Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  Max is the only HA member wearing the laces at lunchtime, when staff members comb the lunch tables, confiscating the contraband. We figured it would be more suspicious if he wasn’t participating. And as expected, no one gets detention. There are just too many people to deal with.

  Friday morning passes without incident, and a kid in my math class complains that HA promised a whole week devoted to the dress code, not just four days. I hope that he has PE fourth period, because when that class walks into the gym locker rooms, they’re greeted by more presents, courtesy of HA. On the boys’ side, this note is attached to each locker:

  RULE #22: Young men’s ties must be plaid and purchased through St. Clare’s official uniform supply company.

  . . . But they didn’t specify which type of plaid.

  As it turns out, the uniform supplier has a veritable bounty of available plaids to choose from. Eden, putting on her best mom voice, arranged for us to purchase an assortment of their worst-selling ties at a steep discount. It’s clear why those ties didn’t sell, I think as Avi and I scatter the ties throughout the boys’ locker room. Who would put dark purple and buttercup yellow together, anyway?

  On the girls’ side, a different note is attached to the lockers:

  RULE #26: Young men must be clean-shaven, without sideburns, mustaches, or goatees.

  . . . But they didn’t say anything about girls.

  Underneath each note is a gift from the owner of the seasonal Halloween store across town, who was happy to get rid of his excess stock of fake handlebar mustaches and furry sideburns.

  There are extras of everything, and by fifth period, it seems like just about every girl has one article of fake facial hair on and most boys have traded in their St. Clare’s plaid for a garish, horribly clashing tie. Me included—that pea green and fire engine red number just called to me.

  The confiscated neon shoelaces showed up in the locker rooms, too, since we had some left over, and between that, the plaid, and the Halloween costume mustaches, St. Clare’s looks vaguely like a clown college. Teachers are doing their best to restore order to the dress code, but there are too many kids to corral—especially when people start arguing that their accessories are technically allowed.

  “But it is from the uniform company, look at the tag,” one freshman boy says to Father Peter in the hallway. “And this is unrelated, but Padre Pio was a jerk.”

  “I don’t think this is an abomination,” a girl in my theology class tells Sister Helen when told to remove a fake mustache. “And neither are rock badgers. They’re adorable.”

  “Connor,” Theresa says in chemistry Monday morning, as the rest of us struggle to figure out the spectrophotometer, “you’re Irish, right?”

  “On my mom’s side,” he says. “I think my dad’s, like, Czech? Somewhere with pierogis.”

  “Have you ever seen this before?” Theresa whips out a very poorly drawn version of Eden’s five-fold.

  “Um, yeah, it’s all over school,” Jess says, turning back to the experiment. “The HA people drew it, it’s their symbol.”

  “And I think you’re missing a circle,” Connor adds. Jess stares at him. He busies himself with the lab equipment.

  “It’s not their symbol,” Theresa says. “They coopted it; it’s from Ireland, before it was a Catholic country. So I’ll ask again—” She pushes the paper closer to Connor’s face. “—have you seen this symbol before?”

  “Wow, ethnic profiling, that’s always gone well,” I mutter, and Theresa fixes her eyes on me. “Before you ask, my family’s not Irish.” Although, come to think of it, I have no idea where Dad’s ancestors are from. Just Mom’s.

  Theresa turns to Jess, who rolls her eyes. “Are you serious? I’m Filipina.”

  Theresa sniffs. “Wouldn’t want to profile.” She gets up and takes the bathroom pass from our teacher’s desk.

  “Didn’t I say this would happen?” Jess says to Connor. “The HA cult gets weirder, Theresa and her cult scream louder, and the rest of us suffer.”

  “Relax,” Connor says. “Last week was fun. You should have put on the mustache, I think it would be a good look for you.” He nudges her under the desk.

  Jess doesn’t look amused. “I actually spend a lot of money to not have a mustache, thanks.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “We couldn’t even go over our quiz in French because Ms. Dieng had to run around confiscating Halloween costumes, basically. They’re turning the school into a circus. And it’s only going to get worse.”

  Connor looks at me and raises an eyebrow. I shrug. “I think you’re being a little dramatic, Jess,” he says, and turns off the spectrophotometer.

  But as the week goes on, I’m starting to think Jess might have been right, after all. On Wednesday, Sister Helen tries to engage the class in a discussion about the role of saints in our daily lives, but this quickly devolves into a full-on showdown over whether everyone’s favorite saints were sexist (all the male ones), anti-Semitic (all the medieval ones), or just plain weird (all of them, in my opinion), and whether they should have a role in our lives at all.

  “They wouldn’t be saints if what they said was that terrible,” argues one of Theresa’s overly earnest followers, a pale girl with lots of freckles. “Do you think you know more than, like, the pope?”

  “Saint Tertullian said women are ‘temples built over sewers,’” says Maura Kearney, a girl I’ve never heard speak before. “I read it when I was looking up Padre Pio. He called women literal sewers, and he’s a saint. That’s messed up. How can you defend that?”

  “That was so long ago,” Theresa’s friend argues. “It was different then. You’re not being fair!”

  “But that’s—” Jenny Okoye says, then hesitates when she notices all our eyes are on her. She takes a breath. “Okay, so they canonized him a long time ago. But they just made Junipero Serra a saint, and we know that he and his followers were horrible to Native people in California.”

  “They thought they were doing the right thing,” Theresa’s friend says.

  “Then they were wrong,” Jenny says. “My grandparents were born in colonial Nigeria. I don’t care about Britain’s good intentions. Good intentions don’t excuse destroying somebody’s culture. Good intentions don’t excuse anything. We can’t judge dead men by our standards, fine, but we choose who we canonize, and we can do better. Shouldn’t we want to do better?”

  Half the room shouts her down. Half the room agrees.

  Avi, Lucy, and I sit in the back and say absolutely nothing.

  In the cafeteria the next day, Avi shows us the article he’s been working on for The St. Clare’s Record, the school paper, about Dress Code Week.

  “I’m not happy you’re writing this,” Lucy says. “Couldn’t you give it to another reporter?”

  “It was assigned,” he says. “It’s not like I was thrilled to have to get quotes from Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage.”

  I’m guessing that’s Theresa. “What’d she say?”

  He flips through his notebook. “She said—on behalf of all her fellow students—that Heretics Anonymous was a radical hate group whose clear mission was to turn the St. Clare’s student body against their school and their church.” He closes the notebook. “It went downhill from there. She wanted to write her own op-ed, but Jenny said no, thank God.”

  “Jenny Okoye?” I ask.

  “Yeah, she’s the editor in chief of the paper.”

  “That mouse?” I say, but then I remember how she spoke up in theology.

  “She’s a good writer, and she’s organized.”

  “But she could probably use some backup,” Lucy says, looking over my shoulder. I turn around to see Jenny, backed into a corner by Theresa, who has several pieces of paper in her hands. Probably that op-ed. Lucy starts to stand, but Jenny, apparently having heard enough, shoulders past Theresa without a word.

  “This is anarchy,” Avi says, shaking his head.

  “If this is The A
narchy, do you think Heretics Anonymous is more like Queen Matilda or Stephen of Blois?” Lucy asks. We look at her blankly. “Guys. The Anarchy? The twelfth-century English civil war that ended in the rise of the Angevin dynasty?”

  “Super-accessible joke, Lucy,” Avi says. “And I’m serious. People are going at each other’s throats.”

  “At least they’re talking about things now,” Lucy says. “At least this stuff is out in the open. Isn’t that what we wanted?”

  Avi nods but looks doubtful.

  On Friday, Avi goes to pass out the paper to all the classrooms and Lucy has a Model UN meeting, so I eat lunch with Eden and Max. If anything, the dining hall’s more chaotic than it was on Wednesday.

  “It’s like we flipped a switch,” Eden says, watching two boys at another table argue over an article in the school paper. They must have gotten an advance copy. “I know you only just got here, Michael, but this never would have happened before.”

  “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?” I ask.

  “I think it’s good,” Max says. “So people are yelling. People disagree with each other, that’s okay. Just because you put everyone in the same clothes and make them do the same things doesn’t mean they think the same, and they shouldn’t have to. That was the point of Dress Code Week, right?”

  He looks to Eden for support, but her eyes are by the salad bar, where Theresa is plastering a giant butter-yellow poster.

  TAKE BACK YOUR SCHOOL

  JOIN THE ST. CLARE’S CRUSADERS

  “Yikes,” I say.

  “That’s a bad name for a club,” Max says as Theresa flits around the dining hall, wallpapering every flat surface with another poster. “That seems like a really bad name.”

  “Why does she care so much?” I wonder aloud.

  Eden sighs. “Her parents are . . . hardcore. Like, extremely traditional Catholics.”

  “So are yours,” Max says, “and you’re not a Crusader.”

  “You don’t understand,” Eden says. “Her family used to go to our parish, but now they drive an hour south so they can go to a Mass in Latin. The girls wear veils to church, and that hasn’t been a thing since the sixties. They don’t have cell phones. Hard. Core.”

  “You think her parents put her up to this?” I ask.

  Eden shakes her head. “No way she’s told her parents what’s going on.”

  “Why not?”

  “Theresa’s the oldest, I think,” Eden says. “Definitely the oldest girl. All her siblings are homeschooled; she practically had to beg to come to St. Clare’s in ninth grade. Her parents were worried about what she might be exposed to, I guess. If she told them about the school being in chaos—oh my God, if she told them about the sex ed assembly? They’d yank her out in a second.”

  “She needs everything to stay the same,” I say as Theresa plasters up another poster. She doesn’t have any say in who her parents are or what they do, but she has a say in this. There’s a twinge in my chest that feels almost like pity but isn’t. Oh shit. Do I identify with Theresa?

  “She’s scared,” Eden says. “I’d be scared, too. St. Clare’s isn’t perfect, but it’s better than her house. I’ve been there.”

  “Here comes her backup,” Max says as Father Peter stalks past us, carrying a yellow poster under his arm. But to my surprise, Father Peter walks right up to Theresa and stops her from putting another poster up. It looks like he’s trying to explain something, gently but firmly. Theresa looks heartbroken. She waves her arms wildly at everyone in the dining hall, pointing out a couple people—including Jenny—in particular. Father Peter rubs the bridge of his nose and gestures at the poster, motioning for her to take it down.

  “Oh man,” I say, watching Theresa hesitate. “She’s not going to do it.”

  But she does, with a huff and an expression of utter betrayal. Father Peter helps her remove the rest.

  “I don’t get it,” Max says. “She’s standing up for him; why doesn’t he want that?”

  I think back to the knockdown, drag-out theology debate. Theresa trying to ferret out HA members. Even Connor and Jess, who probably really love each other, sniping in chemistry.

  “He doesn’t want people to make trouble,” I say. “It doesn’t matter which side they’re on.”

  Max nods, but Eden’s not paying attention. She’s still looking at Theresa, who has returned to her lunch table and is complaining to her surrounding lackeys.

  “God,” Eden says. “She must be so lonely.”

  I don’t feel bad enough for Theresa to agree with that. “What are you talking about? She’s practically got an army.”

  Eden nods at Theresa’s table. “Look over there, and tell me what you see.”

  “I see a bunch of girls wearing ancient Roman torture devices around their necks.”

  “Really look.”

  Well, there’s Theresa, smoothing her now-crumpled posters and complaining to the dark-haired girl next to her. Except—Theresa’s not even bothering to look at her friend while she rants. She’s too focused on her posters to notice that her friend is sharing a meaningful glance with another girl, the freckled one from my theology class. The dark-haired girl raises her eyebrows and tilts her head at Theresa. The other girl rolls her eyes. And when I look at the rest of the girls at the table, their expressions range from bemused disinterest to silent judgment.

  I turn back to Eden. “They don’t like her. Even they don’t like her?”

  “I’ve known those girls since kindergarten,” Eden says. “Rose, Marisol, Grace. They’re nice. They were raised to be polite. They might agree with Theresa, but no way they like her.”

  As we pass by their table to bus our trays, I wonder how many things and people I’ve looked at but haven’t seen at all.

  By the time the following Friday rolls around, and with it, the last day before Christmas break, I’m convinced that the teachers are happier about it than the students. Maybe they think a solid two-week vacation will cleanse the school of an impending emotional apocalypse, but I’m not so sure.

  Either way, I’m excited to be away from school for fourteen days, but that presents me, Lucy, and the rest with another problem—with the school locked for two weeks, where should we meet for Heretics Anonymous?

  “My house won’t work,” Eden says as we all walk through the park across from St. Clare’s after early dismissal. “All my siblings and their packs of kids will be in and out. My parents are giving my bed to three of my nephews. I’m sleeping on the basement couch.”

  I’d offer up my house, except Dad has been home nearly every night for the past week and won’t be traveling again until after New Year’s. Apparently, the Belgians take Christmas seriously. Luckily, Avi jumps in.

  “My parents are going out of town for a few days,” he says. “So I’ve got the whole place to myself.”

  “They’re letting you stay home alone for that long?” Lucy asks.

  “They’re under the impression I’m very trustworthy. Ms. Katz next door is supposed to check in on me, but she’s old and goes to bed at eight.” He arches an eyebrow. “Meetings are great and all, but I think it’s time we had a Heretics Anonymous party.”

  My parents are, as suspected, not entirely cool with this plan, even with some creative storytelling on my part.

  “A sleepover?” Dad says. “Aren’t you kind of old for that?”

  “The day after Christmas?” Mom says. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be imposing on Avi’s parents?”

  “They’re Jewish. And I don’t think we’ll bother Mr. and Mrs. Einhorn at all.” Both these statements are technically true.

  “Who’s going to be there?” Dad asks.

  “Avi and Max. They’re in my PE class.” And Eden, who casts spells, and Lucy, who will hopefully be wearing the flimsiest of pajamas.

  “And Avi’s parents will supervise?” Mom asks.

  “Their bedroom is right above the living room,” I assure her while not actually answering her quest
ion.

  Mom glances over at Dad. “Michael, I don’t know,” she says. “Dad’s not here very long, and I was hoping we could spend that night as a family.”

  “But we’re going to be spending Christmas Eve and Christmas and the whole week as a family,” I protest. “It’s one night.”

  “Maybe after the holidays,” Dad says, and goes back to his newspaper.

  I didn’t want to have to do this. It’s manipulative and weird, but they’ve left me no choice.

  “St. Clare’s is really small. Everyone made their friends years ago,” I say, trying to sound cut up about it. “It’s not like I’ve gotten tons of offers to hang out.”

  “You don’t have a great track record with sleepovers,” says Dad, who never misses an opportunity to remind me of the time I accidentally blew up David Englander’s mailbox in sixth grade.

  “Avi’s the first friend I made. Like, the only one who talked to me for weeks.”

  “What about that girl?” Mom asks. “Lucy?”

  And I don’t even have to fake it, because as soon as I hear her name, the back of my neck gets hot. “That’s different.”

  The mention of a possible unrequited crush has dropped Mom’s resistance down by half, I can feel it. If I can knock her down a little bit more, she’ll override Dad.

  “If I tell Avi no, he might think I don’t like hanging out with him and Max.”

  Mom reaches out to me. “They won’t think that—”

  “They might! And, I don’t know, for the first time it almost feels like I—”

  I break off here and wait for Mom to ask me to finish the sentence. Which of course she does.

  “You what, honey?”

  “Belong somewhere.”

  Mom’s heart breaks. I can also see Dad roll his eyes, but broken hearts trump all.