Mara didn’t answer.  After three years of living in Boston, she’d accomplished nothing socially.  It wasn’t that she had no interest, but that she found herself uncommonly devoted to the mundane routines of her working life.  As a low-level clerk for an insurance company, she was infatuated with paperwork.  Her grandfather, a retired lawyer, had insisted that she come to work at his firm, but she wanted to do something on her own that she had earned through hard work and dedication.  Sandra, her little sister, was in her second year at Cornell University, and continued to pressure Mara to go to school.  But two years at a local community college had gained the young woman an associates in business management, and she hoped to someday be running the department of the very company in which she worked. And it wasn’t that the thought of boys made her anxious.  If anything, she could have had her pick of any man in the city.  She was, in a word, beautiful, and her Middle Eastern appearance, accented in long, flowing black hair and green eyes, turned heads all the time.  But she always imagined herself saving what soul she had to give away, for the right guy, whoever he may be.  So evenings alone in her apartment with cartons of Chinese food, paperwork, and classic movies had become the private side of her existence.  Until she met Wanda.   The City of Boston is located on the eastern coast of Massachusettes.   Boston College Aerial View He stood outside O’Neill Library, briefcase in hand and plaid tie lapping out of his overcoat in the early morning breeze.  Across the square, he watched a vagrant that had stumbled onto campus with a cardboard sign reading, Warning, and listened to the gray and soiled man yell out his sermon to students and faculty scuttling to class. “You must believe!” the tattered old man insisted through rotting teeth.  “I have opened myself to condemnation!” He switched the briefcase to his other hand and leaned against the building, strangely interested in what the preacher had to say.  Almost immediately, he’d become conscious of the intellect writhing in the dirt and stink of the would-be prophet’s mortal disguise of flesh and blood and clothing. “This has always been their tactic,” the old man declared.  “Offer a truth different from their own and be labeled as the evil one himself or as being in league with the devil.  I have tried to offer you guidance but they will not let my words reach you without their censorship.  The true demons of this world are hiding behind halos, cathedrals, little white steeples and onion domes.  Now do see why I will be condemned?  They will cast a dark shadow upon the light I am about to offer.  They will disparage my story as being totally false, a fantasy, a nest of lies, or at best, as amusing.  They will call it blasphemy!  In this, they will be furthest from the truth for it is they who blaspheme my words and teachings.  This they have done since the beginning of time—” O'Neill Library and Plaza