Somebody, some sympathetic, fig-loving cardinal, was going to read my letter and think, Hmmm. Figs. This girl Antonia is absolutely right! We need a saint for figs! In fact, Antonia seems like the girl for the job. Perfetto! Then he would tell the Pope.
I was even named after my favorite saint, Anthony of Padua. Anytime someone lost anything in our house—homework, jewelry, the sugar bowl (that would be due to Grandma)—Mom demanded, “We all need to say a prayer to St. Anthony! St. Anthony will help us find it!” When I was younger I imagined St. Anthony was like a superhero with a cape and leotard and X-ray vision to help him do his miraculous “finding” deeds. But now I just picture him as a young, good-looking spiritual prince watching over me.
Though, truth be told, Mom didn’t really do her saint homework and made a teeny-tiny unfortunate mistake when she named me Antonia after St. Anthony. There actually is a St. Antonia and she is definitely not a finder of lost things. In fact, she died tragically as a teenager. At sixteen. A virgin. She actually died protecting her virginity, and so it’s very possible, even highly likely, that she is the Patron Saint of Teenage Purity. So, technically, my name saint is famous for her purity. Her untouched-by-boys-ness.
I am also famous for this, by coincidence.
And though I may accidentally be the pseudo Patron Saint of Teenage Purity, I’ve been aiming to change Antonia’s reputation a bit. Give some color to what is currently an unfortunate and not so exciting association for girls who bear my name. Do a little presainthood damage in the debauchery department and maybe work on my getting a bit less pure in the near future.
“Hey, Antonia,” said a voice out of nowhere, startling me.
Michael McGinnis pulled up next to me, driving as slowly as I was walking, hanging out the driver’s window of his old, beat-up, hand-me-down Subaru.
“Hi, Michael,” I said, but kept walking. That’s Michael as in the archangel, picture of innocence and goodness, and McGinnis as in, he’s way Irish.
The angel in question and I were friends. Sort of.
“Can I give you a ride, love?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a smile widen across Michael’s freckled face. I could swear he played up the Irish brogue around me on purpose. He called everyone “love,” so it’s not like his calling me “love” made me any different from all the other girls he called “love” on a regular basis—and believe me, there were lots of them.
“No, thanks. I’m almost to school anyway,” I said, trying to sound all “normal” and “whatever,” willing that he didn’t notice the goose bumps that had appeared all over my body the second I heard his voice.
“Come on, Antonia. It would give us a chance to catch up.”
“I’ve got to finish my algebra homework before the first bell,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie, and quickened my pace. I had a rule about Michael: avoid Michael-Antonia-alone-time when possible. Michael and I had history.
“I could help,” he said in what I was sure he believed was a voice that would tantalize me into accepting. “I’m well past algebra and on to trig, you know . . .”
“I’m not sure I need your kind of help, and besides, I’m a math wiz, remember?” I loved math and could practically do it in my sleep. I had Dad to thank for that, who, if he were a saint—even though he never went to college or anything—would definitely have Mathematical Genius on his list of specializations.
“You can’t ignore me forever, Antonia, and you know you don’t really want to.”
“Maybe another time, Michael,” I said, turning onto the walking path up to school, signaling the end of our conversation.
“I promise I don’t bite, Antonia,” he called out hopefully, as if he could change my mind and suddenly I’d decide to get in his car.
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” I yelled back.
“How am I going to change your attitude about me?”
“Now, that’s something to ponder, Michael.”
A car behind him was honking.
“Later, Antonia,” he yelled, finally pulling away from the curb.
When I was sure Michael was no longer watching, I turned to see his car heading toward the long, narrow drive leading up to our two high schools. One was all girls (where I went) and looked like your typical 1970s flat-roofed, institutional-style architecture; the other was all boys (where Michael went) and had been around for more than a hundred years, a beautiful Gothic stone mansion with the best sledding hill in all of Rhode Island for a backyard. Both were Catholic and joined by a shared parking lot, which, by sheer location, was the center of everyone’s social universe. Maybe I was more like my name saint than I wanted to admit since I could barely look Michael in the eye. I had good reasons for this, though. Michael tried to kiss me two summers ago but I didn’t let him. So now he made me totally nervous. It’s also possible that Michael held the honor of being the only boy who had ever tried to kiss me. How pathetic is that, to be fifteen and never kissed a boy? Never touched my lips to anyone else’s. Never felt their softness melt into mine, which I’ve been told by Maria is what a good kiss feels like. Never had the chance to bump noses with my beloved, tilting our faces ever so slightly to finally, longingly, taste each other’s mouths in a delicious kiss.
Never.
Maybe, by not kissing Michael, I’d missed my only chance. I should’ve taken advantage of the opportunity while I had it. Even just for practice. Maybe I was doomed to become one of those sweet-sixteen-and-never-been-kissed girls, like poor St. Antonia, the sixteen-year-old dead virgin. It certainly seemed like a miracle was required to get yourself kissed, that’s for sure, especially by the boy I did have my eye on, Andy Rotellini, who had never offered me a ride or even made an effort to say more than “hey” in passing.
But I believed in miracles.
You had to if you wanted to become a saint.
4
SISTER NOELLA (POSSIBLY A SECRET EMISSARY FROM THE VATICAN) TEACHES BIOLOGY WHILE MARIA AND I PASS NOTES
Maria was giving me her ugly face from across the aisle during third-period biology, but it wasn’t working since her ugly face wasn’t really ugly at all. It’s difficult for someone with perfect genes to look unattractive. It was hard not to laugh at her effort, though. She tossed a tiny, crinkled-up piece of paper onto my desk, which I quickly swept into my lap when Sister Noella turned around to write on the whiteboard.
We were learning about dominant and recessive genes, which apparently explained why people like me have brown eyes and people like Maria get blessed with aquamarine ones, but I couldn’t help wondering why we didn’t spend more time praying to St. Barnabas for world peace or to one of the million saints who intercede on behalf of the sick instead, like St. Maria Mazzarello (not to be confused with mozzarella cheese, which has nothing to do with sickness and everything to do with a perfect-tasting lasagna). It would be more useful than figuring out which letters go together in which boxes of the table Sister Noella was enthusiastically drawing so we could tell her if a fruit fly was more likely to have red or white eyes and misshapen or normal wings.
I was busy watching Sister Noella’s post–Vatican II short blue habit bounce behind her and contemplating how exactly a nun became a biologist when it occurred to me that maybe Sister Noella wasn’t really a biology teacher at all. Maybe she was a special envoy sent by The Vatican People to assess my saintly potential. Maybe that would explain why Sister Noella was always coming into the store to buy my grandma’s weird homemade garlic health remedies instead of going to a drugstore for normal medicine like everybody else. You’d think a biologist would have better sense than to trust a woman like Gram, who regularly clipped stories from tabloids about miraculous two-headed babies and the wonderful healing powers of the sardine. But, then again, maybe Sister Noella was just being nice to Gram. At least, that’s what I was thinking when Maria began whispering, “Hey, hey, Antonia . . . Antonia . . . Antonia!” and I realized I was totally neglecting my best-friend responsibilities and uncrumple
d the note in my lap.
What’s on the agenda for project sainthood this month? I meant to ask you earlier. Sorry!
I gave her my sad you-don’t-bring-me-flowers-anymore face, to which Maria responded by rolling her eyes. I slouched down to better hide my note-writing endeavors, which made me feel like a contortionist since I was sitting cross-legged in order to hide the fact that I was no longer wearing the awful Holy Angels uniform socks. Mom’s efforts to unsluttify me were totally wasted. And yes, our school’s full name is Holy Angels Catholic School for Girls, which is why we call it HA for short. Anyway, if the HA uniform patrol caught you without socks, they sent you home from school.
Very dangerous, the not-wearing-socks thing, but I liked to live on the edge.
Maria and I (that’s Maria Romano, like the cheese) were sophomores, but she was a few months older than me, and already drove. Maria may have been blessed with long, dark, sleek hair, and was thin and as graceful as a gazelle and all, but she was also really shy. Except when she was with her best friend (me, of course). That’s probably why it took her new lover-boy John Cronin so long to realize she was interested. Anyway, Maria was appropriately named after Saint Maria, the Patron Saint of Youth, and therefore beauty, life, and all that goes with youthfulness. We met in first grade back when we listened to whatever our mothers told us and spent all our free time building Lego submarines for the bathtub that really worked. This year marked our tenth anniversary of plaid skirts and Catholic school, but only our fourth without the male species.
The Discalced Carmelite Nuns who oversaw Holy Angels were okay with mixed company until sixth grade, and then they separated everybody in seventh, sending the girls off to the HA high school building and the boys off to Bishop Francis Academy next door, where Michael was a junior and where my destiny, Andy Rotellini, was also a junior. (Discalced, by the way, translates as “barefoot,” which also means that technically my school was run by a group of women who call themselves the “Barefoot Nuns” even though I’d never seen any of them without shoes.) I supposed this separation of the sexes was to prevent us from engaging in Sins of the Flesh. Though the separation was not really necessary in my case, as I seemed to be rather unlucky at committing Sins of the Flesh.
Though I hoped to have reason to repent soon.
Glancing over, I saw that Maria was giving me a stare that said, “Hurry up and write back! Now!” so I scribbled my one-word response:
Figs
I crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it into Maria’s lap while uttering a quick prayer to St. Jude to prevent Sister Noella from catching my clandestine behavior. Jude is the Patron Saint of Desperate Situations and Hopeless Causes, a very useful all-purpose saint for school-day sneakiness among many other things, including aspiring to saintly glory, which at times feels like a hopeless cause.
“Nice,” Maria whispered, showing approval for my current campaign, before pretending to take notes again.
Sister Noella had turned back around to lecture more about phenotypes, which have to do with how genes combine with our environment to determine bodily traits like curly hair, or, if you are a fruit fly, whether or not your wings work properly.
I am not some sort of religious freak, by the way, despite all my praying to saints and talking about them every other minute and expounding on their specializations and the fact that I know virtually everything there is to know about them, and I fully realize that sainthood is not exactly a normal ambition for a fifteen-year-old high school girl. And no, I am not interested in becoming a nun either. Saints, in my opinion, are simply the height of Catholic sophistication. Catholics are lucky to have a virtual Rolodex of thousands of women and men to call upon for help in very specific situations, and not just Jesus, who I see as basically an abyss of possibilities. With Jesus, you never know what you are going to get, if he was busy or just not interested in your little dilemma and ignoring you. But with the saints! At least with them you have everything narrowed down. Like, if I thought I might be coming down with strep, a little word to St. Etheldreda, Patron Saint Against Throat Diseases, and I’d be good to go. (I doubt Jesus would take the time to pay attention to a little sore throat—besides, he has bigger headaches to contend with, like saving the world one soul at a time and all that.)
Besides, as soon as I became the first living saint in history, I could show the world that sainthood was as cool as royalty. Like England and Monaco, Catholics have a vibrant royal past, the only difference being that all Catholic princes and princesses happened to be dead. And while I was aware that for two thousand years popes had been crowning people with this regal honor only after they had passed on to the great palace in the sky and often following some great personal trauma like being massacred by an angry mob or burning at the stake, I was not about to let a little detail like death get in my way.
To Become a Saint You Must Complete the Following:
1. The performance of two miracles.
First miracle = beatification (which I like to think of as beautification).
Second miracle = canonization (don’t worry, it’s canon, not cannon; there are no explosions).
2. Achieve great public renown for special abilities (which of course helps bring you to the attention of Rome, i.e., the Pope, who then bestows saintly glory on you for all eternity).
Technically, the third requirement is death, but I’d chosen to ignore that one for over eight years now (ignorance is bliss, I say!), ever since I turned seven and first decided I wanted to become a saint, which was also when my dad gave me my first Saint Diary for my birthday, inscribed with the words “To my little Antonia, the Patron Saint of Daddy’s Heart.” He died five weeks later in a car accident. Yeah, it was pretty devastating.
The very first letter I wrote to the Vatican? The very first saint I proposed? It was on March 1 just after we got home from the funeral. Gram helped me write the letter. It was very short.
Dear Holy Father the Pope,
I hope you are well. Would you please make me the Patron Saint of Daddy’s Heart? Thank you.
Blessings,
Antonia Lucia Labella
Sad and sweet and corny, I know.
Well, the Pope didn’t go for it, unsympathetic jerk. He didn’t even write back! We’d had the same pope, Gregory XVII, FOREVER, and now he was an old and crazy conservative and would be the death of the Catholic Church (or so some people said). He probably didn’t even know I existed.
But, death aside, I firmly believed that if word got out among people my age about the possibilities of sainthood, there would be a rush of girls clamoring to cut in line. In front of me. Fox would probably have to host a reality show to accommodate everybody. Hundreds of thousands would turn out to audition.
I preferred to be in a line of one for sainthood, however.
This put the odds in my favor.
Maria was attempting to write another note but Sister Noella kept turning her way, trying to give her the scary-nun-warning stare, but not really succeeding because Sister Noella was too sweet-natured. Sister Noella usually let us get away with anything. Maria and I both got straight A’s and were actually first and second in our class, me being first and Maria being second, though we tried not to advertise this tidbit because it would seriously cramp our social life if people thought we were goody-goody smarty-pants.
We’d definitely rather be known as sexy-pants.
The clock read 10:52. Three more minutes of biology-lecture torture.
Maria was scribbling furiously. I was guessing it was a note to John. John was totally gorgeous and a senior at Bishop Francis. They smooched it up and then some after the October Holy Angels–Bishop Francis mixer, which our two schools alternated hosting once a month, you know, so we boys and girls could “mix” with one another. Regular smoothies, all of us. I didn’t go because I wasn’t allowed to go to dances until I turned sixteen, according to my mother, which, I often reminded her, was a full year after she started dating Dad back in the olden
days.
Just over three months left and counting until February 14. I could already taste the freedom.
Lately Maria was alternately cloud-nine happy or all-out anxious about the status of John’s feelings for her. Her feelings for him were never in question, however.
Another note flew into my lap.
Who’s the patron saint of love anyway?
Aha. Maria was hoping for some intercession in the John-relationship project. Maybe it would stop her from being so moody about him.
Valentine, stupid! But technically he’s not an official Catholic saint anymore—he’s only a secular one. The Vatican denounced him in the sixties when they got all weird about love and sex and stuff (not that they weren’t before). Said he never really existed and you can’t have a saint that never existed. Can you believe that? St. Raphael is also technically about love, but he’s no Valentine. Never really took off as a favorite.
The irony that the saint who shared my birthday got kicked out of the exclusive heavenly club to which I kept soliciting membership was not lost on me. But I tried not to take it as a bad sign for my prospects.
Maria mouthed “It figures” after reading my response, which really meant, of course the Catholic Church denounced the Patron Saint of Love since Catholics must pretend that anything to do with love and sexiness does not exist.
“What’s next today?” I said under my breath.
“Gym,” Maria said.
Ugh. Come through for me, Sebastian, I prayed.
The Possibilities of Sainthood Page 3