``You read like some people take drugs,'' his father said. It was true. At three in the morning his father would snap out his bedroom light without a word. Then he'd go under the covers with his flashlight and at least finish the chapter. Life was alright, but books were better. There were kids like him in books and people liked them. Kids that had adventures that always turned out well. He didn't have adventures. It was hard enough to get through the every-day stuff like homework and making his bed.
Then there was the church thing. He was supposed to go to church. He was supposed to say all that mumbo jumbo and pray. He tried to tell them he didn't believe but they just said he was too young to decide and when he was older he'd realize that Christianity was the true way to worship god. He had not the heart to tell them he would never change his mind. The good thing was that in church he could sit and read the Bible for an hour, and he would highlight the bits he liked and he would remember them and quote them back at people who tried to talk bible to him.
No one liked him.
When he was fourteen he read ``Crime and Punishment'' in one weekend. He sat hunched over for so long that when he tried to eat a doughnut it really hurt his squished in stomach so then he just didn't eat until the book was finished. He wasn't the same after that. Something had changed. Next weekend he engulfed ``The Possessed.'' He was in love with the Russians. All of them. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenov and Checkov, Gogol and Gorki and even Bulgakov.
The trouble was he was failing all his classes. Even English. It was Raskolnikov who did it. Raskolnikov accompanied him everywhere. Made sardonic comments about his teachers, parents. He was afraid of Raskolnikov. Afraid that he might become as religious in the end as he did. But Raskolnikov hung around him all the time, always at his shoulder, always ready with his comments.
``Leave,'' he'd shout out loud but Raskolnikov just laughed.
It was church that saved him. Church gave him time to stop and think. It came to him half way through the sermon that Raskolnikov envied him. Envied his good and pleasant life. His ordinary life. Not poor not cold not hungry. Not tortured by neglect.
``A treasure,'' he thought, ``an ordinary life.'' He offered up deep thanks - perhaps not to god perhaps not to nature. Perhaps not to anything.