Chapter 4

Her wounded hands will scorch my breast,

And naked I shall burn.

She was no poet, and she had not written verse since her novitiate, but the lines had kept her up half the night, sick with guilt and desire. The girl had left her knickers on her desk — in playfulness or contempt, she could not say. If she had not gone back to check the windows and the lights, they would have stayed there for a full week, to be discovered when classes resumed after the holiday. She had taken them to bed with her, and as she lay awake, refining the poem in her mind, she had held them lightly to her nose.

Kristen had not arrived as she promised, and she held up the Mass for fifteen minutes, waiting. Seven of her girls, from her various classes, sat in the pews in front of her, a respectable number for a holiday, but without Kristen, they meant nothing. They were apostles in hiding, ciphers without the spirit. Beautiful Kristen. If she had come to Mass, it would mean she had forgiven Sister Patrice for touching her. As it was, well — she would have to think about going away. Father White, sitting behind the lectern in a simple, white linen robe, was growing impatient. Candles stood in racks on each side of the altar, and behind it, the stained-glass windows, divided into quarrels of Virgin Mary blue, made her feel as though the chapel had sunk to the bottom of the sea. Her tired eyes were grateful for them.

Suspecting her life and career were at an end, she gestured for Father White to begin. He stood and, planting himself behind the altar, raised his arms.

“Please stand,” he said. “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen,” thesaid.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

“And with your spirit.”

“Brother and Sisters — I’m sorry, let me amend that. Sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.”

They had barely finished reciting “Lord have mercy” when she heard happy voices in the hall. The door behind her whooshed open, and Kristen and her dirty-minded friend flounced in, chattering out loud. She heard the word “Mom” just as their voices cut off.

“Join us,” White said from the altar. “And think about where you are.”

Stifling their laughter, the girls sidled into the back pew next to her. Miss Nguyen, damn her, stood was between and Kristen, and just as White was resuming, she whispered something in Kristen’s ear. The two of them laughed silently.

She rapped Miss Nguyen on the shoulder, pointed forward and mouthed the words “Up front.” The girl brushed past Kristen and walked down the aisle in leisurely fashion, stopping the liturgy yet again. The defiance was palpable. White’s eyes followed her with contempt as she took her place alone in the middle of the front pew.

“May we continue now?” he said.

Miss Nguyen, standing with her back to the rest of them, fiddled somehow with her skirt, and the resolution drained from White’s face. In the light from the stained glass, he turned a paler shade of blue. He swayed like a dead tree, and it seemed he was about to topple over, but at the last moment he found the strength to look past her and go on.

“Let’s back up,” he said. “Glory to God in the Highest—”

“And on earth peace to people of good will.”

Sister Patrice was too relieved to wonder about it. Kristen had come back, and as the prayers went on, the girl took a step sideways, and another, closer. Sister gazed upon her as she prayed.

“We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you. We give you thanks for your great glory.”

She had never recited the empty words with such full heart.

“For you alone are the Holy One—”

When they sat for the first reading, she and Kristen were hip to hip. She placed a hand on Kristen’s bare knee. In return, Kristen put a hand in her lap. Sister snatched it, and, when she was sure no one was looking, raised it to her lips.

Tall Dana, from her junior class, went to the lectern. She was the tallest, leggiest girl Sister had ever taught — leggier even than Kristen. Six one if she was an inch, and a professional model to boot. It was painful to think of her strutting down the catwalk in heels and satin underwear. Damn it to hell — now she was imagining her at the lectern that way.

“A reading from the book of Leviticus,” Dana began. “If a priest’s daughter debases herself by prostitution, she thereby debases her father. She will be burned with fire.”

Of course: Father White had chosen the verses. As Dana read, Sister tickled Kristen’s knee. With each feathery circle, her hand went up higher along her thigh.

“He shall only marry a woman who is a virgin,” Dana went on. “He shall not marry a widow or a woman who has been divorced or one who has been debased by prostitution, but only a virgin, taken from his kindred, shall he marry. This is the word of the Lord.”

“Thanks be to God,” the girls responded.

Sister stroked Kristen’s thigh under her skirt.

Dana returned to her pew, and poor, homely Rachel, one of Kristen’s classmates, took the stage. She was fat and brown-skinned, with cat’s-eye glasses and scaly knees, but she could sing like an angel. The good Lord gives each one of us our gifts.

“A reading from the book of Romans,” the girl announced in her crystalline voice. “Therefore God gave them in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and because they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator...”

Sister stroked higher. Kristen never took her eyes off the reader, but she grinned, and she opened her thighs, and Sister’s pinkie grazed the damp crotch of her panties.

“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions,” Rachel read. “Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. This is the word of the Lord.”

“Thanks be to God.”

Rachel sat down. White stood and approached the lectern.

“Please stand for the reading of the Gospel,” he said. “A reading from the book of John.”

And what sexual lesson would he find in there? Sister wondered.

“Early in the morning he came again to the temple,” White read. “The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been taken in adultery...”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. It was Holy Thursday. What of the Last Supper? The mystery of the Eucharist? It was true, what the girls whispered about him. The man was a lech.

Kristen put her weight on one leg, leaning into her. Sister put her arm around the girl’s waist. White glanced back at them, but kept reading.

“ ... and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.’”

She took her hand from Kristen’s hip and ran it up the back of her leg, coming to rest on the thin of barrier of cotton that covered her ass. The blood throbbed in her head, and she barely heard White say:

“When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’”

Her hand went up higher. She dipped her fingers into the waistband and thrust down, but just as she was cupping the cool round fullness, Kristen turned on her heel and marched out of the pew. Her panties snapped shut, as loudly, to Sister’s ears, as the slamming of dungeon gate. She shouldered her way through the heavy door, glancing back with a cock of her head, and was gone. Sister felt frightened again, and foolish.

White looked at her quizzically, but he didn’t miss a word:

“When they heard it, they went away, one by one...”

She had to catch her, reassure her. She made a circular motion with her left hand, gesturing for him to keep going, and stepped into the aisle. The last words of the reading — “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again”— followed her into the hall.

Kristen had disappeared.

She looked each way, hesitating, wondering. In front of her was the main entrance. To the right, the hall led to the auditorium and the gym. To the left was the suite of offices, beyond which the corridor continued around a corner and down to the rear exit. Only that door was unlocked today, but every other door could be opened from the inside, and there were a lot of them. The poor girl could have run anywhere.

Then she spotted it. Down to the left, where the hallway turned, there was something on the floor, something that shouldn’t have been there, something small and brown in a pool of pale light, like a crumb on a clean sheet. She had not gone far when she recognized it. It was a shoe, a girl’s penny loafer, tipped on its side.

She approached it. She picked it up. A girl running through the school with one shoe? No — with no shoes. Around the corner, halfway down the side hall, lay the mate, but this one had been placed deliberately, crosswise in the center of the floor, as if to block her path. She picked this one u, too, and despite the urgency of finding its owner, she took a moment to raise it to her face and breathe. She held it like a mask, the opening surrounding her nose and mouth. The dark smell of leather, and the faint scent of Kristen’s toe-sweat.