Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  “I’ll try,” I say. “But if Dad calls tonight, tell him I don’t speak Belgian.”

  Mom stands up and gently strokes the back of my head the way she used to when I was a kid. “Oh, honey,” she sighs. “Belgian isn’t a language.”

  5

  THE WEIRDEST THING about Catholic school is that despite all the statues of saints and a real overabundance of prayer, it’s still school. There might be a crucifix in my chemistry classroom, but I still have pages of problem sets on catalysts and molar mass. The first weeks slip by in a blur of homework, putting names to faces, and getting lost in hallways.

  I sit with Avi and Lucy at lunch, and she sticks close by me in theology, too, whispering definitions of words I’ve never heard of, like “magisterium” and “transubstantiation,” spelling them out in my notebook in perfect, loopy letters. One day at lunch, I do an impression of Theresa the Ultra-Pious that makes Lucy laugh so hard she cries a little, and I’m so happy that when Dad calls later that night, I manage to say forty-eight words to him.

  Avi seems less sure about being friends with me. Once, Lucy mentioned a study group they have, saying maybe I could come, but Avi cut her off, reminding her I’m in a different English class. But I think he doesn’t want me getting as close to her as he is. Maybe he has a crush on her—she’s pretty, I guess. Pretty like a painting behind glass, though, something you’re not supposed to touch. I decide Avi and I are going to get along, even if I have to knock him down and beat the friendship out of him.

  On second thought, maybe not. He’s a lot taller than me.

  The day after Halloween, Coach Kent tells us that today in PE we’ll be walking the track all period, because he has a raging headache and paperwork to fill out, and so help him God if any of us start complaining.

  I catch up to Avi, who’s leisurely walking on the outside of the track. He looks instantly tired when I start walking next to him. I have that effect on people.

  “I think Lucy wants us to be friends,” I say.

  “Lucy wants a lot of things.” He blows on his hands. “But Lucy also tends to barrel into things without thinking them through. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  I’m put off by the implication that I’m a thing Lucy hasn’t thought through, but I keep the conversation going.

  “How did you and Lucy meet?” I ask.

  Avi shrugs. “I sat next to her in algebra freshman year, and she was nice to me.” He looks at me warily before continuing. “We ate lunch together sometimes, but I was mostly hanging out with other people. And then I told her something important about me, and she wasn’t weird about it. Other people were, but she wasn’t, so. That was that.”

  “People were weird about the Jewish thing?”

  “No,” he says, staring straight ahead. “More about the gay thing.”

  I stop walking. “You’re gay?” Avi doesn’t wait for me, so I jog to catch up.

  “You’re surprised?” he says.

  “Sort of—I actually thought you had a crush on Lucy.”

  “I think that’s called projecting.”

  “What?”

  “Lucy is not my type,” Avi says. “And neither are you, in case you’re worried.”

  I wasn’t worried, but now I’m just offended.

  “Well . . . why not?” I ask.

  “Why not what?”

  “Why aren’t I your type?”

  Avi stares at me. “You want me to be attracted to you?”

  “No,” I say. “But you don’t have to act like it’s such a given. I’m not a mountain troll.”

  “Yeah,” Avi agrees. “Mountain trolls have more tact.” But he’s smiling as we round the bend.

  His smile disappears as he glances to the left of the track, near the tennis courts, where a stocky boy is tying what looks like a wizard’s cape around his neck, over his PE shirt and sweatpants.

  “Who is that?” I ask.

  “Max Kim,” he says, and starts off toward him. “Come on.”

  “What’s he got around his neck? He looks ridiculous.”

  Avi whirls around. “No, he doesn’t,” he snaps. “He looks like himself. Don’t be a jerk.”

  I’m stung he assumes my default mode is “jerk,” but I follow him over. Max nods at Avi but then goes back to fastening his cape.

  “Max,” Avi says, “you have to take it off.”

  “Take what off?” Max asks, as if he’s not wearing a giant purple cape around his neck.

  “Coach Kent said he’d take it away if you wore it in PE again.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I heard him say it.”

  “No,” Max says. “He said he’d throw it in the ceramics kiln in the art room. That’s different. It’s worse.” He looks over at me. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m Michael,” I tell him. “I think your cape’s cool.”

  Avi glares at me, but Max grins. “It’s actually a cloak, not a cape, but you’re right. It is cool. Cloaks are the best. Everybody used to wear cloaks, a long time ago, but now everyone thinks cloaks are only for wizards and vampires and Darth Vader, which ignores the entire history of cloak-wearing.”

  “Oh my God,” Avi groans, but Max is on a roll.

  “Cloaks have many practical purposes. They keep you warm, they keep you dry, you can use them as pillows or blankets or a really small tent, you could probably use them to kill somebody too, I don’t know, I’ve never tried, but you could for sure suffocate someone, or strangle them . . .”

  I like this kid. He might look like a knockoff Dracula out for a jog, but anyone who knows how to turn their clothing into murder weapons is a good person to have on your side.

  “It’s a dress code thing,” Avi says. “Wear it after school.”

  “There’s nothing about cloaks in the student handbook,” Max argues. “I looked. Besides, how could a cloak be against the dress code when the pope wears one all the time?”

  “The pope doesn’t go to St. Clare’s, he doesn’t have to follow our dress code.”

  “What if you wore a sweatshirt instead?” I suggest. “If you tied the sleeves around your neck it would look sort of like a cloak. And no one could take it away from you, if it’s uniform.”

  Max considers this for a moment. “But I didn’t bring a sweatshirt today,” he says, looking down at his long-sleeved PE shirt.

  “Wear mine,” I say, taking off my hoodie and handing it to him. He ties the sleeves around his neck. He’s shorter than me, so the sweatshirt hangs all the way down his back. He twists around, trying to get a look.

  “Does it look okay? Like a real cloak?” he asks. Avi and I both agree it does, so Max stashes his actual cloak in the bushes and takes off running, the improvised cape trailing behind him. Avi stares at me the way you look at an optical illusion, surprised to see anything real pop out of that mess of shapes and colors, but happy you saw it. I’m not sure if meeting Max was a test, but if it was, I think I passed.

  “You’re going to be cold without your hoodie,” Avi says.

  “Then we should probably start running.”

  So we do.

  We get out of last period early, because it’s November 1—All Saints’ Day—and there’s going to be an all-school Mass. I’m happy to skip Spanish conjugation drills but less psyched about sitting through my first-ever Mass. The last time I was in a church was for Sophia’s orchestra concert last year, and that was painful enough. Adding Jesus to the experience can’t possibly improve things.

  “All Saints’ Day,” Lucy explains as we walk toward the chapel, “is the day we honor the lives of all the saints—and really, all the Christians—who have died.”

  “And it’s just a super-weird coincidence that a holiday about spirits and dead people comes right after Halloween?” I ask. Between this and the Old Testament, Catholics seem like history’s biggest plagiarists.

  Lucy leads me into the chapel, stopping to dip her pointer finger in a bowl of holy water by the door an
d cross herself with it. I dip my finger in it, too, cautiously, but it feels like regular water. I resist the urge to taste it. She does a funny little half-kneel toward the altar and slides into a pew. I don’t try and copy her weird bow but slide in next to her. Avi takes a seat next to us. The chapel fills up quickly. Max sits in one of the back pews next to a girl with the longest, reddest hair I’ve ever seen.

  Suddenly, from up above, an organ plays, sounding like a dying cow, and everyone gets to their feet. Father Peter enters the chapel, wearing white robes with a green sash and flanked on both sides by young men, one holding a cross aloft.

  “May the Lord be with you,” Father Peter says, standing at the altar.

  “And with your spirit,” the congregation replies as one.

  “Don’t worry,” Lucy whispers. “You’ll pick it up.”

  But I don’t want to pick any of it up, so I tune out all the words and the Mass becomes an endless sequence of sitting, standing, and kneeling. The sitting’s the best, though I get antsy halfway through Father Peter’s endless speech. The kneeling parts are by far the worst.

  “This is going to give me nerve damage,” I tell Lucy as we kneel on uncomfortable, though blessedly padded, pieces of wood attached to the pews.

  She rolls her eyes. Father Peter holds up the Communion wafer, a little brown disc. As he prays over it, one of the altar boys rings a little bell, and, according to Lucy, the bit of bread and the goblet of wine somehow become the literal (yes, literal) body and blood of Jesus Christ, a man who has been dead for two thousand years.

  I tell her that sounds a lot like black magic. She tells me to shut up.

  The people in the front rows are standing now, forming a line in front of Father Peter. I watch as he places a wafer in their hands, which they pop in their mouths and continue on.

  This is calmest cannibalization ritual I’ve ever seen.

  “Come on,” Lucy says, grabbing the fabric of my blazer sleeve and hauling me up. “It’s time for Communion.”

  We get in the slow-moving line with most everyone else in the chapel, though a handful of people, Avi included, stay in the pews. As we shuffle toward the front, I panic.

  “Lucy,” I hiss at her back.

  “What?” she says without turning all the way around.

  “I don’t want to eat the wafer.”

  “You don’t get to eat the wafer, Michael. You’re not Catholic.”

  “Then why did you drag me up here?”

  She turns around to face me. “Put your arms up like this.” She folds her arms across her chest like a corpse in a coffin. “That’s how they know not to give you Communion. Then follow me back to the pew.”

  Moments later, Father Peter holds the circular wafer up in front of Lucy, then places it gently in her cupped hands. She puts the wafer in her mouth, crosses herself, and continues back toward our seats. I step forward to follow her, arms still crossed in front of me, but there’s suddenly a hand on my forehead. I stare up at Father Peter, totally confused. He looks surprised to see me, too, but quickly swipes two fingers down and then across my forehead.

  It takes me a second to realize it. He made the sign of the cross. On me. I stumble back to my pew, my skin prickling and itching where a priest just marked me for Jesus. I squeeze in next to Lucy, who is kneeling with her head bowed, a perfect image of piety.

  “Did you,” I ask her, “trick me into getting blessed?”

  “Shhh,” she says, but she’s smirking beneath her folded hands.

  After more mumbling and another off-key song, Father Peter commands us to “go in peace,” and the chapel erupts with chatter and the sound of uniform shoes squeaking on the waxed floor.

  “I can’t believe you did that to me,” I mutter to Lucy as we all leave the chapel.

  “If you don’t believe in any of it, then what’s the harm?” She turns to Avi, grinning. “You should have seen his face.”

  She makes a sharp right, away from the crowd of students heading toward the main doors, and Avi follows her.

  “Avi thinks you should join our study group,” Lucy says.

  “But I’m not in your English class.”

  “Yeah,” Avi says, “but we think you’ll get something out of it anyway.”

  I follow them down the hallway, expecting to be led to the library, or maybe the English classrooms on the third floor, but we don’t go to either of them.

  “Um, guys, where are we going?”

  “You shall know even as you are known,” Lucy says. “As the Apostle Paul would say.”

  “I don’t think he’d like being quoted in this situation,” Avi says as we stop at the end of the hall.

  Lucy pulls open the door to what looks like a janitor’s closet, with brooms and buckets of cleaning supplies, but also contains a set of rickety-looking stairs leading down into the bowels of the school.

  “You guys study in the basement?” I say, peering down into the darkness below.

  “Well,” Lucy says, “not exactly.”

  And when I’m about to explode and demand someone tell me what the hell is going on, Lucy grabs me by the hand and pulls me down the stairs. A surge of electricity goes through my hand as she grips it, but that could easily be the basement’s faulty wiring. She holds her cell phone in front of her for light as we stumble down and down until we’re on level ground again, facing an unmarked door. Lucy knocks on it three times, and I nearly collapse when Max, his cloak around his neck again, pokes his head out.

  “Oh, hey, Michael,” he says. “Are you one of us now?”

  When I was six, an irresponsible teenage babysitter let me watch a horror movie on cable, where this cult slowly gained the trust of local townspeople, only to kidnap them and sacrifice their entrails to a horned god. This feels a lot like the scene before the town doctor got his spleen ripped out.

  “I’m . . .” I say. “I think I’m joining your study group.”

  Max frowns. “This isn’t a study group.”

  I’m definitely ten seconds away from getting my organs burned on a pyre for some vengeful pagan deity.

  “Max!” Lucy scolds. “You ruined the surprise. I had this whole speech planned!”

  She pushes open the door to a dim but cozy-looking room filled with a mismatched set of chairs and a faded floral couch. Max stands by the door, and on the couch is his redheaded friend I saw at Mass. Camping lanterns light up the room, and a large sheet of butcher paper is tacked up against the far wall, though I can’t read it from so far away. Lucy guides me into the room and Avi follows, closing the door behind him.

  “Welcome,” Lucy says, “to Heretics Anonymous.”

  6

  ON MY FIRST day at St. Clare’s, as I stood outside the main doors, I remember being surprised at how normal it looked. Sure, it had a better-manicured lawn than my old school, but otherwise, didn’t look much different than most high schools. It was only once I stepped inside that I started to notice the weird statues, confusing twistbacks in the halls, and winding staircases. Apparently, it also has secret underground rooms where students gather for something that isn’t a study group, but thankfully isn’t a homicidal sex cult, either.

  “It’s more like a support group,” Lucy explains as we sit on the couch, looking at the club manifesto she’s pulled down from the back wall. “This school has a billion and one clubs.”

  “Key Club, Drama Club, Model UN,” Max says, ticking them off on his fingers.

  “Yeah, like those, so—”

  “Junior Statesmen of America, Assassins Guild, Knitters for Christ—”

  “You’re making them up now,” Avi says.

  “But,” Lucy continues, shooting a look at both of them, “there’s no club for people like us, who . . . think a little differently. So we made one.”

  “And you hold this club at school?” I ask, my eyes adjusting to the dim light and my brain adjusting to the existence of a secret society in a building crawling with clergy.

  “St. Clare�
��s would shut it down in two seconds if they knew, obviously,” says Eden, Max’s redheaded friend. She’s wearing a necklace with a bunch of symbols I don’t recognize. Her uniform’s wrinkled and her hair’s unkempt, and I get the feeling it’s on purpose. “But it’s more fun to do it right under their noses. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I say. “What’s with the name? Heretics Anonymous?”

  “A heretic is someone who has belief, but not the right kind,” Lucy explains. “At least according to the Catholic Church. A heretic might believe in God, but some of the other things she believes don’t match up with the party line, you know?”

  “Not really.”

  Lucy gestures to Avi. “Jewish people believe in God but don’t believe Christ is God.” She gestures to Eden next. “Wiccans believe in multiple deities.”

  “So do Celtic Reconstructionist Polytheists,” Eden says. “Which is what I actually am, Lucy.”

  “Sorry,” Lucy says. “And Max—”

  “I’m a Unitarian!” he cuts in.

  “What do they believe?” I ask.

  “Hard to tell,” he says. “But the church on Lawson Road let me have a bunch of their old computers to take apart, so I decided I am one.”

  “It’s a free religious community,” Lucy says. “No set doctrine. People decide what they do and don’t believe in.”

  “When I went last week, someone told me a joke,” Max says. “What do you get if you put two Unitarian Universalists together?”

  “What?” Eden says.

  “Three opinions.”

  Lucy laughs. “But Unitarians don’t believe in the authority of the Catholic Church. So they’re heretics, too.”

  “And I guess that makes me a triple heretic,” I say, “because I don’t believe in anything.”

  “You’re not a heretic at all.”

  My heart drops into my stomach. What did she bring me down here for, if I’m not one of them? Maybe I have to go through some kind of initiation, like turning all the crucifixes in the school upside down, or drinking holy water to see if I burst into flames.