Precious Blood(91)

“It’s our Confirmation class picture. The names at the bottom are our Confirmation names. You take an extra one, you know how it works, a kind of name in religion. I—wait.” She reached into her pocket and came up with a folded sheet of lined notepaper. “Here. I wrote us all down. Real names and Confirmation names. Cheryl is the second from the right in the front row. Her Confirmation name was Bridget.”

Gregor looked from the picture to the notepaper and back again. “Can I keep these?” he asked. “I don’t have to have them forever. Overnight would be long enough.”

“As long as you return the picture, yes,” Scholastica said. “The picture isn’t mine. It belongs to the convent.”

“I’ll take very good care of it.”

“We were twelve when it was taken,” Scholastica said, “just at that age when children turn into teenagers and start to separate the sheep from the goats. We were definitely the sheep, the six of us. Andy and Barry and Tom and Peg and Judy and I.”

“And Cheryl Cass was a goat.”

“If you’re thinking that’s why Andy had the goat in church, go right ahead. I thought of that, too. I somehow don’t think so. But to answer your question, yes. Cheryl was a goat. At that stage she was worse than a goat. She was an untouchable.”

“She was pretty,” Gregor said.

Scholastica smiled again. “You mean she looks pretty after a fashion. I suppose she was. It was the wrong fashion. When I first went into the convent, I used to think about her and think we’d been so cruel to her because she was, well, poor. Worse than poor. We all knew what her mother was like, what both her parents were like. We found the whole thing revolting. But—”

“But?”

“But that couldn’t have been the whole truth,” Scholastica said. “Tom Dolan’s parents were just as bad. Worse, in a way, because his father was very irreligious. He’d go storming up to old Father Deegan screaming and yelling about the Church, right in front of everybody. He’d get bombed out of his skull Sunday morning and make a scene at the twelve o’clock Mass. It used to embarrass Tom no end. But we never held it against him.”

Gregor was willing to bet Tom Dolan hadn’t believed that. If he had been in Tom’s position, he wouldn’t have believed it himself.

“Anyway,” Scholastica was going on, “that was probably why Tom wasn’t as bad about Cheryl as the rest of us. Peg and Judy and I wouldn’t even talk to her. Whenever she happened to be in the same room with us, we looked right through her. The boys would—play tricks, call her names, things like that, when we were younger. As we got older, they started hitting on her for other things.”

“Sex.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly a secret, was it? A dozen people have probably told you the same thing. We’ve all turned into such stuffy, conventional citizens, you probably think we were little goody two-shoes in school, but we weren’t. We were very wild in those days. Especially the boys.”

“Especially Tom Dolan?”

“No. Especially Andy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know where it came from—Andy’s parents are the sweetest, most unimaginative people you’d ever want to meet—they live in Florida—but Andy was a raving lunatic. I don’t know if he ever got over it. Anyway, it was Andy who started it with Cheryl Cass, at the beginning of our junior year. He was going out with Judy then. I was going out with Barry Field. It doesn’t really matter. We were inseparable then, except when we were in class. The Cathedral Schools are segregated by sex.” Scholastica laughed. “At one point, Barry and I decided we were so much in love—you know the kind of love; it’s sex, you don’t know each other—we were going to elope together to Maryland. You could do that in those days, go to Maryland and be married at sixteen without a waiting period. And then we decided we just couldn’t do it, because it would break up the group.”

“You were probably glad you didn’t go, later.”

“Sometimes we were, and sometimes we weren’t. That was just after our sophomore year. Andy was going out with Judy and they had a fight, a really big bust up. Peg and Judy and I were wild about some things, like beer and marijuana, but we were very cautious about others, especially sex. I think Andy tried one of those ‘put out or walk’ deals and Judy decided to walk. Andy revved up his car and went cruising around and ended up at Lake Diantha. And there was Cheryl. What he told Barry later was that she let him sleep with her right off the bat.”