Remembering, I continued to lie where I was. The blood ran out of my nose and out of a cut on my forehead. It pooled, damp and thick and sticky, around my face. I wanted to get up. I wanted to clean myself off. But I couldn’t muster the strength to move. I just lay there and let the images pass.

Finally, after a while, I managed to pray a little, in a confused, sort of dreamy way. I didn’t ask God to send angels down from the sky to lift me out of there or anything like that. I knew the world didn’t work that way. I knew God made people free and gave them choices, and I knew that meant they could do bad stuff to one another if they wanted to. Maybe life would be easier if we were all just God-zombies doing what was right automatically. But no one ever said freedom was easy.

So I just prayed God would keep his hand in my hand. I knew he knew what it was like to have people do unfair things to you and to hurt you for their own reasons. I just prayed he would stand next to my mom and dad and next to Beth and my friends and whisper to them that he remembered what it felt like, that he knew.

Things come into your head when you pray, I’ve noticed. Helpful things, almost like messages. Right now, for instance, I remembered the Churchill card, the index card Sensei Mike had given me. He’d written some words on the card, words once spoken by the British prime minister Winston Churchill, a speech he’d given during World War II when it seemed the Nazis might destroy his country: “Never give in; never give in-never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force: Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”