Chapter 3

For the moment, she was Sister Kristen. All it took was a pretend veil she had made by laying a pillowcase across her crown and tucking the corners behind her neck. She looked at herself in her dresser mirror. Her hands were folded in prayer, with her fingertips touching her chin, and her sharp breasts peeked around her forearms. Except for the veil and her gold cross, she was naked.

“Sister Patrice,” she said, “I’m ready for my test.”

She crossed herself with her right hand and with the fingers of her left combed the soft curls of her pubic hair. The flesh below was cool and dry, but there it was, the rubbery bead that would keep her out of the convent if she couldn’t control herself.

It didn’t overwhelm her the way it did when Sister grabbed it in the classroom, but it felt good to rub it, and she quickly grew moist. The goo seem to come from nowhere, flooding the gully that opened between her legs. She dipped in her finger in and smeared the stuff around, tenderly, and the heavenly feelings returned. She pushed the finger far inside herself, the way Sister had.

Out in the living room, she had the radio on. It was tuned to the classical station her mother liked, and the music was pretty, with strings that died away in slow-moving waves. After a pause, a clarinet burbled, and a deep-voiced woman began to sing:

Wir geniessen die himmlischen Freuden,

drum tun wir die Irdischen meiden.

Kristen didn’t understand, of course, but something childlike in the melody made her check herself. Don’t give in, it seemed to say, and you’ll stay clean.

She stopped rubbing, but she didn’t take her hand away. She made up her mind to teeter on the edge, between innocence and sin, for as long as she could. This time she would pass the test.

The woman went on singing. The twitching eased, but Kristen pushed her finger in higher and circled that delicious spot with her thumb, climbing again to a millimeter below the peak. She breathed through her mouth in shallow gulps, keeping as still as she could. Any sudden movement now would set her off.

“There,” she said. “Stop.”

It was as though she had jumped off a swing at its highest point and was hanging in mid-air. But she didn’t fall. She defied gravity, floating unnaturally, the playground sand below her.

“Ah ... ah.”

She smiled in triumph, but as she began to withdraw her finger, it slid across the center of her pleasure — lightly, but in just the wrong way. Gravity took over, and she fell.

“Shit, here it comes!”

No use. No use. Resistance failed for the second time that afternoon. Her hands sprang to life, one jiggering the swollen bump in her pussy, one clutching her breast. A sound like a salivating animal rose from her crotch, and that delicious tightness crushed her in its fist. Sister Kristen watched herself come in the mirror.

“My God!” she murmured. “My God!”

Why have you forsaken me? But there was no earthly way to stop. The wicked thing had to run its course, which it finally did. Kristen fell back on her bed. Her hand lay still between her legs. She turned her head and nuzzled a pillow, panting stupidly.

It must be a strange life the nuns led, praying all day and then playing with themselves, trying to be strong. Maybe they all failed, and maybe failure was just a way to remind themselves that God forgives everything.

Next thing she knew, the guy on the radio was telling everyone to give blood. She had missed him saying what the music was. She couldn’t remember how it ended, either.

“Darn,” she said, “what was that?”

She made herself get up, and, after a moment to steady herself as the blood rushed from her head, she went in and turned off the stereo. It was fun to stand there with no clothes on. A warm breeze came through the open windows, along with the sounds of boys playing hockey in the street —sticks clicking and scraping on the asphalt, voices calling to one another. She grinned at the thought that they didn’t know she was naked.

Then suddenly she was frightened they did know, somehow, because the hockey noises stopped and an obscene chorus began. The boys whistled. They made exaggerating kissing sounds. One shouted, “Hey, girl, suck on my stick!”

Kristen scrambled back into her bedroom. She tore the pillowcase from her head. Her gym shorts and undershirt lay on the floor. She was fumbling into them when the doorbell rang, and she understood what the commotion outside was really about.

Suzie had arrived.

Kristen pulled her top into place as she walked back through the living room. It was a ribbed tank that molded itself to her tummy and the inward curve of her waist and turned her solid nipples into lumps of sugar. As provocative as she felt, though, she could never match Suzie, who was standing at the front door in a black leather halter and black ankle boots. Her denim cut-offs were stuffed into her crotch and rode high in the back, giving the boys a generous view of her behind. They glared at her from the street and clutched their big sticks, white-knuckled with lust.

“Don’t say hi or nothin’,” one of them shouted. “Chink whore!”

Without turning around, Suzie raised her right hand, pointing a single finger toward heaven.

“Why do you dress like that?” Kristen asked, opening the screen door.

“Gives them a look at what they’re never gonna get,” Suzie said.

She was carrying a black canvas bag, which she dropped beside the sofa as she began to toe off her boots. Even her socks were sexy: black and sheer, with vertical black ribs and lace around the tops. She took a black kit from her bag.

“Let’s do this,” she said.

Kristen sat on the sofa and pushed out the coffee table. Suzie knelt in front her and unsnapped the kit, which bristled with clippers, files, emery boards and bottles of polish arranged in square holes. She rested Kristen’s heel on her naked thigh, and as she knelt, her shorts dug deeper into the V between her legs.

“Are you even wearing underwear?” Kristen asked.

“What for?” Suzie said. “You’re not, either.”

Looking up from the floor, she could see right up Kristen’s gym shorts.

“I’m inside. You take chances.”

“So what?”

“Didn’t it piss you off when that kid called you a whore?”

“It pissed me off more that he called me a Chink — Ugh! You let your nails go.”

She dug an emery board under the down-turned corner of the nail on Kristen’s big toe. Kristen settled back on the couch, luxuriating in the professional attention, the skill Suzie had learned in her mother’s salon, and the dull rasping that sent muffled tremors up her shin. The left cup of Suzie’s halter slackened as she leaned forward, lost in concentration. Kristen could see the rounded border of her nipple, rising like a black moon. Her conscience pricked her: She was no better than those horny boys outside.

“So what did Patrice do to you?” she asked.

“She dragged me down to see Father White.”

“Oh God! Did he look up your skirt?”

“He gave me his ‘brazen whore’ speech.”

“He’s such a perv.”

“He’s not the only one.”

Kristen said nothing.

“What did Patrice do with you?” Suzie persisted.

“She told me you’re a bad influence.”

“And?”

“What?”

“Did you like it when she felt you up?”

Kristen snapped her foot away.

“How’d you know?”

Suzie calmly took hold of Kristen’s heel again and went back to work.

“She came back, and White heard her confession.”

“In front of you?”

“She didn’t know I was there.”

“How could she not know you were there?”

“I was under the desk.”

“Ohhh-K?”

“Hiding.”

“Why?”

“If you have to know, I was going down on him.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I was giving him a BJ.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I was sucking his cock.”

“No freaking way!”

“Hold still!”

“You lie!”

“Don’t believe me. She comes barging in, all wound up, and she told White she put her hand down your panties.”

“Nooooo.”

“She said she has a thing for you.”

“Uh uh!”

“She said she’s been resisting you all year. She loves you!”

“No! No! No!”

“We must bear witness to the truth: Patty’s a hot lez.”

“Stop!”

“You should totally do it with her.”

Kristen got quiet.

“You like her, don’t you?” Suzie said.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Kris — you a lez?”

“Oh, God, I don’t know!”

“You know, if you are, you can’t be Catholic anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because God hates fags. White calls it ‘an objective disorder.’ You do anything like that, you go straight to hell.”

“All he thinks about is sex.”

“All anybody thinks about is sex. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“What.”

“Did you like it?”

Tight-lipped, Kristen nodded. Slowly. Three times.

“Awesome,” Suzie said.

“But it’s bad.”

“They just say that to scare you. What kind of polish you want? I got deep purple. Hot pink. Cherry red.”

“Just clear.”

“You are so boring. I know: Glitter. It’ll get Patrice all hot and bothered when she sucks your toes.”

“Stah – ahp!”

“Don’t fight it, girl.”

Kristen’s toenails sparkled like the Pearly Gates when the Para-Transit van pulled up in front of the house, scattering the hockey players once and for all. The hydraulic lift hissed over the throb of the engine. That was Kristen’s signal. She sprang from the couch and locked the screen door open while the bus driver unfastened the latches on the lift platform. Each had their allotted role in the homecoming ritual.

“Thank you Simon,” Kristen’s mom said, and she rolled up the front walk and the wooden ramp that covered the steps. Her right hand, bent sharply at the wrist, held the joystick forward.

“You girls have a nice night,” the driver called, with a nod at Kristen.

She kissed her mother on the mouth. Then she stood aside, and her mother trundled into the living room, over the plastic runway that protected the carpet.

“Hello, Suzie,” she said.

“Hey, Wendy.”

It jarred Kristen every time she heard Suzie call her mom by her first name. Wendy Lamb was a still young woman, not yet forty, with angelic skin and a broad smile, and her daughter had been made in her image. They shared a slender body, russet eyes almost too large for their tapering faces, and a head of full, reddish-brown hair worn loosely about the shoulders.

She halted in the middle of the room. Kristen came from closing the door and plopped a foot in her unfeeling lap.

“See what Suzie did?” she asked.

Wendy held Kristen’s foot in her good left hand, nearly toppling her into Suzie’s arms.

“Beautiful! Can you do me, hon?”

“Sure,” Suzie said.

“How much?”

“Thirty for both.”

“You get more than that, don’t you?”

“You get the friends discount.”

“After dinner,” Wendy said. “You girls are probably famished. Shall we order out?”

Kristen put her foot down, and nearly fell again.

“Are you all right?” Wendy asked.

“She’s goofy from the nail polish,” Suzie said.

They had Indian, from the one place that delivered. The kitchen was off the living room, and they sat at a round table barely big enough for the three of them. Suzie ate the way she talked: aggressively. She had the lamb. Kristen turned up her nose at the consumption of an animal. She made a point of ordering the spiced chickpeas and cauliflower. Wendy compromised. She ordered the red chicken.

It wasn’t quite dark yet and already she was in her night things — green pajamas with a tartan robe and slippers. It’s easier than changing twice, she had said.

“At first I thought it would scare people off,” she told Suzie, who was curious about how Wendy managed. “Part of being a counselor is putting people at ease. The last thing you want is for them to feel self-conscious, especially when they already have so much on their minds with the cancer. But once I start talking, they realize it’s about them, and they don’t seem to notice. Or they’re too polite to say anything.”

It all came back: Staying Aunt Beth’s while her parents drove off for some grownup time, the news of the tire that had bounced from the back of the pickup on the turnpike and hit the windshield, leaving her mother a widow and a cripple. The relief — and the guilt — she hadn’t been with them. The move to the smaller house with only one floor. And now, Kristen realized, there was something else to be sad about: did Mom have any feeling down there? Could she ever again experience the pleasure Kristen had given herself, the pleasure she must have felt with Dad? She never mentioned it, but why would she?