Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  There’s something about Red Ribbon’s voice, I think, as I watch Sister Joseph Marie cycle through several shades of red. It’s clear and steady and urgent, like she’s used to being interrupted. It sounds like the flute my sister plays, the way it can soar into the highest notes without sounding squeaky, how it can sound like an instrument three times its size.

  As Sister Joseph Marie, now a color closest to eggplant, writes furiously on a pink detention slip, I decide I know two things to be true:

  1. The girl with the red ribbon is out of her mind.

  2. She’s going to be my new best friend.

  I learn a third absolute truth as I dart through the hallways after history ends: tailing someone is a lot harder when everyone’s wearing the same outfit.

  I have to talk to this girl. She’s got to be a nonbeliever like me, or Sister Joseph Marie wouldn’t have accused her of blasphemy. That’s what they tell people right before they burn them at the stake. I saw it on the History Channel. At worst, she’s an agnostic, and that isn’t a deal breaker.

  I push through the crowd, following brief flashes of red as the girl moves at a rapid clip. I could catch up with her, but I have no idea what I’d say if I did. Hi, my name’s Michael, are you also a depraved sinner? Hey, I’m Michael, want to have lunch and discuss the obvious absence of a loving God? She turns at the end of the hall, past a statue of a sad-eyed Virgin Mary.

  I skid around the corner, desperate not to lose sight of her in the sea of plaid, and suddenly find myself face-to-face with a dark-haired girl whose brown eyes are looking at me suspiciously. The tail end of a red ribbon peeks out from behind her ear.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” she says. “Why are you following me?”

  “I’m Michael.” I stick out my hand, and immediately wish I’d wiped it on my pants first. She ignores it.

  “Okay. Why are you following me, Michael?”

  “I’m in your history class.”

  “You’re also really bad at answering questions.”

  I put my hand down, my face prickling.

  “I just—” I scramble for something to say that doesn’t make me sound like an unhinged stalker. “I wanted to tell you I thought it was really cool what you did in class. How you stood up to her.”

  Red Ribbon’s face softens for a split second, then tightens right back up. She hugs her book bag to her chest. “I didn’t do it to be cool. I said it because I really believe it.”

  “I can tell,” I say.

  “Oh.” She relaxes her grip on the book bag.

  “So . . . I wanted to tell you that.”

  “Why?”

  Because your voice sounds like the flute my sister has. Creepy. Because I know we’re the same. Doubly creepy. Because it’s lunch and I don’t know where to go. Creepy, desperate, and sad.

  “I didn’t want you to feel like you were alone, in thinking what you said,” I tell her. “That sucks, and I feel like it probably sucks more here than other places.”

  She looks me up and down carefully. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I’m new.”

  “I’m Lucy.” She swings her book bag onto her shoulder. “Do you want a tour?”

  3

  AS LUCY AND I wend our way down spiral staircases and in and out of corridors that occasionally lead to nowhere, I wish I had a map. And I wish Lucy, who walks as fast as she talks, would slow down.

  “The school nurse is around that corner, to the left, but seriously, don’t bother, she’s not even allowed to give you Advil unless you have a note, and the teachers’ lounge is that room to the left of the Saint Francis statue, though I can’t think of why you’d need to go there.”

  She finally takes a breath and I wonder if I should have been recording her. Lucy showed me the whole school, top to bottom, but now that we’re on the ground floor, I can barely remember my own name.

  “And to conclude our tour,” Lucy says, pushing open a heavy oak door, “this is the dining hall.”

  “You mean the cafeteria?”

  She shrugs. “I’ve never heard anyone call it that.”

  As soon as I step inside, I decide “dining hall” is the more appropriate word. Cafeterias have metal tables and tubs of limp vegetables. They smell like burnt pizza and grease. This place has dark wood tables and smells like freshly squeezed lemons. I grab a grilled cheese sandwich and sweet potato fries before meeting up with Lucy in the salad bar line.

  “Hey, Lucy,” says the boy ahead of her in line, who I recognize from history. He has his arm wrapped all the way around a pretty girl’s waist, looking like a possessive toddler with a teddy bear. “Are we ever going to have a class where you don’t go off on some feminist rant?” The girl beside him giggles.

  “I don’t know, Connor,” Lucy says, examining a bottle of salad dressing. “Are we ever going to have an assembly where you don’t try to fingerbang your girlfriend in the back of the auditorium?”

  The girl goes pink. Connor quickly steers his girlfriend out of the food line, glaring at Lucy over his shoulder.

  “During an assembly?” I ask Lucy.

  “That’s what Jason Everett said, and he was sitting right behind them.” I must look shocked, because she nods at the crowd of uniformed students sitting down to lunch. “Don’t let the kilts fool you. This is still high school.”

  Lucy leads me to a table where a tall boy with glasses sits reading a book, alternating between turning pages and shoveling spoonfuls of pudding into his mouth.

  He doesn’t look up as we sit down, still frowning at the book.

  “What the hell does mirabile dictu mean?” he asks.

  “You’re still on that section of the Aeneid?” Lucy says. “It was due like last week.”

  “I’m aware. Does mirabile dictu mean ‘strange to say’ or does it mean ‘wonderful to say’?”

  “It means both,” Lucy says. “Strange and wonderful. Miraculous.”

  “It can’t be both, that doesn’t make any sense,” the boy says.

  “I think it does. Aren’t most wonderful things a little bit strange?”

  “Whatever.” He closes the book and notices me for the first time. “Who’s this?”

  “A stray,” Lucy says before I can answer myself. The back of my neck gets hot. A stray?

  “I’m Michael,” I say. “It’s my first day.”

  “I’m Avi,” he says, “and normally I’d try to get to know you better, but I’m right in the middle of failing Latin.”

  “I’ll write out the translation for you,” Lucy offers.

  “Yes, please,” he says, sliding the book toward her.

  “If,” she continues, “you sign my detention slip.” She holds out the crumpled, salmon-colored notice between two fingers. Avi’s face falls.

  “What did you do?” he says, managing to sound both reproachful and bored.

  “Sister Joseph Marie and I had a minor theological disagreement. Sign it?”

  He shakes his head. “You’re going to get caught.”

  “I have orchestra practice after school, I can’t miss it,” she says. “Mr. Mead is on detention duty today, I checked. You’re great at his signature. Please?”

  Avi looks too straitlaced to commit forgery in a crowded cafeteria, and I expect him to refuse, but he sighs and accepts the detention slip, looking warily over his shoulder.

  “You could always stop arguing with teachers,” he says as he signs the slip. “Then we wouldn’t have to do this.”

  “This time it was necessary.” She glances over at me. “Michael thought it was cool.”

  Avi looks up at me. His eyes narrow. “Did he?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It was awesome.”

  “See?” Lucy says to Avi, and flashes me a smile.

  “Especially all the stuff about the saints,” I say. “I mean, I have no idea who any of those people are, but it was so smart, you found a way to use her own religious bullshit against her.”

 
Lucy stops smiling, but I can’t stop talking. “I spent this whole morning thinking I was going to be stuck with a bunch of, like, mindless Catholic sheep people for the next two years,” I say. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”

  “Not the only what?” Lucy asks.

  “You know,” I say, taking a bite out of my grilled cheese. “The only atheist.”

  Lucy and Avi look at each other. Avi laughs. Lucy doesn’t.

  “I’m not an atheist,” she says.

  “Agnostic, then,” I say. “Whatever.”

  “No,” Lucy says. “I’m Catholic.”

  A bite of grilled cheese sticks in my throat. “What?” I cough. “But all the stuff you said in class—”

  “I said those things because I’m Catholic. Sister Joseph Marie was diminishing the bravery of women who died for their God.” She pauses. “And my God, too.”

  Oh, shit.

  I have few talents, but I am indisputably a world champion in destroying a friendship before it ever starts. I try to catalog how many ways I insulted her religion. At least three.

  “But don’t worry,” Lucy continues. “You won’t be surrounded by—what was it? Sheep people?”

  Well, when she says it like that, I sound like an unbelievable asshole. Probably because I am an unbelievable asshole.

  “Believing in something doesn’t make me a sheep, and it doesn’t make me stupid,” Lucy says. “I mean, there are awful people at this school, there totally are, but they aren’t mindless. Except maybe Connor.” She glances over to where Connor sits, pouring hot sauce into his mouth as his friends laugh hysterically. “But I don’t think that has much to do with his religion.”

  I want to tell her I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I’d said. But I did mean it, and that makes it worse.

  “I’m—I didn’t—”

  “It’s fine,” she says, waving it off. “It’s your first day. Twenty-four-hour grace period.”

  “Really?” I say.

  “We sheep people are big believers in grace,” Lucy says.

  Avi leans in. “If it makes you feel better, the first time I had lunch with Lucy, I asked her if she blamed my people for killing Jesus.”

  “Which, to be clear, I don’t,” Lucy says.

  “But to be fair, it has historical precedent,” Avi points out.

  “You’re Jewish?” I ask. He nods. “But like—how Jewish?”

  “It’s not a math equation,” Lucy says.

  “I light candles on Chanukah,” Avi says. “I eat my body weight in hamantaschen on Purim and sat shiva when my grandma died.” He puts his finished bowl of pudding back on his tray. “But tomorrow, I’m going to have a carnitas taco for lunch, because I don’t think pork is unclean. I think the ancient Israelites were smart to avoid it, because it goes bad fast and it can make you sick, but I’m not an ancient Israelite. And I trust the lunch ladies.”

  “But still, you have a religion,” I say. “You both do.”

  “What do you think this is?” Lucy asks me. “The Albigensian Crusade?”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “It means no one cares you’re an atheist. Actually—” She pauses, and there’s a glint in her eye. “That might be really great,” she says, but weirdly, she’s looking at Avi when she says it.

  “Why?” I say, feeling like I’ve missed something.

  “You know, for some fresh blood,” she says, still looking at Avi, not me. He gives the smallest shake of his head, and she shrugs but looks disappointed.

  “What do you have after lunch?” Lucy asks. I dig my schedule out of my backpack.

  “Theology,” I tell her. “With . . . seriously? Another nun?”

  She leans over my shoulder to look, and her red ribbon brushes against my chin. Her hair smells like vanilla extract and what I think might be incense.

  “Oh, but it’s Sister Helen,” she says. “She’s sweet, you’ll like her. Avi and I are both in that class, we’ll take you.”

  We go to bus our trays, and at the trash cans is the blond girl from chemistry. Lunch doesn’t seem to have improved her mood. When she sees us, she glances from me to Lucy and Avi, then heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Typical,” she mutters as she pushes past us.

  “That’s Theresa,” Avi says. “Lovely girl. Really personable.”

  “Yeah, we met,” I say. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

  “You’re in excellent company,” Lucy says.

  When we reach Sister Helen’s classroom, Lucy lets Avi go in first, then turns around, smiling like she’s about to lead me into a surprise party. Like she knows something I haven’t figured out yet. Something strange and wonderful.

  “Don’t worry,” she tells me. “There’s room at this school for people like us.”

  Us?

  As I follow her through the door, I hold on to that word like it’s a life preserver.

  4

  WHEN THE BELL rings at the end of sixth period and all of St. Clare’s streams out the front doors, I expect to feel better, like a weight’s been lifted off me, but I just feel fuzzy and lost.

  I start off for what Mom calls “home” but I call “an explosion of moving boxes.” The new house is still a disaster zone, I notice as I walk in the front door. I unpacked most of my things the first night. I always try to arrange my room exactly the same—books on the same desk shelf, posters in the same locations, nightstand lamp positioned so the crack on the base faces out. And next to the lamp, this old astronaut figurine I’ve had forever. I don’t even know where I got it. Dad used to hide it around the house, as sort of a game. You never knew where the astronaut might show up. In the fruit bowl, his arm wrapped around a banana. In the sandbox, staged like he was sunbathing. In the bathtub, riding a rubber duck. Dad stopped doing that a long time ago, but the astronaut has a permanent spot in my room. It’s the one place where nothing changes.

  There are even more boxes in the kitchen, and stacks of pots and pans cover the kitchen table. Mom must finally feel up to cooking again, which is a huge relief—there’s only so much pizza and mediocre suburban Chinese takeout a person can eat.

  Sophia, my little sister, is already home from school. She sits at the breakfast bar, staring into a bowl of alphabet soup. Mom has her back to the door, busy dusting off and putting away dishes.

  “Welcome home, Michael!” Mom says without turning around. “How was your first day?”

  “Fine,” I mumble, and sit down next to Sophia. She stays focused on her bowl.

  “Mom,” Sophia says, rearranging letters with the end of her spoon. “Can I have another bowl of soup?”

  “What, honey?”

  “I’m trying to spell ‘gelastic,’ but I need an l.”

  Normal ten-year-olds use their alphabet soup to spell “fart” and then eat it before their moms can see. Sophia uses it to show off her SAT word of the day.

  “If you have another bowl, you won’t be hungry for dinner,” Mom says, straining for the top shelf. “Gelastic—that’s a pretty big word.”

  “Eight letters isn’t big.” Sophia gives up on her vocab project and starts eating her words, one by one. “I know words with twenty letters.”

  Sophia also knows all the capitals in Europe and how to say hello and good-bye in twelve languages. I can’t wait until she gets her first Nobel Prize and I can tell everyone at the celebratory dinner about how she stuck peas up her nose as a toddler.

  “What does it mean?” Mom asks.

  “‘Gelastic.’ Adjective,” Sophia recites in her special two-time-district-spelling-bee-winner voice. “Laugh-provoking in look, conduct, or speech.”

  Mom pushes herself up farther on the counter, balancing precariously on one knee. I should help her, or at least offer. I am taller than her, though not by much. She’s my mom, and it isn’t her fault we’re here, and I should help her. Dad would say the same thing, if he were home. But he isn’t, so his opinion doesn’t matter.

  There’s a lump
in my throat that feels like peanut butter but tastes bitter. I swallow it down and don’t get up.

  Mom manages to shove the dishes onto the top shelf. “Can you use it in a sentence?”

  Sophia shoots me a glance. “Michael looks very gelastic today.”

  “Hey!”

  “Sophia!” Mom slides down off the counter and turns to face me, taking in my uniform in all its dorky glory. “Oh, look at you! You ran out so fast this morning, I didn’t get to see you before you left.”

  “That was intentional,” I say as she adjusts my tie.

  “I think you look very nice,” she says.

  “I look like a Scottish undertaker.”

  “They aren’t called undertakers anymore,” Sophia says. “They’re called funeral directors.”

  She takes her bowl of soup to the sink and flounces upstairs.

  Mom sits down at the table next to me. “Dad called while you were at school. Do you want to call him back?”

  I shake my head.

  “Michael,” she groans. “Don’t you think you’ve made your point?”

  “He lied to me.”

  “He didn’t mean to. It was a very unexpected offer.”

  “He lied to you, too.”

  Mom closes her eyes. “A very good unexpected offer that’s opened up lots of opportunities for him. Should I have forced him to turn that down?”

  I hope my silence speaks for itself.

  Mom puts her hand on mine. “I know this isn’t ideal.”

  “This is about the furthest thing from—”

  “Because it isn’t ideal for me either,” she says sharply. “Your dad traveling so much is not ideal. Having to start over is not ideal. But I’m trying, and Sophia’s trying, and you need to try, too.”

  This is the moment I’m supposed to tell her about Lucy, Avi, and how good the dining hall food was and how “there’s room for people like us,” so I can show her I am trying. That there’s the slightest of possibilities that this year won’t be as big a disaster as I thought. I could tell her, and the new crease in her forehead would disappear and her eyes would look less worried. But if I tell her that, she might start to think what she and Dad did to me is okay, and it’s not, and won’t be no matter how many friends I make.