The Side Entrance

"You keep showing up because maybe this time will be different. That's either faith or stubbornness—I've never been able to tell the difference."

The chapel car park had its own geography.

I'd learned to read it the way I read any environment — the patterns beneath the surface, the information encoded in arrangement and proximity. The Bakers' white Tarago was already in its usual spot near the entrance, which meant Evelyn had succeeded in her perpetual campaign for punctuality. The Nguyens' hatchback sat in the far corner, as it always did. Brother Rigby's station wagon occupied the space nearest the side entrance, positioned for the quick departures his ushering duties sometimes required.

And scattered among the familiar vehicles, the cars I half-recognised without being able to name their owners. The congregation made visible in metal and glass, each vehicle a marker of presence, of commitment, of the particular form of belonging that brought people to the same building week after week.

I climbed out of the Corolla and stood for a moment in the cool morning air, letting the transition settle. The chapel rose before me — tan brickwork, modest spire, the architecture of function rather than grandeur.

Dad was already moving toward the entrance, his stride unhurried but purposeful. Mum followed, adjusting her scarf against the chill. Charles had somehow managed to put himself together — his tie was approximately straight, his hair had achieved a state of relative compliance, and both shoes were now firmly on his feet. Small victories.

I pulled out my phone and fell into step behind them, scrolling without really seeing. The Gospel Library app was open from this morning's half-hearted attempt at scripture study, but my thumb moved past it to check messages instead. Nothing new. The screen's glow felt too bright in the pale winter light, and I dimmed it before anyone could notice what I was or wasn't reading.

The car park continued to fill with the steady trickle of arriving families. I watched them without watching — the particular skill of peripheral observation that had become second nature. Young parents wrestling prams into submission. Teenagers emerging from back seats with the reluctant energy of those who'd rather be anywhere else. Elderly couples moving with the careful deliberation of bodies that had been making this journey for decades.

A child broke free from her mother's hand and sprinted across the asphalt, her Sunday dress billowing behind her like a small flag of rebellion. The mother called after her — half-exasperated, half-amused — and gave chase with the practiced resignation of someone who'd performed this exact routine a hundred times before. The child was caught, lifted, settled onto a hip with a sigh of long practice. Life continued.

I let my family pull ahead slightly, creating a buffer of space that felt necessary without being obvious. Dad had reached Mum's side now, his hand finding the small of her back in that automatic gesture of connection I'd watched him make for as long as I could remember. They walked together like two parts of a single mechanism, their rhythms synchronised by decades of shared motion.

Charles glanced back at me, eyebrows raised in silent question. I gave him a small nod — I'm coming, just taking my time — and he turned back to follow our parents, apparently satisfied that I wasn't planning to make a break for the car park exit.

The thought had occurred to me, actually. Not seriously, not with any real intention behind it. Just that small, persistent whisper that sometimes surfaced in moments of transition: What if you just didn't? What if I climbed back into the Corolla and drove somewhere else — anywhere else — and spent the next three hours doing something that didn't require me to perform a version of myself I wasn't sure existed anymore?

But I wouldn't. I never did. The gravitational pull of expectation was too strong, the consequences of deviation too complicated to contemplate. So I kept walking, one foot after another, crossing the familiar asphalt toward the familiar doors.

And then I saw her.

Megan Ashworth was standing near the chapel entrance with her family, her posture relaxed, her attention focused on something her younger sister was saying. She wore a modest dress in a colour I couldn't quite name — somewhere between blue and grey, the shade of winter sky just before it decides to rain. Her hair was arranged the way she always arranged it for church, pulled back from her face in a style that was practical and pretty without trying too hard to be either.

She hadn't seen me yet. Or if she had, she was giving me the courtesy of pretending otherwise — that polite fiction of not-noticing that allowed both parties to choose whether to engage.

I'll see you Sunday.

Her words from Wednesday surfaced unbidden, carrying with them the memory of the cordial she'd brought me, the careful warmth of her smile, the way she'd said we should talk more sometime with that slight lift in her voice that suggested she meant it. She'd been kind to me. Genuinely kind, in a way that made my inability to reciprocate feel like a failure of character rather than simply the way I was built.

I should go over there. That's what a normal person would do — a person who felt the things people were supposed to feel, who understood how to navigate the particular territory of interest and attraction. I should walk across the remaining distance, greet her family, make small talk about the week, find out how her nursing placement was going. I should do something that looked like pursuit, or at least like receptiveness to being pursued.

Instead, I adjusted my trajectory slightly, angling toward a cluster of young adults I'd spotted near the side of the building. A small deviation, barely noticeable to anyone watching. Just a young man choosing to greet his friends rather than approach a family he knew less well.

The coward's path, disguised as social pragmatism.

Samuel Baker was at the centre of the group, because Samuel was always at the centre of any group he inhabited. He stood with his characteristic expansiveness — shoulders back, hands moving in broad gestures, his voice carrying across the morning air with the confidence of someone who'd never met a silence he didn't want to fill. Two other young men flanked him: Daniel Vance, whose girlfriend attended Playford and had gradually drawn him across ward boundaries with the gravitational pull of young love, and Marcus Okonkwo, who'd returned from his mission six months ago and still had that slightly dazed look of someone readjusting to civilian life.

"— and I'm telling you, the statistical model is flawed," Samuel was saying as I approached. "You can't just extrapolate from last season's data without accounting for the injury variable. That's basic analytics."

"That's basic rubbish," Daniel countered, grinning. "You're just upset because your picks are underperforming."

"My picks are strategically positioned for long-term gains. Unlike some people who went for short-term flash over sustainable value."

"Your picks are in last place."

"Temporarily. It's called a slow burn."

I reached the edge of their circle and stopped, letting my presence announce itself without interruption. Samuel noticed me first — he always noticed movement, always tracked new arrivals with the particular alertness of someone who wanted to know who was watching him perform.

"Jerome!" His face split into that wide, uncomplicated smile he seemed to produce effortlessly. "Mate, perfect timing. Tell Daniel his fantasy football methodology is fundamentally unsound."

"I don't actually know anything about fantasy football."

"That's fine. Neither does Daniel. You'll fit right in."

Daniel extended a hand, and I shook it with the automatic courtesy the gesture required. "Good to see you, Jerome. How's the wildlife rescue stuff going? Samuel mentioned you've been doing some work out that way."

"The Haven. Yeah, it's going well. Busy season with the cold weather — a lot of animals coming in with injuries they might have survived in summer but can't shake off now."

"That's really admirable work." Daniel's tone carried the particular sincerity of someone who meant what they said without quite understanding what they were affirming. "Taking care of God's creatures and all that."

"Something like that."

The conversation shifted, as conversations in these contexts always did — moving through the familiar territory of work and study and the small events that constituted young adult life in our community. Marcus talked about his job search, the challenge of explaining a two-year gap in employment to potential employers who didn't understand missionary service. Samuel detailed his ongoing campaign to convince his parents to let him use the family car for a road trip he was planning with friends from his basketball league. Marcus mentioned something about a girl he'd met at a combined stake activity, his tone carefully casual in a way that suggested the casualness was entirely performed.

I listened, contributed where expected, laughed at the appropriate moments. The social algorithm running smoothly, producing outputs that matched the inputs well enough to pass inspection.

But part of my attention remained elsewhere — tracking the car park, noting arrivals, cataloguing the population of this particular Sunday morning.

The Holloway family had appeared near the main entrance. Ryan stood with his parents, his posture carrying that polished ease of returned missionaries who'd learned to hold themselves with deliberate composure. From this distance, I couldn't read his expression, couldn't tell whether anything beneath the surface suggested the events of Wednesday night had left any visible mark.

He looked normal. Completely, utterly normal. The same carefully pressed shirt, the same modest tie, the same deportment of a young man who'd spent two years learning to represent something larger than himself. Nothing in his stance suggested that three days ago, he'd been kissing Nate Baker in a chapel bathroom and then shoving him violently away when a witness appeared.

I made myself look away before the observation could become obvious.

I didn't see anything.

That's what I'd told Nate.

But carrying the secret was different from making the promise. The secret had weight. It pressed against the inside of my ribs every time I saw someone who connected to it, every time the context of Wednesday night surfaced in my awareness. Nate. Ryan. The bathroom. The kiss. The panic.

And now here we all were, scattered across the same car park, preparing to enter the same building and perform the same rituals of faith and community. As if nothing had happened. As if the surfaces we presented were the only truths that mattered.

"Jerome?"

I blinked. Samuel was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite decode — curiosity, maybe, or concern.

"Sorry. What?"

"I asked if you were coming to the basketball game Wednesday. We're short a player and I need someone who can actually run a defensive play without tripping over their own feet."

"Oh. Yeah, probably. I'll check my uni schedule."

"That's a yes," Samuel declared, apparently deciding to interpret my response in whatever way suited him best. "I'll put you down. Seven o'clock, same as last week."

I nodded, because that's what you did. You said yes to the things that were expected, showed up to the places you were supposed to show up, and trusted that the performance would eventually stop feeling like performance.

"We should head in," Marcus said, checking his watch. "Meeting starts in ten."

The group began to move, the loose cluster reforming into a stream of bodies flowing toward the chapel entrance. I fell into step with them, letting the current carry me forward.

Megan was still near the doors. I could see her peripheral shape as we approached — the blue-grey dress, the carefully arranged hair, the posture of someone waiting without making it obvious she was waiting. Our trajectories would intersect if I maintained my current path. We'd have to acknowledge each other, exchange greetings, navigate whatever conversational territory the encounter required.

Samuel solved the problem for me, though he didn't know he was solving anything.

"Side entrance," he said, steering the group toward the smaller door that opened directly into the corridor near the cultural hall. "Less traffic. Plus I need to check if anyone's set up the chairs for the Young Adults class yet."

I followed without protest, grateful for the redirection even as I felt the cowardice of it settle into my stomach. Megan would be in the chapel. I'd see her from the sacrament table, probably. Our eyes might meet across the room, or they might not. Either way, the conversation I was avoiding would still be waiting for me — just postponed, not prevented.

The side entrance opened into a corridor I knew by heart.

Industrial carpet in a shade of blue that had probably been fashionable in the 1990s. Fluorescent lights humming overhead, casting everything in that flat institutional glow. Notice boards covered with flyers and sign-up sheets, the accumulated paperwork of a congregation's ongoing life. The particular smell of chapel buildings — some mixture of cleaning products and carpet fibres and the accumulated presence of hundreds of bodies passing through week after week.

I breathed it in without meaning to, the scent triggering something deep and automatic. Memory, maybe. Identity. The olfactory equivalent of coming home to a place you weren't sure you wanted to live anymore but couldn't imagine leaving.

Samuel had moved ahead to check on the classroom situation, his voice echoing back from somewhere around the corner. Daniel and Marcus followed at a more measured pace, their conversation shifting to something about a camping trip the stake was organising for later in the year. I let them go, slowing my steps until a gap opened between us.

The corridor was quiet. Most of the congregation would be entering through the main doors, funnelling into the foyer and then the chapel proper. This side passage saw less traffic — mainly used by people with specific destinations, preparation rooms to reach, classrooms to set up. The hush felt different here. More private. A brief pocket of solitude before the communal obligations of the next few hours took over.

I stopped walking.

Just for a moment. Just long enough to stand still in the empty corridor and let the silence settle around me. The fluorescent lights buzzed their constant, mindless frequency. Somewhere distant, I could hear the murmur of voices from the foyer, the particular sound of a congregation gathering. But here, in this small stretch of industrial carpet and painted cinder block, I was alone.

Why do you keep doing this?

The question surfaced without warning, sharp-edged and familiar. I'd been asking it for months now, in various forms, never quite finding an answer that satisfied. Why did I keep showing up? Why did I keep performing the rituals, speaking the words, wearing the costume of belief when the substance beneath it had grown so thin?

For Mum. That was part of it. The way her face softened when she watched me at the sacrament table, the pride she carried in having raised a son who served faithfully. I couldn't bear to take that from her — couldn't bear to be the source of the particular grief that would come with knowing her child had lost his faith.

For Dad. His quiet assumption that I was following the path he'd walked, that the priesthood I carried was as real to me as it was to him. The weight of his expectation, so gentle it barely registered as pressure, but constant. Always there. Always shaping the choices I made.

For the community. The Bakers and the Rigbys and the Hendersons and all the other families who'd watched me grow up, who saw in me a young man they understood and approved of. The social architecture that would fracture if I stopped fitting into the space they'd built for me.

But there was something else, too. Something harder to name.

Hope, maybe. The stubborn, irrational hope that one day the performance would stop being performance. That I'd wake up one morning and find the belief had grown back overnight, like a limb regenerating in some impossible act of spiritual renewal. That the emptiness where certainty was supposed to be would finally fill with something real.

It hadn't happened yet. But I kept showing up anyway, just in case. Just in case this was the Sunday everything changed. Just in case the next prayer was the one that finally felt like it reached something beyond the ceiling. Just in case the faith everyone else seemed to carry so effortlessly would somehow, eventually, find its way to me.

The sound of footsteps pulled me back to the present.

A woman I didn't recognise was approaching from the direction of the foyer — probably a visitor, or a new family I hadn't met yet. She smiled politely as she passed, the automatic courtesy of strangers sharing space, and continued toward wherever she was going. I smiled back, the expression arriving on my face without conscious instruction.

Keep moving. People will notice if you stand here too long.

I pushed off from my stationary position and continued down the corridor, my footsteps resuming their measured pace on the worn carpet. The foyer was ahead, the sounds of gathering growing louder as I approached. The main event. The congregation assembled. The particular performance of Sunday morning, with its assigned roles and expected behaviours and the constant, invisible pressure to be the person everyone believed you were.

The corridor opened into the foyer, and I stepped through.

The space was bright with accumulated presence.

Families clustered in familiar patterns, their configurations as predictable as the pews they'd claim in a few minutes. Children wove between adult legs, their energy not yet constrained by the reverence the chapel would demand. Conversations overlapped in the particular way of communities catching up — fragments of sentences drifting past, names and events and the small currency of shared lives.

Brother Rigby stood at his usual post near the main doors, his floral scarf a cheerful defiance of conventional masculine aesthetics. His face lit up as he spotted me, that irrepressible welcome he offered to everyone who crossed his threshold.

"Brother Smith," he said, the words carrying the weight of genuine pleasure. "Lovely to see you this morning."

"You too, Brother Rigby."

The exchange was ritual — the same words, the same warmth, repeated every Sunday for years. But there was something comforting in its predictability. A fixed point in a landscape that kept shifting beneath my feet.

I moved deeper into the foyer, navigating the human terrain with the particular care of someone who wanted to be present without being noticed. The bulletin board displayed its usual clutter of announcements and sign-up sheets. The drinking fountain hummed its quiet mechanical song. The carpet bore the faint impressions of countless footsteps, patterns of wear that mapped the congregation's habitual movements.

And there — near the chapel doors, arranging themselves for entrance — the Baker family.

Evelyn stood at the centre of their cluster, orchestrating the chaos with the efficiency I'd watched her deploy for years. Her husband hovered at the edge, managing a toddler who seemed determined to explore the acoustics of the foyer at maximum volume. Samuel had rejoined them, his earlier enthusiasm now channelled into whatever brotherly interaction he was conducting with one of his younger cousins.

And Nate.

He stood slightly apart from the main group, his posture carrying a careful neutrality I recognised. The posture of someone who'd learned to hold themselves in public spaces, to manage their visibility, to present a surface that revealed nothing of what lay beneath. His eyes were focused on something in the middle distance — not avoiding contact, exactly, but not seeking it either. The particular stance of a person who'd rather not be noticed but knew better than to make that preference obvious.

Our eyes met.

It lasted less than a second — a flicker of contact, immediately broken. But in that brief moment, something passed between us. Recognition. Acknowledgment. The weight of shared knowledge pressing against the air.

I didn't see anything.

He gave the smallest possible nod — so slight it might have been imagination, might have been nothing at all — and returned his attention to the middle distance. The conversation continued around him. His family moved in their familiar patterns. And the moment dissolved, leaving no visible trace.

But I felt it. The thread that now connected us, invisible and unspeakable. The secret I'd agreed to carry, settling into my chest alongside all the other things I couldn't say.

"Jerome!"

Mum's voice cut through my awareness, pulling me back to the immediate present. She was beckoning from near the chapel doors, her expression carrying that particular blend of warmth and mild exasperation that meant I was falling behind schedule.

"We're going in," she called. "Are you coming?"

I glanced toward the corridor that led to the preparation room. The sacrament would need to be prepared. Trays arranged, bread set out, the logistics of ordinance managed with appropriate care. That was my responsibility now — one of the duties that came with the priesthood I'd been ordained to carry.

"I need to help with the sacrament," I called back. "I'll find you after."

She nodded, accepting the explanation without question. Of course he needs to help with the sacrament. Of course he has priesthood duties to attend to. Of course her son is exactly the young man she believes him to be.

I watched her disappear through the chapel doors, Dad's hand finding its familiar position at the small of her back. Charles trailed behind them, his attention already drifting toward wherever the Baker family — and, more specifically, Chloe Baker — had settled themselves.

The foyer was beginning to empty now, the congregation flowing toward the chapel in steady streams. The pre-meeting energy was shifting, softening, preparing for the particular hush that sacrament meeting required. In a few minutes, the space would be nearly deserted — just latecomers and the occasional parent managing a crying child in the corridor.

I stood in the thinning crowd and let the transition wash over me.

This was the threshold. The last moment before the performance began in earnest. In a few minutes, I'd be standing at the sacrament table in my white shirt and careful tie, speaking words that claimed divine authority, participating in rituals that the congregation trusted me to perform with sincerity and faith.

And I would perform them. Because that's what you did when you were Jerome Smith, twenty-one years old, standing in a chapel foyer on a Sunday morning in July. You stepped into the role you'd been given. You hoped the role might eventually become real. And you carried everything you couldn't say, hidden beneath the surface of the person everyone expected you to be.

The foyer had nearly emptied now. The sounds from the chapel had shifted — the prelude beginning, Sister Crofton's hands finding their familiar keys. The call to stillness. The invitation to reverence.

I took a breath, adjusted my tie, and stepped into the chapel.