Frannie and Sean playfully banter over which one of them prepares various dishes better as they cook dinner together. The siblings are ecstatic when Daddy comes home. He’s a driver for an interstate moving company and has been gone for two days. Daddy brings roses and lilies for Mama, but he drops them on the table and hurries to her room when he learns that she isn’t feeling well. Mama stays in bed while the rest of the family eats dinner. Daddy tells the children that Mama is having another baby. Sean and Daddy are both excited about the news, but Frannie is troubled. She likes being the youngest in the family, and she worries that her mother is too old to have another child. While the siblings wash the dishes after dinner, Frannie hears music coming from a neighboring apartment. Knowing that Sean can’t hear it makes her feel sad, but she knows that he has “his own music going inside his head” that she can’t hear (56). Simply standing beside her brother eases Frannie’s sadness and worries.

The next day is Saturday, and Sean and Frannie have an argument when he turns off her favorite cartoons. Mama spends much of the day in bed, but she gets up to ask them to stop fighting. An irritated Frannie starts on her chores, and Sean goes to his room. While she’s cleaning the bathroom, Frannie thinks about the Jesus Boy and wonders where he lives. She goes grocery shopping with her father that afternoon. Both of them are worried about Mama, and Frannie voices her fear that the baby will die. Daddy tells her, “You don’t need to worry about what happened before. All you need to look at is what’s happening now” (58). He admits that their happiness may only last a few months, but he tries to live in the moment. Frannie is still afraid for her mother. Thinking about Jesus, she wishes that she could heal people’s pain and weariness with a touch.

On their way home from the grocery store, Frannie asks Daddy to drop her off at the recreation center so that she can watch Sean play basketball. She overhears a few girls commenting on her brother’s handsome appearance and making condescending, ableist remarks about his deafness. Frannie feels dispirited when she sees her brother and two of his friends, who are also deaf, losing to a team of boys who can hear, so she goes out into the hallway. The Jesus Boy comes out of the boys’ locker room and smiles at Frannie. She asks him how he knows sign language, and he explains that he’s always known it but can’t remember when he learned it. He mentions that life on the predominantly white side of the highway was difficult for his family because he doesn’t look like his father: “I used to wish that I would wake up and look just like him. I still do sometimes. I look at him and he’s so cool and…” (65). When some children stare at the Jesus boy, Frannie shoos them along, which makes him smile.

Trevor enters the recreation center and tries to pick a fight with the Jesus Boy. A “tall, dark-skinned man” walks over to the Jesus Boy (66), who introduces him as his father. Trevor stalks off without another word. After the Jesus Boy and his father leave the recreation center, Sean exits the basketball court. He teases his little sister for following him around and then proudly tells her that he made the shot that secured victory for his team. As the siblings step out into the snow, Frannie feels warm inside.

Later that afternoon, the city experiences record-breaking snowfall. Grandma comes over, and Frannie tells her about the Jesus Boy. Frannie’s grandmother urges her to be kind to her new classmate: “You just remember there’s a time when each one of us is the different one and when it’s our turn, we’re always wishing and hoping it was somebody else” (72). Grandma, Sean, and Frannie fall into a comfortable silence and drift off to sleep.

On Sunday, Samantha calls Frannie and invites her to attend her father’s church, OnePeople Baptist. When Frannie says that she plans to stay home and watch cartoons instead, Samantha becomes frustrated and asks her friend why she isn’t worried about what will happen after she dies. Frannie voices that she doesn’t believe in an afterlife, and she realizes that she doesn’t share Samantha’s fear of mortality because the loss of Lila and the two other babies means that death is a constant presence in her home. Frannie tells her friend that the snow reminds her of Samantha because it’s quiet and peaceful in a way that feels sacred. Samantha asks, “Can you come to church with me, Frannie? […] Just ’cause I want you to?” (77). Frannie agrees.

While Mama likes the idea of Frannie going to church, she reminds her daughter that the choice is entirely hers. Religion offers Mama a sense of hope that she wants to share with her relatives. She dislikes the church led by Samantha’s father because she thinks they condemn people, but she understands that Frannie wants to honor her friend’s request. Frannie recalls the Dickinson poem and tells her mother, “There’s hope in this house. And at your church. And at OnePeople. At our school. Across the highway and on this side too. Everywhere” (80). Mama hugs her daughter close and sheds a single tear.

Samantha’s father, Reverend Joseph H. Brown, has his church in a former candy store nestled between a diner and a laundromat. When they reach the church, Frannie squeezes Samantha’s hand, and her friend smiles back at her hopefully.

On Monday morning, a girl approaches Sean and flirts with him while the siblings are walking to school. Frannie says what her brother signs, and she grows angry when the girl says ignorant things about his deafness. Sean is dejected when the girl walks away, and Frannie asks, “There’re lots of pretty deaf girls at your school […] Why even bother with hearing ones?” (83). Sean reminds his sister about his idea of bridges connecting each window to another world. He explains, “The hearing girls are the bridges. They’re the other worlds. They’re the worlds I can’t just walk across and into” (83). Sean adds that Frannie doesn’t understand because she can already go wherever she wants.

Before school begins for the day, Frannie admires the pristine snow covering the school yard and playground. When she sees the Jesus Boy, she thinks of the sign for Jesus, “the middle finger of one hand brushing over the palm of the other” (84). Trevor tries to pick a fight with the Jesus Boy, and Frannie is stunned when Rayray intervenes and asks, “Why you gotta be so…so mad all the time, Trev?” (86). When Trevor persists, the Jesus Boy asks if Trevor wants to fight him because he has a father and Trevor doesn’t. Trevor calls him white, and the Jesus Boy says that neither of his parents are white. Frannie wonders how many times people have made similar assumptions about the Jesus Boy and treated him the way Trevor does.

The Jesus Boy mentions that Trevor’s father is white, and Trevor tries to punch him. Because his arm is in a cast and the ground is slippery, Trevor falls. The sight of the bully sprawled and crying in the snow makes most of his classmates laugh, but Frannie and the Jesus Boy hurry to help Trevor up. Trevor curses at both of them, but he looks and sounds pitiful.

As Frannie and the Jesus Boy enter the school building, Rayray asks them if they’re all right, “his face softer and more serious” than Frannie has ever seen (91). Rayray is grateful to the Jesus Boy for standing up to Trevor because he no longer fears the bully now. Rayray asks him if he’ll stay at Price, and the Jesus Boy answers that he will because he has nowhere else to go.

The Jesus Boy confides in Frannie that part of him wants to hit Trevor and part of him wants to exchange social roles with the other boy. He says, “I could be the new Trevor around here—with people being scared of me and all. […] Trevor would be the Jesus Boy” (92). The pain that he caused Trevor makes Frannie and her classmates realize that the new student is as human and complex as any of them. The Jesus Boy holds the door for Frannie, and they walk to Ms. Johnson’s class together.

That afternoon, Frannie and Samantha walk home. It’s snowing again, and Frannie feels as though spring will never come. Samantha is deeply disappointed by the realization that the Jesus Boy is an ordinary boy who was prepared to hit Trevor. She laments how quickly belief can erode: “[W]hen you don’t have that thing to believe in anymore, you don’t have anything” (94). Frannie watches her friend walk away in silence because she doesn’t know what to say to her.