Day one of sixth grade and I felt sucked into the hole of a straw, waiting for God to spit me out.

 

All of us gathered there, chaotic flows of red and blue uniforms, standing in the courtyard of Our Lady of Lourdes. Principal Pam finally appeared in her linen set. She taped three sheets of paper to the chain link fence, the tail ends flapping in the wind.

 

I imagined the elderly nuns cutting paper into small slips with our names, supplying their precious saliva, fitting each spitball into the straw. Handing it over to Sister Helen, the one with good lungs. Sister praying short pleas and spitting us in piles, into homerooms. I had to believe it was prayer that got me there, the divine that separated us.

 

It was the beginning of a season without Kait—there had been other times, like before we met, when we were babies, and those two cruel summers she went to sail camp. It felt to me like she was always leaving.

 

I wished there was a way to meet with her right then, to grasp her hand in the hall and desperately let go, an assurance that this was something neither of us wanted. But Kait was late that day. I scanned the other sheets quickly for her name, before we were guided into lines like mute sheep, into the hallways where we spent our lives.

 

Kait’s homeroom was in the computer lab. I could picture her with her new friends, her tanned knees tucked up in a rolling chair, taking turns pushing each other around.

 

I walked into the art room and directly into Sister Michiels. Pronounced me-shells like the French. The nuns were dowdy and no fun, but I liked having a reason to be this close to one for once. Sister Michiels’ entire face frowned, with visible fuzz lining her skin, darkening above her lips. I knew staring at that expanse above her mouth could kill hours if needed.

 

Take a seat, Camille.

 

She spoke softly, deeply, her voice climbing upwards when she said seat, and settling back down again into the hills of my name.

 

I sat at the large table in the middle of the room meant for art, spaced two chairs from the others. Quinn, Emily, Clay, Victoria. No one I could really talk to, and paired off already. Those unbearable minutes before the bell rang. My heart beating outside my body, my mind tracing the intersections of the easel.

 

I was halfway through a rubbish pledge to the sisterhood, to the ant-shaped hairs lining Sister’s lips, when she walked in.

 

Mary Elise. The kind of two-name name that pegged your family as devout. She sat right next to me. All I can remember from that first encounter: her green grosgrain ribbon. The way it was cut on an angle by hand, how it frayed at the tip. How I wanted to yank it straight from her head.

 

*

 

That first week we did a lot of sitting next to each other, a lot of not talking.

 

She dressed neatly, as if when her clothes came off her body they were no longer hers, taken by her mother to be laundered and folded for the next child. I kept my uniform bunched by the bed for easy access. Sometimes her clothes were so stiffly starched she looked at my attention.

 

She used to be friends with the Blue Lip Twins, a terrible nickname for the twins whose mother died of a brain aneurism last year. The whole school went to the funeral, the casket opened to the mother’s corpse, her lips dead blue. Mary Elise clung to the twins in the aftermath, the triplets, some called them, until they moved to Mississippi.

 

With such a large family, I could tell she rarely spoke, and that she was waiting for me to fill the air. But I held off—the way she watched me, like I was those white trails in the sky, her neck erect, her face reverent, I had to proceed carefully.

 

On a drive to school, my mother suggested I invite Mary Elise over. I was drinking my smoothie and laughing until she said this, because my father had chopped the fruit with the onion knife again.

 

I had just been talking about Mary Elise, but I was still caught off guard. I told her I would think about it, but made it clear that we weren’t friends.

 

It’s good to have all different kinds of friends, Camille, she said.

 

I spent the rest of the ride trying to name a single one of my mother’s friends, someone she didn’t meet at work.

 

*

 

When I got dropped off at the pool that weekend, it was way past lunch. Kait and the other girls reapplied their sunscreen to each other’s backs, and I slipped in line. Kait passed me a paper plate from the table, some pecked-over turkey and a pickle. She pulled my halter top up over my head to get at my neck, and I ducked to help it along. Her hands on my back with that Cool-Whip-feel, the pickle super sour in my cheek. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

 

That year I felt a certain rush at the pool, a quickening that made me run when I should walk. I had lost time to make up for. I was louder, funnier.

 

I dove into the deep end with a noodle, and we all bobbed there, playing truth or dare.

 

I dare all three of you to push your crotch into your noodle, pull it back and forth on your suit, I said.

 

That tickles, that tickles! Sophie screamed.

 

Shut up! We all shushed her.

 

We were rougher in the pool than we were at Lourdes. Didn’t think of God in the water.

 

Courtney went around fingernailing X’s into our mosquito bites. I swear she X’ed me harder than the others. Mine bled.

 

Kait French braided my hair as the pool closed. The others would say me next, me next but I was always first. She had learned to braid on me. She did pristine braids on Sundays. I would sleep in them and come to school with waves, her hands in the ends of my hair, showing me off.

 

It all changed the year we didn’t share homeroom. I’d take the braids out at night. Sometimes I would cry as I took them out, tear them loose with my fingers.

 

On one of those stupid nights I decided to make the switch: school was now the pool, a pool called Lourdes. If I could believe that, I could bear it.

 

*

 

When I saw Mary Elise on Mondays, I thought pansy. I viscerally hated pansies, all black and blue-ish purple, staring like they had no clue.

 

I developed a pattern of behavior with M.E. On Mondays, I feigned exhaustion from the weekend, spent homeroom protecting my pool hair. By midweek, I let her draw on my planner. She wasn’t any good at it; she used blue pen of all things, bubbling my name, scribbling thin daisies. By the end of the week, I’d open my trove of jokes, allowed her spurts of giggles to surround me with attention.

 

We wore white Peter Pan collars, and during announcements I would sit up straight all the sudden, pretend my collar was two wings taking flight. M.E. next to me, spit-laughing all over Sister Michiels.

 

We sat at the front of the room with Sister, or at the back, depending on the door.

 

Mary Elise talked with Sister all along, they were loosely related in that Catholic way, where everyone was distant cousins with a deacon. I resisted at first, even attempted chatting up the two boys in homeroom, Quinn and Clay, but they were real clowns, too busy crafting weird sports out of colored paper. My mother told me to give them a year, and I told her I’d be too busy making up with Kait by then to bother.

 

Once I settled in near Sister Michiels, close enough that I could touch her wrinkled skin, the world opened. She smelled like wet clay and pepper, and she dressed in all cotton, sweaters different shades of blue and cream. When she wasn’t looking, I would sniff her cardigan, inhale that ancient scent of faith.

 

Sister talked in her signature deep melody, surprising me with her rowdiness. She told us things I’d always wanted to know, even though I didn’t know I did. Like how nuns used to wear nude bras and panties into the communal shower, afraid of being skin to skin. How there are patron saints of everything, like roses and loneliness, and if there isn’t, God won’t mind if you make it up.

 

She told us about Lourdes, group trips to France to the healing spring, where the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette. The tiny pieces of bone built into our altar. Relics, excised from her corpse. How the pope wanted her heart sent to Rome, but the surgeon warned her chest might collapse. Instead, he extracted her ribs, the body still intact.

 

When the bell rang in homeroom, I walked to class with a newfound faith. Not in God, but in the mind, the expansiveness of it, the way Sister Michiels gave pieces of her mind to me, to Mary Elise, how she made something possible between us.

 

I sat across from Mary Elise in Math. I ignored her, but now and then we would exchange a glance, as if possessed, filled with the knowledge of the holy world outside this horizontal school.

 

*

 

At the pool, everyone was saving themselves for marriage and I called bullshit. Some of them were straight up innocent, but for most it was all an act.

 

I don’t like limits, I said.

 

I was attached to a pool noodle and they knew why. The week before I dared the girls to try a back massager on their private parts. They looked at me, blushing, but I know some of them went home fishing for batteries in the back of a drawer.

 

I didn’t think about them doing it, but I liked the idea that I was setting their bodies in motion.

 

That was the day of Kait’s birthday party. I watched from the water as she and her parents set up. She had on a two-piece and a flower crown, her long blonde curls brown from the water, her face flushed like a girly wet Jesus. I noticed Courtney by her side, sticking a long pink sash to Kait’s wet skin.

 

When she blew out her candles, I found myself dipping back into the crowd of girls, next to Laureen. I put my sunglasses on inside, right as the tears came, in that freezing multi-purpose room of our childhoods.

 

*

 

Courtney cannonballed so close to me I felt her toenails scrape my skin. She waited for all the girls to float together to tell them that her stepdad found her on her back with a deep-tissue massager. Said she was grounded and told him it was my idea.

 

She was pretty sure my parents knew.

 

Thankfully I was cried out already, and the waves of the pool had a way of diffusing tension. Girls dog-paddled off in twos until I was alone. I stayed there doing deep dives to the pool’s bottom until my mother was calling my name, calling me a prune.

 

That night my father silently cooked spaghetti and served it, eating up and leaving the table, said he needed a prescription from K&B. His car pulled out slowly, and my mother began.

 

You’re becoming a woman, it’s only natural, she said.

 

I was so close to throwing up sauce. She made me wash the dishes with her, something she never did, our bodies stiff at the sink, elbows moving in unison.

 

I thought of her rosy lace thong I’d seen in the laundry, compared it to the image of the nuns bathing in nude. I watched her dry a plate using a decorative towel, talking to the cat with her teeth clenched, the way I clenched my teeth. Something we both did intuitively but nev#1f4068er spoke of. I let the steaming hot water pour over my hands until they itched.

 

*

 

It was smiley-fry-Friday and raining. They sat us boy girl for lunch, and we were almost as quiet as we were in church. Cole Daily asked me why my eyebrows stuck straight up, on the right and not the left. I shrugged him off, but it stung for a while.

 

Rainy day recess meant the entire grade in one room, the grey dividing walls pulled back. I remember the sound of it: the squeaking of boys’ black soccer cleats, the drumming of girls’ white sneakers kicking their heels into desks.

 

I was wild for the chaos of rainy days. The teacher chaperoning, hushing us when we got loud. The way the windows fogged up like a steamy movie, the dirty water dripping up and down the hall.

 

Kait sat two desks away from me, braiding Court’s hair. The first time in a classroom together in months and we didn’t speak. No one talked to me, but they didn’t say nasty things either. At the pool last weekend they were all giddy like flies buzzing round me, asking if I’d ever felt good down there. Since then they looked punched in the gut with shame.

 

Mary Elise wasn’t in the room, but I knew where she was so I asked politely for the hall pass. She was in chapel, praying. We were allowed to skip any class if we went to chapel, but no one else would be caught dead.

 

I filed in next to her, her shoulder blades jutting out of her blouse like wings. We didn’t speak, but being in that cool, dark place with her felt different. It was more secretive than any whisper about me from the other room, but I was in on it—which is all I’d ever wanted. There was relief in the posture the pew gave, the way it sat my spine straight, my shoulders concaved. It felt honest.

 

I knew she was praying for the Blue Lip Twins. Once in homeroom she asked Sister what it was like to pray as your job all day, no husband, no kids.

 

I stopped listening, but I watched as M.E.’s face shed weight, the kind of life she wanted in the answer.

 

I crossed my hands next to her and bowed my head, so close I could smell her. I prayed like my grandmother taught me, for the intercession of a saint, to bring back Kait.

 

*

 

Mary Elise felt called to the Lord, you could see it when she said it, her face bubbling up with faith. There was a lot of that going around, especially when the whole order of nuns would visit. They lined up in height order, and as they gave their speech I thought about which nun I’d take home with me, if that were allowed. Mary Elise said she could see God working through them. I said they look like they don’t get out much.

 

I tried it, for a while. I was religious about lying on the floor of my room, waiting for God to knock. I would make it dark and turn on my worm light until the room glowed purple. Set the mood. Mom came in once while I was doing it, quickly shut the door. Two times I felt something in my chest, a weight that lifted when I breathed deep. Could’ve been the start of something, or indigestion.

 

*

 

Whenever I talked to Mom about Mary Elise, I would pretend she irked me more than she really did. Conversations were funnier that way.

 

Mom said, To everything there is a season. I liked that, seasons. Felt eternal. Like Kait and I would come together when it really mattered, when we grew up and off together, into a real bloom show.

 

At least I know M.E. won’t tag along for long, I said, since she’s marrying God and all.

 

Mom laughed at this.

 

On a day I can’t place, somewhere between that winter and spring, M.E. became an offering. If I could make it through the year, be nice to God’s little honorable shadow, I’d get Kait back. That was the deal I made with Him.

 

*

 

Our first and only sleepover. I had a loose agenda for the night: pizza, spa, dress up, dancing, then secrets in sleeping bags. M.E. ate the pizza like a greedy bird, said she never got a full slice to herself. She picked her two front teeth for ages, then ate the bits. I had to look away.

 

I made her spend a good hour on me, first brushing my hair, then massaging my scalp and shoulders with Perfect Peony Cream. Her skinny fingers poked my joints but I tried not to make a face. I liked the disembodied attention, how if I closed my eyes it could be Kait braiding me.

 

When it was my turn to pamper her, I cut corners. Brushing her hair just once or twice, squeezing just a drop of cream out of the bottle until it sank in. I spent most of the time telling her stories, releasing my hands from her skin. She didn’t complain.

 

She went limp when it came time to pick costumes. Like something about it turned on her religious mind and the clothes screamed devil. I curled a feather boa around her neck, fluffed it at her sides. She looked mawkish, like a corpse.

 

I turned up the music to tune her dead face out, zipping on a leopard pencil skirt I stole from Mom’s closet that was dress-length on me. I saved the boa with the gold glint for myself, wrapping it around and around my neck until the feathers fused with my hair.

 

I danced, hooked my arms behind her head and hugged her limpness loosely, wishing she’d stop all this so we could karaoke. Her bones were so feeble, her arms and legs, like I could twirl her into my fork like linguini and catch her with my teeth.
I felt rushed then, that quickening feeling I got at the pool, to hurry up and make things happen. At the pool I was trying to seduce the girls into liking me, but with Mary Elise, I was trying to seduce her towards a type of life. By then I knew the night wouldn’t end normal, that we wouldn’t end up daring each other to sip vodka or prank call Cole Daily.

 

Would you rather play nun? I remember saying, my mind racing to make up the rules.

 

That got her attention.

 

I snuck into the hallway for clean white pillowcases, and we tented them over our heads. Her cheekbones were made for the harsh white slant of the habit. She cheered up instantly.

 

Now we pray, I said.

 

She lay down on the hardwood floor. Her palms face up; her eyes shut. I didn’t mean for us to actually pray, but I lay down next to her, tilting my eyes up towards the ceiling like I had so many times.

 

I felt the feeling again, the lifting in my chest, and then I heard a voice say: tie her up.

 

I opened my eyes to see if Mary Elise had said it, but her eyes were closed. I wasn’t sure if it was God, or if it was my own mind, calling to me. Tie her up.

 

I kept a hula hoop under my bed, and my jump ropes coiled inside its circle.

 

Mary Elise stirred as I crawled to the bed on my knees.

 

Now we play saints and sinners, I whispered. You’re the saint, and I’m the sinner.

 

She smiled in the dark at that natural distinction.

 

You’re a martyr for your faith.

 

I crawled towards her with the ropes, and to my surprise her wrists rose together towards me.

 

It felt good to tie her thin wrists, her bony ankles in that moment; it satisfied me.

 

I clenched my teeth. She looked like a saint on her deathbed, with minutes left to live, in continuous prayer.

 

Mary Elise’s eyes spun underneath her lids as she prayed. I knew she was praying for them. I knew she belonged to the twins, and to God, like I belonged to Kait. I kneeled over her still, staring at the blank white of her habit, the expansiveness of it—the way it recalled a life of the mind, inside the convent she would call home, a place that would never call me. The way I glimpsed this life briefly.

 

I fell asleep again, and woke up, and at some point pulled at her arm to untie the rope, but she recoiled from me and rolled onto her side. I still don’t know if she wanted to stay tied, or if she was simply reacting to me in sleep.

 

*

 

It was All Saints Day, the day we dressed up and they paraded us around the church aisles, little nuns, martyrs, saints. The boys got to wear their bathrobes and a simple rope, while we had to don the whole get up, the habit, the dark skirts and tights.

 

Every other girl was dressed as St. Therese of Lisieux. It was an excuse to wear fake floral crowns and hold bouquets like wannabe brides. St. Therese, patron saint of florists and small acts of love. And of war trenches, Sister Michiels whispered.

 

Since Mary Elise had gone to chapel for homeroom since the sleepover, we had not discussed our dress. We both showed up in church dressed as St. Bernadette, clutching matching shawls. I stood as far away from her as I could, but we were still sorted by homeroom. Queued right next to each other. Our outfits laid bare what I had tried so hard to hide from everyone else—that we were aligned.

 

*

 

I spent the rest of the year thinking about that night, trying to make it to summer. I played each detail through: the cheese pizza in her teeth, the scent of peonies, the voice in my head, her perky wrists.

 

When I woke up the morning after the sleepover, I was in my bed and Mary Elise was gone. Had she untied herself? Had her mother found her like that on the floor when she came to get her? My mother acted no differently with me, but I sensed something distant in Dad, wavering for a while. Even Sister Michiels kept her distance from me, no longer offering little dark morsels of wisdom.

 

Summer came as a consolation. The pool uncoupled from Lourdes, became itself again. Kait braiding my hair, Courtney suddenly taking a liking to me, wanting to know about the skinny Catholic girl from homeroom. I dodged the questions, distracted her with a peanut, showing her the way the kernel inside looked vaginal.

 

I thought of Mary Elise anytime I saw pale bones doing laps.

 

I thought of her all of the time, especially when Kait sat close to me.

 

*

 

The week before seventh grade, I learned Mary Elise was gone. There was a rumor she moved to be with the Blue Lip Twins in Mississippi, but I still saw her twiggy little siblings in the hall. They paid me no mind.

 

The first week of seventh grade, and Kait and I were in the same homeroom. It was a blissful week, filled with pool nights and MASH on paper napkins and dinners outdoors.

 

The second week of seventh grade, the hurricane hit.

 

At my evacuation school, I thought of her every time I passed the candle-lit chapel at the end of the hall.

 

I wanted more than her prayers—I knew now.

 

I wanted her whole heart.

 

---

 
CHRISTINA D’ANTONI is a writer born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her MFA in fiction from Arizona State University, and is an alumna of the American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, and Lighthouse summer workshops. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, X-R-A-Y, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. She reads flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine.

 

The art that appears alongside this piece is “penance” by GRETA KOSHENINA.