(Editor’s note: Each weekend we’ll publish one chapter of the new Christian novel Which One of You? here at Christian Heartbeat.)

The heat doesn’t wait this time of year. If you’re smart you start early. By nine I’d finished my workout: Three crisp miles along the intracoastal and four non-stop rounds behind the house beating the 100-pound body bag. I’d run the three miles in just under 20 minutes, pushing myself harder than normal. But it was the bag session that worked the frustration out of me. There’s something about pulling on the hand wraps and bag gloves that makes me feel powerful and in control. Of course the bag doesn’t hit back.

By 10 a.m. I’d showered and was on my way to the skate park. The story I’d been fed about that night didn’t add up. It fit together alright as far as it went, but a few chapters were missing. Who was there with Sagan? The police wouldn’t say. I threw out specific names. “No, not him. No, not her.” So Sagan’s having a party with none of his friends present. And where does he get money for pot? A couple of missing chapters in the story.

When kids are up to no good there are never any secrets -- mainly because none of them want to be known as a goody two-shoes. Make the honor roll or win a superior at the state competition and the word goes no further than your mom, dad and grandparents. But dodge getting busted at a pot party the police rolled up on, and you’re going to make sure every other kid knows. Just enough risk-taking “rep” gives you a little sex appeal. No one wants to be the kid who toes the line all through high school. At least, those are pretty rare.

So I knew Frankie would have the details I wanted. Rest assured, had Frankie been present that night he wouldn’t have let Sagan take the fall alone and the cops sure as hell wouldn’t have let him walk. Lucky thing he wasn’t there. Frankie was doing a decent job straightening out his life. He didn’t need a setback.

A handful of young dudes were already inside the high-fenced enclosure. The city had given in to a few determined parents, tossed aside the stereotype of skaters as dope smoking dropouts, and built the park where a pair of decaying tennis courts once stood. Up on the north platform of the big half-pipe Frankie was easy to spot among the blond-haired young teens who rode their bikes to the park every summer day, skateboards strapped to handlebars and surfboards clutched under an arm. Dark-skinned and almost 20, he was the hairy one with a man’s muscular chest under his white wife-beater tee.

I watched with fingers clenching the fence as the youngest looking boy dropped over the edge and shot halfway up the opposite wall before losing speed and falling backward to ground level. Everyone laughed except me, but the boy bounced to his feet and looking up at the others joined in the hilarity. Frankie spotted me and dropped over the edge, deftly turned his board and pushed off with one foot to skate in my direction. Just in front of me he jumped off, kicked the board’s back tab and grabbed it as it popped to his chest.

“Hey Pastor Dietrich,” he said. “What’s up with you today?” Pastor Dietrich was what Sagan called me. Carolyn’s kids called me Dietrich. They already had a “Dad” who didn’t much like me using that name. So dad was out and I sure didn‘t want to be Mr. or Pastor Waymire in my own house. So we settled on Dietrich. But Sagan, his mom, and the social worker, thought Dietrich by itself was too familiar. So it became Pastor Dietrich, which was OK with me.

“Oh … I … just stopped by to see how you’re doing,” I said. He knew I’d come to ask about Sagan, but he said “thanks man” anyway. My cell phone rang. It was Carolyn. I let it go to voice mail.

“I heard what happened with Sagan,” he said. “Is he still at the hospital?”

“Until tomorrow night,” I said. “72 hours is standard.”

“Cool … I mean, I’m glad he’s getting out.”

“You say you heard what happened. What did you hear?”

Frankie hesitated a second. What he’d heard he’d heard from other kids, even though they were preppie kids who looked down their noses at guys like him. Was it alright to share it with an adult? “I heard a couple things.”

“Like who was there that night? How it came to be?”

“I heard that Becky girl was part of it. You know the one; her family lives over there on Yacht Club Island.”

“The Bentley’s?”

“Yea, right. Her and some of her cheerleader friends. And a couple of dudes, that one guy for sure -- the big football player, Brad.”

“I didn’t know Sagan hung with those kids.”

“He just knows ‘em, you know, from school. They were tryin’ to party and they had more girls than dudes. That one girl, not Becky but the other little blond, Sagan told me she‘d been acting like she thought he was cute, trying to talk to him at school. He was kinda full of himself over that.”

“So where did the marijuana come from?”

“That’s how they ended up at your house. One of them, I’m not sure which, had a couple of nice buds they got from somewhere, but they didn’t have any way to smoke it. They were too embarrassed to just walk into the convenience store and ask for a pack of Zig Zags -- that’s like rolling papers …”

“Yea Frankie,” I said, grinning. “I know about rolling papers on account of I’ve watched the movie Woodstock.”

“Sorry,” he said with a smile. “Didn’t mean to treat like … the man. Anyway, one of the dudes goes into Publix and buys one of those packs of Bugler tobacco just so they can get the papers, even though everyone knows those Bugler papers really suck and no one would use ‘em if they didn’t have to, and everyone behind the counter knows the dude is gonna throw the tobacco away and use the papers to roll bud. Dumb.”

“So now they have some pot and some papers. Where does Sagan fit in?”

“That’s the funny part. They’re over at Becky’s ‘cause her parents are gone again on a cruise or somethin’, and it dawns on them none of ‘em knows how to roll. They try it a couple times and with those stupid Bugler’s, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t break the buds up enough but they can’t get it. Their joints keep fallin’ apart and they’re all laughing even though they ain’t even high yet -- they coulda been drinking too -- and then that one girl …”

“The one who likes Sagan?”

“Yea, she says I bet Sagan knows how to roll. Let’s call him.” But he was listening to music in his room and didn’t hear the phone. So they took the party to him.”

That still didn’t answer why Sagan was the only one arrested, but I had a good guess. Yacht Club Island. Carolyn’s mother lived there. You didn’t live there without money, which in this town means influence. And Brad Pinkerton. All these kids had an in so they walked away while Sagan rode in the back of a squad car. But I had another question in mind.

“Tell me Frankie, and I promise it goes no farther than right here, have you smoked pot with Sagan lately?”

“No way Pastor Dietrich! No freakin’ way! I’m off it and so is Sagan -- I mean until he fell back that night and that never would have happened if that one girl hadn’t been all over him. I mean she’s really hot and really… you know,” he cupped his hands in front of his chest, “really, really built -- even if her mom and dad bought ‘em for her.”

“I guess that’s hard to say no to.”

Frankie shrugged his shoulders. Not easy talking this stuff to a friend’s father, let alone a pastor. “That’s why you stay away from those kids,” he said. “They can get away with anything; guys like me and Sagan, we can’t.”

“They’re probably laughing about it right now.”

“I hope not,” Frankie said.

“Just a grand adventure for them.”

“Yea, maybe.”

All the years I’d been preaching it never struck me to line one group up against another. The church door was open to everyone. Everyone was equal in God‘s eyes. Naïve? Maybe. Even when I got Sagan, my idea was to lift him up, to give him opportunities I had, that Carolyn’s kids have, that kids like Becky Bentley have. College, a career, a place in society. Honest to God I never thought about things being stacked, about hard roads and easy roads. So now I knew what happened that night. About the rest of it, at that point, I was still thinking. But I could feel a little fire building in my belly.

“How about you Frankie?” I asked. “How you been?”

“Great sir, you know, staying out of trouble.”

“Still got that waiter job at the Ocean Place?”

“Almost every night. I’ve been taking a couple of shifts in the kitchen too.”

“Cooking?”

“Yea, doesn’t pay as good as serving but, who knows, some day maybe I’ll open my own place. It’s good to know the whole routine.”

“I have faith in you Frankie,” I said. “How about your parents?”

“The old man came back so I got out. I found this upstairs efficiency on Orange Street.” Frankie glanced up at the sky. “Starting to cloud up. Feel how wet the air is? You can almost smell it.”

Dark clouds were moving in fast off the ocean. “Rain’s coming early today,” I said. The wind was starting to kick up.

Frankie yelled to the younger kids in the park still busy working the ramps, impervious to changing conditions. They paused, looked up and went back to skating. Frankie shook his head and said, “I ain’t their daddy.”

I thanked him for the information as we walked on opposite sides of the fence toward the gate. He closed the gate behind him, dropped his board to the concrete and pushed off toward home. Twenty feet away, he stopped, turned to me and said, “Tell Sagan to get ahold of me when he gets home.”

I said I would. My cell was ringing again. Carolyn. I still wasn’t ready to talk with her. She’d want solutions and I was still sorting out the problem.

I drove south on U.S. 1 as the rains lashed the earth. Even on high my sedan’s wipers couldn’t keep up. Water piled up in the street. In the right lane drivers crawled forward with hazard lights flashing. I turned on my headlights and pressed on. Suddenly it stopped. But up ahead, 100 yards, maybe two, I could see another wall of rain waiting for me. I figured the sooner I reached it, the sooner I’d be through it. I accelerated to the legal limit and then beyond. Nothing about this downpour was unusual, just a little earlier in the day than average in the summer scheme of things.

The rain slacked to simply steady as I pulled under my carport. I put the key in my front door and the sound of big drops dancing on the ground disappeared. I felt heat on my back and turned to see the sun popping through the clouds. I smiled to myself remembering my father’s optimistic take on Florida’s summer storms:

“Patience my son, is the most important thing. Here in Florida if you cancel your picnic every time a few clouds appear you’ll end up spending the whole summer inside.” And that was before everyone had air conditioning. Inside on a summer day was not the place to be. Better to get a little wet sitting in the shade of big live oak tree.