By the late summer of 1971, sixteen-year-old Vivian Hannity had been attending Catholic schools her entire life. Yet, year by year, her interest in her own religion kept waning. It wasn’t exactly that she was becoming an atheist. It was more like the rigid dogmas of the Church simply made no sense to her anymore.

Once, say at the time of her Confirmation, she believed everything without question. She bought the whole package, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Limbo, the Virgin birth, whatever was told to her by the nuns who taught her. Yeah, I got confirmed just in time to renounce it all. For her third-generation Irish family, it was as much a cultural thing as a matter of faith. The Church was simply there, something beyond questioning, and one followed its precepts because, well – that was the way a decent person should live.

Vivian reached puberty a bit on the late side, at the age of fourteen, and that was the beginning of the end for her. She could not resolve the contradictions between what the Church was trying to teach her and her own powerful sexual feelings.

It happened that fourteen was also the beginning of her attendance at an all-girls high school, the Mount St. Ursula academy in the North Bronx not far from her home on Mosholu Parkway. Within a short time, she began to feel trapped there and yearned for her future graduation when she could move on to a non-Catholic institution.

One of the first things to go wrong was that that the Church strictly forbade masturbation, and the nuns at Mount St. Ursula had no qualms about telling that to their young students. For about a week, Vivian tried to give up her passion for fondling herself into an orgasm. After all, the nuns were authority figures who seemed to know what they were talking about.

After a brief period, Vivian said to herself, this is ridiculous. If God gave me this body, he must have meant for me to enjoy the pleasure it can give me. That night, in her bed, she raised her nightgown. Then she used one hand to rub her clitoris and the other to insert the thick handle of her hairbrush into her cunt. After eight days of abstinence, she quickly had an intense orgasm. She had to use her willpower to avoid yelling out the joy of her climax. She didn’t want the rest of her family to hear her voice as she came.

After that, she figured that this was exactly the kind of act she should mention during her monthly Confession, but she refused to do it. She was growing to hate Confession, and the “little girl” lies she would say when in the booth. She thought that maybe the priests enjoyed hearing lascivious stories from schoolgirls, but she had no way of confirming that. They certainly sounded bored most of the time when she was prattling on in her side of the confessional.

After a while, Vivian began to think that the Church was strangely obsessed with sexual matters even though no one would admit to it. One of the areas where that appeared was in the preoccupation with the horrible deaths of venerable martyrs, many of whom had quite a bit of sexual sadism involved with their demise.

One of them was St. Ursula herself, who was supposedly one of 11,000 virgins beheaded by Huns near Cologne in the Fourth Century. Vivian thought the story lacked credibility, but the Church thought highly of her, enough to even name Vivian’s school after her. Better to lose your head than your hymen. She thought that was one of the unspoken lessons to be learned from the school’s namesake. Why hadn’t those Hun guys banged all of those chicks instead of killing them? After all, with 11,000 of them, there seemed to be more than enough to go around.

She had also seen a medieval painting of the death of St. Engratia, a young woman flagellated to death around the year 303. Vivian thought that the picture looked like a classic BDSM whipping scene. Of course, no one would admit to that, but the truth seemed obvious. And there were many other grisly tortures to contemplate, right up to the crucifixion of Jesus himself. There has to be something wrong with a religion so fixated on these weirdly horrible deaths.

But it wasn’t the distant past that bothered her the most; it was the strange, sexualized atmosphere now present at the school that really got to her. It seemed that most of her classmates, with the attempts to repress them and the lack of any boys around, were engrossed with sex even when they tried to deny it. They referred to themselves as being “boy crazy” but Vivian knew that simply meant “horny.” There were also some distinctly lesbian aspects mixed into those feelings.

It was at the beginning of her junior year that Vivian first became involved with the lesbian angle at her school, both directly with one of her classmates and somewhat indirectly with the nuns. One issue revolved around the underpants the girls had to wear to school. Much like at an English boarding school, the girls were supposed to wear uniform “regulation underpants” every day. These were supposed to be white and of an ample cut.

Vivian believed that the short skirts they also had to wear were a form of hypocrisy. We’re actually nubile young women, but they dress us like little girls.

Nevertheless, the underpants situation, by some long-forgotten school tradition, had evolved into a sort of cat-and-mouse game between the students and their pious teachers. Many of the girls would come to the academy with “bad girl” panties on under their uniforms. These would be of some color, cut, or another attribute (laciness was popular) that completely violated the school’s sartorial rules.

There was some exciting risk to this because sometimes the nuns would conduct random “panty-checks” of their young charges. Any girl caught with improper underwear had to immediately report to the “paddle room” for corporal punishment. The nuns would beat them, first on the seats of their drawers and then on their bare backsides. Up to three girls could be lined up for punishment sometimes; on certain days several others would be waiting their turn for discipline.

Afterwards, the guilty females would be sent home, and if they lived close enough, they had to return with the proper undergarments for another inspection.

During her freshman and sophomore years, Vivian had avoided involvement in these hi-jinks. Nevertheless, she heard various details about what happened during these sessions. A number of girls admitted, that despite the pain, they also enjoyed the paddlings. Their genitals would become wet during the beatings, although the nuns would never comment on it even though they had to have witnessed it.

Some of the girls would then have an urgent need to masturbate, although they often had to wait until they were home to satisfy themselves. A couple of them, before heading home, would duck behind a tree on the school grounds for a quick wank.

For their part, the nuns seemed to relish dishing out the punishments. They would often smile or even giggle when applying their thick paddles to tender young backsides.

Unlike many other girls, Vivian thought there was something strange about nuns in general. Why would they, starting at a young age, renounce and deny their own sexuality? Yet she grasped the idea that the paddlings were a way for them to sublimate their desires. Actually, maybe it’s not so sublimated after all.

For her first two years at the school, Vivian didn’t participate in the “bad panties” shenanigans. Yet she was still intrigued by it. Among other things, she wondered what her reaction to a rear-end punishment would be like. She had never been spanked by her parents, and she wondered if she would enjoy it.

She was also developing a Sapphic interest in her classmates. Without any boys around to distract her, she developed a curiosity about other females and how they could satisfy her growing lust. Masturbation was fine, but she began to crave the bodies of the other girls around her.

Am I really a lesbian? She was sophisticated enough to know what bi-sexual meant, and she took that on as her own orientation. When I get a chance, I’ll chase some men too, but for the moment I’ll take what is available.

As her junior year started, all of her hidden questions were suddenly answered. The catalyst for the change was another junior named Catherine, or simply Cathy, Morrow.

Vivian had known her from the previous year, but that September Cathy made a direct play for her. She was about five-foot-nine, a tall, rangy girl with dark hair she cut on the short side. It only went down to her chin, which was unusual for a Bronx girl in 1971. Vivian thought she had a “downtown,” even dyke-y look about her. Somehow she seemed too cool to be attending a place as uptight as the Academy.

Vivian herself was five-foot-six and more slender. Her medium blonde hair went down to her shoulders and she usually kept it in place with a hairband across the top of her head. She wasn’t exactly shy, but she was quiet compared to the voluble Cathy.

Cathy was in a couple of Vivian’s classes, and she didn’t hesitate to make some moves on the other girl. In one of their early conversations, she came right out and asked, “Hey, Viv, have you ever kissed another girl before?”

She didn’t like being called Viv, but she stifled any protests about it. The actual question didn’t shock her, but she found it a bit impertinent. “No, I never have.”

“Have you ever thought about it at least?”

She had, but it had always been a purely theoretical proposition. She decided to admit to it. “Yes, I’ve wondered at times what it would be like.”

“Well, would you like to try it out with me, after school, today?”

Vivian was surprised, but the concept seemed exciting. “All right, sure, but where would we go?”

Cathy herself had to think about it. The North Bronx of 1971 was not an area where women could openly show romantic or sexual affection for each other. It was a crowded place during the daytime when they would attempt their stunt

She came up with something. “If you are willing to walk a bit, there is a rock in the woods on the far side of the Penn Central tracks.” That was actually in the northern-most part of Bronx Park. “We could sit on that and have a bit of privacy I think.”

Vivian wasn’t entirely happy with that but she was willing to give it a try. “Okay, let’s at least have a look at it.”

“Great! There is something else we could try, but not today. You know about the ‘dirty girl panties’ game, right?”

“That’s kind of risky. If the nuns catch us, we’ll get a spanking.”

“Well, that’s part of the fun of it all.” She smiled at Vivian. “I got caught last year, and well – it’s actually pleasure mixed in with the pain It’s quite exciting to present your bare bottom for a punishment. But first, let’s try out our little make-out session.”

They met at three o’clock and walked down the hill towards Webster Avenue. Both of them were wearing their summer uniforms: short-sleeved white blouses, light-blue skirts, white knee socks, and brown shoes. (Uniformity is so important at our school.)

Cathy talked readily about various topics, mostly gossip about girls Vivian barely knew or about the nuns who taught there. At one point a group of three boys, high school students from somewhere, stared at them as they passed. Vivian looked away, but Cathy brazenly returned their gazes. Yeah, guys, you might like a piece of me, but you’re not getting any today, that’s for sure.