3.

Twenty minutes before dismissal, there was a soft knock on the door, and Father Ransom walked in. All forty of us kids sprang up together, automatically, like robots, the way they programmed us back in first grade, and we sang out:

“GOOD AFTERNOON, FATHER!”

“Good afternoon, class. Please be seated.”

“THANK YOU, FATHER!”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

“We were discussing the fate of Sodom,” Sister Margaret said.

“I hope the girls in the class will take a lesson from Lot’s daughters.”

“What can we do for you?” Sister asked.

“Is there a Cynthia Purple here?”

Sister looked at me. “Miss Purple―?”

I stood up again.

“May I borrow her for a few minutes?”

“Of course,” Sister said. “Do you need her to bring her books?”

“This might take a while. She can pick them up after dismissal.”

Everybody in class was looking at me. I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking, “Wooooo ― she’s in trouble!” That’s what I thought, too, but I had been so sick all day about facing mom when I got home that anything that kept me in school felt like a reprieve.

Besides, Father Ransom was the kids’ favorite priest. He was a lot younger than the prune-faced old men he lived with at the rectory. At least his hair wasn’t white: it was jet black, and he wore it long enough so it was starting to curl. Some of the parents called him a hippie, but he made me think more of a horse with a black mane. He was good-looking, too — compact, with a sharp chin, a hooked nose, and narrow gray eyes ― and he didn’t wear the old-fashioned cassock and biretta the other priests wore. He was dressed in black slacks and a dark gray, short-sleeved short with a collar. He hadn’t been at Annunciation long. The rumor was he’d bounced around a lot of other parishes before he landed here.

He held the door open for me and waited till I passed him before he followed me out.

“In the conference room,” he said.

“Conference room” is just what they call it. It’s really just a little office the south end of the school, where the corridor T’s-off toward the east and west stairs. It’s hardly ever used, so they laid down a blue-green carpet, put in a sofa, some chairs and a bookcase, and forgot about it.

Father Ransom told me to sit on the sofa while he turned the lock in the doorknob. There were some pamphlets laid out on a table in front of me. The one on top was called Talking to Your Child About Sin. A bronze crucifix hung on the wall opposite. The bookcase was next to it. It only had a couple of books on each shelf, with titles like The Church in a Changing World, Vatican II and You, and The Case for the Resurrection.

Instead of taking a chair on the other side of the table, Father Ransom sat down next to me on the couch. I kind of shrank into the corner, but he turned toward me and brought one leg up on the cushion, so his knee was touching me through my skirt.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Father asked.

“No, Father.”

“Well, I had an interesting talk with your mother on the phone this morning.”

I went cold all over.

“I guess you know what we talked about.”

I said, “Yes, father,” but I could barely hear myself. I was looking at my hands, which were clenched in my lap.

He brushed my cheek with the back of his hand.

“Your mother told me that she caught you in bed this morning without any clothes on — in the altogether, was the phrase she used.”

Yeah, that was mom’s phrase.

“Is this true?” he asked.

“Uh.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Yes” ― I coughed ― “Yes, Father.”

He stroked my cheek and neck, like he was getting my hair out of the way.

“Now, there’s nothing wrong with being naked, in itself,” he said. “You have to be naked when you bathe, for example, or when you change your clothes. When I was a boy, we used to go skinny dipping at church camp. But sleeping naked, for its own sake, can lead to other things, sinful things. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure, Father.”

“Then I’ll be frank. Your mother said you had been masturbating. Were you masturbating?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you were doing it, or you don’t know what it means?”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“Masturbating ― look at me ― masturbating is when you touch yourself between your legs to give yourself pleasure. Did you do that?”

“Yes, Father.”

“And why did you do it?”

“I’ feh’ g’d.”

“What? Now don’t cry.” When they tell you not to cry, that’s when you really start crying. “Say it clearly: Why.”

“It felt good.”

“It felt good,” he repeated. “Normally, we see this disorder in boys, but boys can’t control themselves. We expect more from girls. You must understand, it’s a grave sin.”

“How come?”

There was a box of tissues on the table. He handed me one while he thought about the question.

“Because sex is a gift from God,” he began. “And like all of God’s gifts, it must be used properly. It exists, primarily, for the transmission of life, and, second, as an expression of love within the sanctity of marriage. Anything else, any purely selfish pleasure, is a perversion and a sin.

“When you get older, if you decide to marry, you’ll learn to submit to your husband. The church, following the Bible, teaches that submission is the proper role for a wife. Do you want to submit?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I thought if I said yes, he’d get done faster.

So I said, “Yes, Father.”

“Excellent. Then we can begin.”

He took my tissue and tossed it on the table, and then he held my hand.

“Have you ever seen a man’s penis?”

“No, Father.”

“The penis,” he went on, like he hadn’t heard me, “is God’s chosen instrument for the transmission of life. It is also the instrument of submission. Through it the wife submits, and the husband achieves mastery.”

He straightened my fingers against his and put my hand in his lap.

“Feel that?”

“I’m not sure.”

I didn’t feel anything until he began moving my hand up and down his fly.

“When the penis is stimulated, prior to intercourse,” he said, “it grows long and hard and stiff. We call that an erection.”

It happened just the way he said. Something solid poked up under there, growing longer and thicker and harder under my hand until it bulged all along his zipper.

“Wow,” I said.

Before I knew what was happening, he undid his pants and pushed them down. His underwear, too. Fast, like it was nothing to take it out in front of a kid.

“Look at that,” he said. “Isn’t that a miracle?”