the armchair without returning Ignatius’ look into his eyes. He sat down and unfolded the newspaper from underneath his arm and began to read.

His father scorned “sentiment.” He would have had everyone believe that he was unmoved by emotion, that he only cared for duty. But Ignatius saw now that it was an illusion. There was a great reserve of pain there, dangerously close to the surface. He now saw a man who had been overwhelmed by sadness and had survived by hiding behind routines. Ignatius suddenly felt a great longing to say something, to speak to him.

Ernest Wick had already immersed himself in the newspaper. Seemingly oblivious to the world, his lips moved silently as he read, his eyes scanning the dense columns of words he held up in front of him. Ignatius pulled up a chair and sat down in front of him.

“Father?”

“Nate, what is it?” He never lifted his eyes from the paper.

“Do you ever miss mother?”

His father did not pause for a second. He replied in his usual gritty monotone, “Of course I miss your mother.”

“I mean, do you ever wish she weren’t gone?”

“No point wishing for something you can’t have, Nate.”

“That’s not what I mean, Pa.”

His father growled impatiently. “It’s been a long day, Nate. I’m tired. I’d like to read the paper. Don’t you have homework?”

“No. I want to talk.”

The newspaper lowered. His father’s eyes rose above the gray pages, and he glared down at Ignatius. “What do you want to talk about?” Ernest Wick replied acidly.

“If you miss Mama, how come you never talk about her? How come you’ve never talked about her to me?”

Ernest Wick’s frown deepened into a scowl, and a muscle on the side of his face started twitching slightly, but he did not say a thing. Ignatius recognized the look. He had seen it many times before, whenever the man was about to lose his temper. Any other day it would have sent him scurrying away to avoid the oncoming wrath. But this time he stood his ground and stared back defiantly.

“Don’t you think I’d like to remember her sometimes with you? Remember how warm and soft it was when she hugged us? Remember how the house used to smell so good because she was always cooking something? Remember how she used to sing at night before bed? I miss her. Every day I miss her. But I never hear that from you. It’s like you don’t care about her any more. Like you don’t even remember she existed!”

Ignatius saw his father’s face turn a shade of bright red and his eyes open wider and wider until they seemed they would pop out of his face. Suddenly he thrust the newspaper away, scattering it onto the floor, and rose up out of his chair, towering menacingly over Ignatius. Ignatius leapt out of his chair, almost knocking it over as he backed away.

“How dare you?” his father erupted.

Ignatius opened his mouth to say something, but there were no words.

“Get out of my sight, before I do something to make you sorry!”

Ignatius fled toward his room. But just before disappearing through the doorway, he wiped the blurry vision and the tears out of his eyes and peered back at his father, and he saw a man whom life had turned to ashes. His father was standing there wearily, staring down at the floor with an expression of utter loss. Then he looked up and noticed Ignatius still there, watching him, and the anger started to rise again twisting his mouth into a snarl, and Ignatius made good his escape. Ignatius slammed his bedroom door shut behind him and threw himself down onto his bed, and he just lay there. He had seen it in his father’s eyes: the real emotion, the well of sadness. It had been there only for a fraction of a moment, in the crack between Ignatius’ words and his father’s reaction. But he knew what he had seen. And then it slowly dawned on him that there was something wrong with his father. Ernest Wick was broken and could not be fixed. He would never transcend his circumstances, never see beyond the trap of pain and denial he was caught in. He would never talk heart-to-heart even with his own son. He was incapable of it. And so Ignatius had to forgive him.

Ignatius realized that he could no longer depend on this man. His father still fed, clothed and sheltered him, this was true, but this was dependence only in the most superficial sense. In the deeper sense of relying on his father spiritually, of understanding his father to have some kind of moral authority over him, he could not and perhaps never had depended on him. His father was incapable of seeing or understanding the larger scheme in which Ignatius had a sacred calling. “I am walking in a new path now,” Ignatius told himself. The thought of it filled him with fear, but also with a kind of relief, sadness and hope all mixed up. Samael would take care of him now.

Ignatius did not dare to show his face outside of his room for the rest of the evening. He heard his father clump-clumping around the living room and the kitchen, muttering to himself. He heard the clink-clank of glass. He was probably drinking, earlier than usual. There would be no dinner tonight, Ignatius thought. But he did not mind. He was not hungry. He just lay on his bed thinking. He committed himself then and there to be strong, to learn everything he could from Samael, to give himself totally to the Calling.

The next morning, Ignatius got up and slipped into the bathroom to wash and get dressed. He heard the radio on in the kitchen, so cautiously entered to find his father, just like every morning, sitting at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, with a plate of cold toast and a half grapefruit and bowl of oatmeal waiting for Ignatius. They ate breakfast together in silence, and his father drove him to school early and dropped him off at the bottom of the hill, just like every morning. “But it’s not like every morning,” Ignatius thought to himself, “because now I see.”

Ignatius wondered if he would find his new homeroom teacher, Mrs. Prior, waiting in the classroom for him, reading a book at her desk like she had been yesterday, the first day of school. But she was not. But then he realized, he did not need her to be.

As students slowly filed into the classroom, instead of hiding behind the shell of his homework or his books, Ignatius watched them for the first time. He saw the different faces. Some of them were afraid, taking no more space than they had to – had he looked like that? Some of them were trying desperately to make others laugh, begging for each others’ attention. Some of them were self-absorbed, some flighty, some intense, some bullying. He saw Homer Nelson enter the room, Danny Walsh one step behind. And to his amazement he did not look away from them, he looked them straight in the eyes. He half expected Homer to make some kind of remark like, “What are you looking at?” But he did not. He just looked away, and took refuge in his seat at the back of the room, Danny Walsh just next to him. He saw a girl walk into the room. He had seen her before. Ignatius tried to remember her name, and then it came to him: Kelly Parsons. Kelly had bright red hair, tied back away from her face in a short pony tail. She wore a delicate, white blouse printed with pink and blue flowers, a velvety red skirt, white knee socks and red shoes. He had seen her many times in school, but this time he noticed how she was not like the others, preoccupied with others or herself. She took neither more nor less space than belonged to her. She just was. When he looked at her, he felt something stirring inside him, some kind of warmth he had never felt in his life before.

He turned away and looked forward toward the head of the class. “Now is the testing time,” he told himself. “You were weak and pathetic, and you could not see beyond the circumstances that carried you helplessly along. You could not see outside your own grief and your own fears. Now you understand. Now you know that you can be strong and now you know the source of your strength, and you know that without that source you are nothing. Don’t get distracted now, when you are finally on the verge of something great. Now is the testing time.”

Mrs. Prior marched into the room, her hair looking a bit disheveled, as if she had been too hurried this morning to comb it completely. Ignatius glanced up at the clock and saw that she was three minutes late.

“Good morning class,” she said, with just a bit of worry around the edges of her voice, “Are you ready for roll call?”

“I am ready,” thought Ignatius.