by Katie Henry
“I feel like I’ve been patient. I’ve heard you out,” he’s saying. Lucy grabs my arm to stop me from going farther, but I poke my head into the classroom. It’s empty, except for Father Peter, whose back is to the half-open door, and Jenny, who has her hands balled at her sides. She looks terrified, but she also looks furious.
“I know, Father, you did. But . . .”
“Yes?”
“I heard you out, too,” she says with the barest hint of an edge, “and I still think we should publish it in The Record.”
He shakes his head. “Jenny—”
I’ve never heard him call a student by their first name. It sounds oddly intimate.
“This happened,” Jenny says. “It happened, we can’t say it didn’t, everybody knows.”
“If everyone already knows, I don’t see why you need to write an article about it.”
“She was a part of St. Clare’s! Her students deserve to know the whole story, not just rumors.” Jenny sets her jaw. “She was a part of our family. Wasn’t she?”
I duck out of the doorway and turn back to Lucy. I mouth, “Ms. Simon?” and she nods.
“This is a very sensitive issue,” we hear Father Peter say. “It’s been a hard couple of months around here. This would only exacerbate things. I know you and Ms. Simon were close, but I need you to trust me on this. We can’t have an article on her departure.”
There’s the squeak of patent leather shoes on linoleum. “I’d quote you; you could explain why it happened. But not writing about it at all, it’s like you’re asking me to lie.”
“I’m not asking anything. I am telling you, there will be no article in tomorrow’s paper or any other. Are we clear on that?”
Silence. He prods again. “Jenny?”
“Yes!” she says about eight decibels louder than I’ve ever heard her speak. “Father,” she adds. Her footsteps get close to the door, so Lucy and I escape down the hall.
“Man, I didn’t think she had that in her,” I say to Lucy as we descend the stairs to HA.
“She’s quiet,” Lucy says, pushing open the door, “but Jenny has principles.”
Everyone’s already there, so Lucy and I waste no time in telling them what we heard Jenny and Father Peter saying. Avi nods, like he already knew.
“Father Peter kicked us all out of the newspaper office early. Everyone except Jenny.”
“What does she want to do?” Eden asks. “Write an editorial saying it was wrong to fire Ms. Simon?”
“Not even, that’s what’s so messed up,” Avi says. “She wanted to write a news article about Ms. Simon leaving. Just confirm that she did, and why she had to. Father Peter said no.”
“Because it would be ‘divisive,’” I add. “He doesn’t want anyone to talk about it.” Avi nods.
“What about your article, back in December?” Lucy asks. “About Dress Code Week. That wasn’t divisive, but this is?”
“Did you actually read that article, when it came out?” Lucy looks suddenly guilty. “It started out about Dress Code Week. By the time our staff adviser and Father Peter were done with it, the article was about the new security cameras and how much safer everyone feels.”
“You can’t write what you want?” I ask. My old high school didn’t have a real paper, just a student-run blog, but no one was censoring those articles. Or spell-checking them.
“Everything goes through Father Peter at least once,” Avi says. “So our articles get rewritten and sanitized and end up boring as hell. That’s why I called this meeting.”
We all look at each other, confused. Avi elaborates.
“A school newspaper is more than something to put on your college application. It’s one of the only places we have to talk about our school, to voice our opinions without getting in trouble. That’s what it should be, anyway, and I think HA should make it that way.”
“You want to protest the paper?” Max asks.
“No,” Avi says. “I want to make one of our own.”
21
LUCY AND I haven’t told anyone we’re dating, not yet. She worries that it’ll upset the group dynamics, and I’m worried Avi will think he possesses any skill at being a wingman. But this secrecy doesn’t even last two months. One day, Eden and Max join me, Lucy, and Avi for lunch. Eden and Max seat themselves on one side of the table with Avi, like some of kind of jury, and tell us they know.
“We totally support you guys, but we’re kind of hurt you didn’t tell us,” Eden says.
“There shouldn’t be secrets in a secret society,” Max says.
Lucy looks unconcerned. “We were just waiting for the right time.”
“How did you even know?” I ask.
“Please. It’s not like you two were subtle,” Avi says.
“Give us a little credit,” Eden says.
“I saw you making out by the teacher parking lot yesterday and I told them,” Max says.
Eden and Avi glare at Max.
I decide to use this newfound group honesty to my advantage and call an HA meeting for February 14. But when Lucy arrives to the room that afternoon, we’re the only ones there. I’ve set up the camping lanterns on the bookshelves and the broken desks in the corner but turned the other lights off, so the whole room is bathed in a low glow that I hope looks romantic, not creepy.
“What is this?” Lucy whispers as she shuts the door behind her. “Where’s everyone else?”
“They were nice enough to give us the room,” I say. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
She drops her bag and goes to inspect the V-Day spread I’ve arranged on the least damaged desk I could find. It’s all Lucy’s favorite things: off-brand Dr Pepper, cheddar popcorn, and of course, some Valentine’s Day treats.
“Chocoramo!” she says, scooping up the Colombian chocolate cake I had to buy on the internet. “I haven’t had this in forever, how did you know?”
“Eden said you used to bring one in your lunch every day.”
“It’s a national treasure. Like Vegemite in Australia,” she says, sitting down on the couch to unwrap it. “I can’t believe you did all this.”
“It’s our first Valentine’s Day,” I say, sitting next to her and helping myself to a handful of candy hearts.
“I feel awful, I don’t have anything for you.”
This is the first time we’ve been alone—really alone, without my mom downstairs or Lucy’s brothers in the next room—since the night of the party. “I feel like we can figure something out.”
“I thought you wouldn’t be into Valentine’s Day,” she says. “It’s about a saint, after all.”
“I like free candy. I don’t care if I get it because of some saint who was into hooking people up.”
“The day’s not supposed to be about chocolate, you know,” Lucy says as she shoves half the chocolate-covered sponge cake in her mouth.
I already heard the whole Saint Valentine’s story in theology, and it didn’t exactly get my heart pounding.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, “Saint Valentine married a bunch of Christians in secret and the Romans chopped his head off. Boring.”
“Oh yes, decapitation. Super boring.”
“It’s the same story with all the saints. They’re Christian, they won’t stop being Christian, they get executed, the end.”
“When I was in elementary school, that was always the boys’ favorite part, learning all the gross ways saints died.”
“Decapitation’s not so bad,” I say. “When Mount Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii got covered in ashes, everybody knows that, but in Herculaneum, which was closer, the air got so hot so fast everyone’s heads exploded. Literally exploded. That’s gross.”
Lucy stares at me, horrified and impressed. For once, I know something she doesn’t. Finally, all those books about natural disasters I read as a kid have paid off. I can’t wait to tell Mom. She thought they’d turn me into an arsonist.
“That’s . . . awful,” Lucy says.
“I know. Natur
e’s awesome. None of your saint stories can top that.”
“Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a spit,” she says. “And guess what they made him the patron saint of?”
“What?”
“Cooks.”
Touché. That’s extremely messed up, but I’m not conceding defeat. “In the eighteen hundreds, a volcano called Krakatoa erupted with four times the strength of a Russian hydrogen bomb. I don’t know if people’s heads exploded there, though.”
“Pope John XII died of a massive heart attack while having sex with his mistress. Or her husband killed him. Nobody’s sure.”
“One time in Boston, a tank carrying molasses blew up and a fifteen-foot tidal wave of molasses covered the whole city, wiping out buildings, taking out trains, and legit murdering like twenty people.”
Lucy thinks for a moment. She puts her cake aside. She folds her hands in her lap. “In 897, Pope Stephen VI dug up a previous pope’s dead body, brought it to a courthouse, conducted a trial against the corpse, found it guilty of illegally ascending to the papacy, and threw the decaying skeleton into the Tiber River.”
Holy shit.
This girl gets me.
“See, this is what Sister Helen should be teaching us,” I say. “That’s awesome. I want to know about that, not the Chief Spiritual Works of Mercy.”
“It’s theology. Were you expecting sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”
“One out of the three would be nice.”
Lucy looks like she’s considering something, then says: “There’s Saint Daniel the Stylite.”
“Isn’t that a kind of rock?”
“No, that’s—a stylos is a really tall pillar. And stylites were these holy men who would go live on top of the pillars.”
“They’d live on top of the pillars? Like eat and sleep and live on top of a pole?”
“Yes. So Daniel—”
“How did they go to the bathroom?”
“Do you want to hear the story, or not?”
I nod.
“One day,” she continues, “Daniel was sitting on his stylos, minding his own business, when someone leaned a ladder up against the pole and climbed to the top. People did that sometimes, to talk to Daniel and seek his wisdom. But that day, some of Daniel’s enemies sent a prostitute to climb the ladder and seduce him.”
“They wanted to get him laid?” I ask.
“Daniel was celibate,” she explains. “If he was seduced by a woman, it would wreck his holy reputation.”
“What kind of prostitute?”
“What do you mean what kind—”
“Are we talking a high-priced call girl, or . . . ?”
“Yeah, I don’t know how much this ancient Byzantine woman charged for her services, Michael.”
“I’m just trying to create a visual.”
“So the girl climbs onto the pillar, next to him,” she continues, and scoots closer to me. “He sits there and stares at her.” She shoots me a sharp glance. “Weirdly. Very weirdly.”
I avert my eyes, focusing on the sound of her voice, soft and rolling, like ripples in a lake.
“Daniel tries to look away from her, but he can’t. And Daniel knows if she stays there for one more second, he’s going to end up kissing her.” Her knees are touching mine, the chocolate cake abandoned on the desk. “He wants to. Even though everything he’s ever been told tells him he shouldn’t, it’s all he wants.”
I snake my hand around her waist, pulling her closer. This is almost better than kissing, the way her body presses against my hand when she breathes in. I can feel the edge of her tights under my fingers. I think about what it would be like to unwrap her layers, sweater vest, crisp white shirt, and all, like the world’s greatest Christmas present.
“Would it really be so bad?” I ask. “If Daniel did kiss her?”
“Well,” she says, “I don’t think he would have become a saint.” She loops her hand around my tie and pulls us both down onto the couch. “But he might have been happy anyway.”
22
LIKE ANY GOOD editor in chief, Avi assigns each member of Heretics Anonymous a piece for our secret newspaper. With only five of us, it’s bound to be small, but Avi’s fine with that.
“It’s the content that matters, not how many pages we can fill,” he says. “I mean, The Record prints the weekly lunch menu, for God’s sake. Doesn’t mean we have to.”
As Avi works on the actual, school-sponsored newspaper, he secures the things we’ll need—a bootleg copy of the computer program used to lay out the paper, and The Record’s official template, complete with the right fonts. Then, one sunny Thursday afternoon in late February, we all gather at Max’s house, our assigned articles on flash drives.
Both Max’s parents work from home, and their industrial printer’s just what we need to produce our newspaper—we’re calling it Off the Record. Max’s mom and dad both have afternoon appointments, so we’ve got full access to our own private print shop. We crowd into Max’s bedroom, look over the articles, and lay everything out.
Eden and I have cowritten an article titled “Interfaith Is Integral,” exploring how St. Clare’s could better include non-Catholic students and their religious traditions. “I get that this is a religious school,” Eden says. “But if you’re cool with accepting kids who aren’t Catholic and taking their tuition money, you could at least not insult their beliefs.” I suggest that the theology textbook could stop describing atheism as “one of the most serious problems of our time” and not suggest that agnostics suffer from “a sluggish moral conscience.” Eden suggests acknowledging other faiths’ holidays during the school year.
“If people who aren’t Catholic can sit through mandatory Masses, St. Clare’s could at least acknowledge Ramadan or Yom Kippur.”
“Rosh Hashanah would be good,” Avi says. “Everyone can get behind eating apples and honey.”
“Which holiday’s the one where you get to build a hut?” Max asks.
“Sukkot. My family tried to do it once, but our sukkah kept collapsing, so we built a pillow fort, ate some dumplings, and called it a week.”
Lucy’s contribution is a forceful, thoroughly researched, excessively long opinion piece on why women should have institutional power in the Catholic Church. She hovers over Avi’s shoulders as he edits it.
“You can’t cut that!” she protests as he slices and dices with his red pen.
“Lucy. This paragraph alone has eight separate quotes from feminist theologians.”
“So?” she says. “Everyone should read Sister Elizabeth Johnson. She’s a genius.”
He crosses something else out. “No one will read it if it feels like homework.”
She pouts but lets him edit.
Max gets very concerned that this paper is going to turn out too serious. “The Record has an entertainment section,” he points out. “We should, too.”
Everyone agrees. Max puts together a quiz called “Which St. Clare’s Nun Are You?” and we all have fun taking it—well, except Lucy, who is horrified by her result.
“Sister Joseph Marie?” she yelps. “This can’t be right. I must have scored it wrong.”
“I can see it,” I say, and she glares at me.
“Better than who I got,” Max says. “Sister Joan. She’s the most boring one. Even her name is boring.”
Together, we come up with a word search puzzle that asks readers to locate all the words we’ve heard people using to describe Heretics Anonymous. These words include “atrocity,” “hilarious,” and “blasphemous.” We tried to fit in “basically the eleventh plague of Egypt,” but that was too long.
The centerpiece of the issue, though, is Avi’s article. It’s not exactly the paragon of journalistic integrity he wanted it to be.
“How can you get quotes from people if the reporter’s anonymous?” he points out. “And besides—I’m too biased for it to be a real article, anyway.”
So what he creates isn’t quite an investigative exposé an
d isn’t quite an opinion piece. It’s an impassioned defense not just of Ms. Simon, but of the human rights we all have—the right to walk our own path, the right to strive for our own happiness. The right to be ourselves without fear.
“Saint Clare of Assisi herself said, ‘We become what we love. Who we love shapes what we become,’” Avi writes in the closing paragraph. “And I would add something else: The way we treat others proves who we’ve become. Who are we, St. Clare’s? What do we want to become?”
The next day, Avi and I sneak out of the dining hall at lunch with overstuffed backpacks, leaving out the school’s side entrance and skirting around the track, where the cross-country team is doing a lunchtime practice. We exit via the metal gate by the basketball courts. I still can’t believe this is against the rules. At my old high school, we could go wherever we wanted for lunch. Though, granted, the suburban neighborhood surrounding St. Clare’s doesn’t offer many dining options.
We take the long way around, eventually looping back to the park across the street from the school’s main doors. “There,” Avi says, pointing out the biggest tree in the far corner of the park, near the county courthouse. “That’s the one.”
Obviously, we couldn’t distribute the paper on campus, and not just because we’d get caught. Avi wanted it delivered exactly 150 feet away from the school.
“Father Peter kept saying that, when he told Jenny she couldn’t publish her article,” Avi explained yesterday as copies of Off the Record churned out of Max’s printer. “Anything distributed within 150 feet of school property has to have his approval.”
After some discussion, we settled on the park’s largest, oldest oak tree—it’s a solid landmark and far enough away. As a bonus, it provides excellent cover from anyone who might be looking for us.
“Avi, come on,” I hiss as we stand behind the tree. We’ve been here five minutes, weighing down stacks of newspapers from the wind with rocks. “They’re fine; can we go already?”
“You have no appreciation for presentation, you know that?” He stands up. “Okay. Let’s find Eden.”