SISTER ST. JOE’S BLACK VEIL

My father, lounging about like a movie star, an aging model god, waited outside the Sacred Heart Holy Angels office to discuss my suspension. He sat in a cracked mahogany chair that was too small for him, his Armani suit rumpled. He wore a yellow striped tie around his neck and a silver Rolex at his wrist. It had a broken clasp he fiddled with when he was nervous. Dear old Dad.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked, sliding into the chair next to him.

Instead of answering my question, my dad just stared, fiercely, at me. Whenever he was angry, his eyes popped, the whites practically swallowed the blue irises, and he moved jerkily, his head bobbing around on the knob of his spine.

“You know,” he said, “this is going on your permanent record. This could affect your choices for college.”

“Dad,” I sighed. “It’s just a suspension.”

My father stopped picking me up for school in the mornings after Juli got her Audi. It’d been three months and seventeen days since I saw him last. Despite his irritation, he looked even more handsome than I remembered, his skin tan and his clean white teeth curved like clamshells.

“Tell me, again, exactly,” my father said. “How did you pull this one off? How did you get suspended from Sacred Heart for a week?”

It was after school, that nowhere time when the halls were ghostlike, just a handful of stray girls, three or four of them at a time, straggling down the hall, chatting about Key Club and the next brownie sale. I stared at the trophy case across the hall from us, at the dusty plaques and cheerleading trophies.

“I was angry,” I whispered, picking at the thread in my skirt, not daring to look at my father. “I had some spray paint this kid left in Juli’s car, so I hit the walls. I know it was stupid.”

“You’re a graffiti artist now, is that right?” He smiled, briefly. “What did you write?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’d like to hear it from you,” he said.

“Somebody else started it,” I told him. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life before. Honest.”

Behind the trophy case, girls from Sacred Heart and girls from Holy Angels stared at us from black-and-white pictures. All of them blending into one student, one face, one girl who wore smart, full-skirted dresses with matching skinny belts, white gloves, and a pearly white smile. What happened to them? How did they become women? How did they make it to the other side?

“What did you write?” my father asked.

“It’s nothing.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“ ‘Deb Scott’s Dead.’ ”

The door to the office swung open. I thought it was what I had said that made his face go white, his fingers searching nervously for the clasp on his watch. But then I looked up and saw Sister St. Joe standing in the open door, her black veil on her shoulders, her pretty, haunted doe eyes opened wide.

My father stood up. He face went from white to burning scarlet red. He whispered, “Deb?”

Sister St. Joe, looking just as startled, turned her face, sharply, to the left as if she’d been slapped. She stared at her shoes and started talking fast. “Thisbe . . . I . . . you . . . can’t come in here.”

“Deb,” he said. My father took a step towards her, then nervously stepped back. He reached out his hand to her and then just stared at it, the fingers flexing in the open air.

“Did you know that I work here now?” Sister St. Joe asked. She wouldn’t look at my dad, she wouldn’t look at me, but she wouldn’t stop talking either. “I teach all the hard sciences. Sex,” she said, “Darwin, and death.”

Deb Scott of the blue smoky eyes. Deb Scott of the wild black hair.

I whispered, “It’s you.”

It wasn’t even a thought, not really, the way my book bag slid off my shoulder, over my elbow, the strap taut in my hand. And then it was flying, gliding across the hall, soaring past Sister St. Joe’s black veil until it found its purchase in the glass panes of the trophy case. First the crash, then this moment, this breath of silence, an intake of air, before the glass fell like rain. Everything stopped. I took a long tear of breath, then another, like beads on a string. It’s like I wasn’t even there, just a ghost of myself. Everything quiet, calm, perfect as petals.

Then the glass crashing, falling in a hundred thousand glittering pieces, a thunderstorm of glass raining down on the crumbling memorabilia of Sacred Heart Holy Angels, the cheerleading trophies, the plaques, the black-and-white photographs of girls that went before me, smiling, blank eyed for the camera, the two graduation tassels—purple and yellow for Sacred Heart, green and white for Holy Angels.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“What the?”

There was a flurry of activity, the nuns swarming through the halls in their swishing black skirts, girls, laughing and pointing at the glass everywhere.

My father shook my bag loose of broken glass and put a giant paw on my shoulder. All the time not daring to take his eyes off of Sister St. Joe’s face, her pretty doe eyes, her young, troubled mouth.

“I can’t,” my father said. “I don’t,” he said, stopping.

Sister St. Joe bit her lip hard and took a breath, struggling to pull herself together. I wanted to tear off her veil and run screaming down the hall, crashing through the double glass doors, out into the world, never looking back once.

“Go on, get out of here,” Sister St. Joe said. “Please.”

My father drove me home. I picked at the biscuit leather braiding of the seat, my hands doing this wavy, palsied tremor kind of thing.

“So,” I whispered. “You’re her married man?”

My father exhaled and trained his watery blue eyes on the dotted line of the road. He gripped the steering wheel with a stranglehold.

“You think you know? About sex? Love? You and your friends?” he asked, staring down the long ribbon of the road. “Fine. You tell me. You tell me what you know.”

I opened my mouth to answer. What did I know? I knew boys were a fast, heady high, that some boys tasted like salt, others like a piece of fruit. I knew sex was like a dance, like shuffleshuffle-step. It was our way into the world, Astrid, Juli, and me.

“Go on,” my dad said. “Tell me. Tell me what you think you know.”

Farms beat by the windows, red barns and blue silos, stitched together by cross-tied wooden fences.

“You don’t have a clue, sister. Believe me, you have no idea,” my father said. “Nobody does.”

My father pulled up to the curb in front of my mother’s Colonial. I got out, slammed the door. The sky was gunmetal grey. My father dragged his flashy car out of the suburbs for his town house downtown.

In the morning, I got up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Banged around the kitchen for breakfast. Burned toast.

“What?” my mother asked. “You’re not speaking again? Great.” She punched my shoulder. “Knock yourself out.”

Astrid and Juli sent a suspension care package filled with Hershey’s chocolate bars, fashion magazines, Cadbury eggs, Mad Libs booklets, and condoms. “You know,” Astrid wrote on the note. “For when your mom lets you out of the house again.”

I dialed Devin’s phone number just to hear his muffled “Hello?” before I gasped and hung up.

I was sitting at the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil when Sister St. Joe pulled into the driveway in the nuns’ rattling station wagon. She cut the engine off halfway through Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” and flipped her black veil back like a rope of hair. She rang the doorbell and put her mouth to the door, saying, “Thisbe, it’s me.”

I opened the door and just stood there.

Sister St. Joe kicked her orthopedic-looking nuns’ shoes at the wall and said, “Just give me a second.”

I stepped out onto the front porch. It was spring, but still blustery. The ugliest month of all in the Midwest, when everything’s brown, sucking mud.

Sister St. Joe eased herself down on the front ledge. She spread out her black skirts to kick her heels against the brick wall.

“You know there’s a plant in Borneo that smells like rotting meat?” she asked. “That’s how Mother Nature works. The awful smell attracts flies, I suppose. Pollination. Whatever. Or did you know there’s a deep-sea frog that gives birth through its back? Hundreds of those little tadpoles swimming through the sea. Of course, there’s always veil-tailed guppies. They eat their young. Mine, the nuns took him.”

Sister St. Joe watched me from the corner of her eye. She ducked her chin to her chest. My hands trembled at my sides like fish.

“So what did I do? I took my vows,” she said and tried to laugh. “Isn’t that funny? A laugh? I thought that would fix it. I thought I had to, you know, as a penance.” She lifted her black skirt and fanned it out at her sides.

Sister St. Joe stared off into the distance and suddenly I could see it, the shadow of Deb Scott in her, the doe eyes, the set jaw. I wondered how I never saw it before.

“Life surprises you sometimes,” she said. “What you will and will not become.” She took a breath, and then another. She zipped her pearl-drop crucifix back and forth on its silver chain. I sat down beside her, rested my head against her black shoulder.

Something in my throat tore loose. I felt a sob rise in my chest. I thought about Astrid, Juli, and me, flying fearless down the long, winding ribbon of the world, for what?

“But you know what I’ve been thinking lately?” Sister St. Joe asked, wiping the dampness out of her eyes. “The Peace Corps. Guatemala maybe. I could build some nice houses, don’t you think?” Sister St. Joe flexed her muscles and winked.

We sat there on the porch and cars drove past. I listened to her breathing, the girl, the legend. Sister St. Joe surprised me by nicking her fingers under my chin. She raised my head, parted the strawberry blond bangs out of my eyes to ask, “So, tell me. Is Deb Scott dead?”

I tore my face loose from Sister St. Joe’s grip and stared at her, those feral eyes, darting across the map of my face, searching. She was still wild, still desperate, still perched on the verge, and looking to me for answers. What could I tell her?

I opened my mouth to speak, to give her an answer, but nothing came out.

She said, almost crying, “Tell me. Does this mean Deb Scott’s dead?”