There are dozens of high school girls who lock themselves in their bedrooms on the anniversary night, their hands dusted with luminous sand, prayers on their lips, their hearts heavy with sorrow. It looks like diamonds when you run it through your fingers. The first year, the art teacher ordered special sand from Arizona and the candles glowed with red light, but now the sand is trucked in from Heyward’s Gravel Pit, and it’s pure white. People who never even knew her spend all afternoon in the cafeteria filling up paper bags. The light globes are made at the high school where Helene was a senior before the accident. In the early morning hours, safe in their beds, they wonder how much of the world can never be understood or explained.

They’re hoping to reveal a con in process and dispel the myth of a miracle, but after keeping watch for a while the boys all flee. On the second anniversary of the accident, a gang of boys creep out their windows and gather at two in the morning to see if Helene’s mother, Diana Boyd, drives along the road replacing each melting pool of wax with a fresh candle. They shouldn’t last for that amount of time, but that’s part of the miracle. The lights are candles set inside paper bags, surrounded by sand, and they burn past midnight. In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 110, on the side of the road that slopes off when a driver least expects it.

Faithful by Alice Hoffman