Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

  Max nods and accepts the cloak, holding it close to him. “Bye, Michael,” he says as he leaves.

  “Bye.”

  I turn back to the paper cutter, but I can feel Father Peter watching me. “Are you two friends?” he asks.

  “Sort of.” Once fellow secret society members, now just sort-of friends. A sort-of friend can still stand up for another, though. I turn to face Father Peter. “He calls it a cloak. Not a costume.”

  I expect him to ignore that, or to tell me to focus on the paper cutter that’s so close to claiming one of my thumbs. He tilts his head. “Do you think I’m being unfair?”

  The correct answer is “no.” The correct answer is “I just got off suspension for things I did because I thought you were unfair, so maybe I don’t have the best judgment.”

  “The cloak’s important to him,” I say.

  Father Peter nods. “But the dress code doesn’t include cloaks. If I let him wear it, wouldn’t I be treating him differently than the rest of you? And wouldn’t that be unfair?”

  I want to say no, out of principle, but I stop. I think. I feel a spark, deep in the pit of my stomach. A spark of an idea, an argument. Not a smashing-glass rage of an argument, but something better, a reason. “I think you’re already treating him differently than the rest of us.”

  And again, I expect him to stop the discussion. “How so?” he asks.

  I pause and let the words become clearer and crisper in my head. “A cloak is an article of outerwear. Right?”

  Father Peter nods.

  “And in the dress code, outerwear like coats and jackets don’t have to be from the uniform company, right?”

  “No,” Father Peter concedes. “But coats aren’t worn in classrooms, or during PE—”

  “But they can be worn in the hallways, during passing period; they can be worn before and after school on school grounds, which is basically what Max is already doing.”

  He stares at me, his pale eyes boring into me like they did on Ash Wednesday, but what’s behind them is different. He goes back to his computer. “I’ll think about it.”

  The next day, Max struts down the hall in his cloak, a canary-colored note on Father Peter’s personal stationery held tightly in his fist.

  When I get to the dining hall, Max and Eden are waiting for me outside. Max has safety-pinned the note to his cloak.

  “Was it you?” Eden asks. “Did you convince Father Peter to let him wear the cloak?”

  I’d thought about telling them, right after the conversation in Father Peter’s office. I thought about texting Max, letting him know what I’d said. But then I thought, who would that be for? Max, or me? I didn’t want him to think I had an agenda or I’d done it to get back in the group’s good graces. Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others, in order to be seen by them.

  “I don’t know,” I say truthfully, because who knows why Father Peter did what he did?

  “Come on,” Eden says. “Max sees you in the office and the next day he changes his mind?”

  “Also Father Peter told me it was you,” Max says, bundled in his cloak like baby Jesus in the manger.

  “I’m glad he’s letting you wear it,” I tell Max, and start to walk past them, trying so hard not to hope they’ll forgive me, because that’s not why I did it.

  “Wait, Michael,” Eden calls. I stop. So does my heart. I turn around. “We saved you a seat.”

  I eat lunch with Eden and Max every day that week, and they fill me in on everything I missed while I was suspended. Before I even got to school on Ash Wednesday, Lucy went down to the HA room and spirited away the club charter—the one we all signed. This horrifies me. She could so easily have been caught. No one’s been down to the HA room since.

  “I don’t think we can ever go back,” Eden tells me, sending fresh ripples of self-loathing through my veins. She’s right. Nothing will ever be the way it was before.

  “How’s Lucy doing?” I ask them. Eden and Max share a look.

  “We haven’t really been talking all that much,” Eden says carefully.

  “Because you didn’t want to look suspicious?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Max says. “But also—I don’t think Avi wants to. Especially since we started talking to you again.”

  Ouch. Understandable, but ouch.

  “This has been hard for Lucy,” Eden says. “When she’s hurt, she hides. Honestly, I think she wishes Avi would leave her alone, too.”

  The first day I was on suspension, Father Peter held an all-school assembly and announced that the person behind HA had been caught and had apologized for what he’d done. I think this is a very liberal interpretation of what I actually said, but whatever.

  “Father Peter said this was an ‘opportunity to heal,’” Max says. “Like we cut everyone open, or something.”

  In some way, I think we did. What I did—what Heretics Anonymous did, ever since the video—opened people up. It wasn’t a clean cut, but we saw what was inside everyone. I get why Father Peter thinks that was bad, but there was good there, too. Just like Jenny said.

  Nothing can be the way it was before. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be repaired.

  With Eden and Max back in my corner, I turn my focus to Lucy. I think Avi will follow Lucy’s lead, but Eden is skeptical.

  “He’s a grudge holder,” Eden says. “Lucy—she’s not, but what you said at her house . . . I don’t know.”

  For the next couple weeks, I give Lucy space. Even after Dad gives me back my phone, I don’t text her, though she probably blocked my number. I don’t approach her in history, though she jumps out of her desk the second the bell rings and is out the door before I even think the words “I’m sorry.”

  She seems determined to avoid me, and I’ve let her, but on a cold day in March, I decide to break that streak, because I have to. It’s her birthday.

  “I want it on record I don’t think this will work,” Eden says as we eat lunch that day. She jabs at her roasted carrots as Max and I share pork dumplings he brought from home. “And if she asks, I had nothing to do with this. Nothing. Got it?”

  I nod, nudging my backpack with my foot to make sure it’s still there. Inside is Lucy’s present, wrapped up carefully and tied with a bright red ribbon. Eden, who knows Lucy’s locker combo, will secretly place the present in the locker, where Lucy will find it, and forgive me, and stirring music will play as the credits roll.

  I hand the package over to Eden, trying to block it from Lucy’s view on the other side of the dining hall. Not that she’s looking.

  “It’s a weird shape,” Eden says, examining it.

  “You have to keep it upright,” I tell her. “Or it’s going to be a huge mess.”

  “Is it ice cream?” Max asks. “Because Lucy is lactose intolerant, so I don’t think you should get her ice cream.”

  Eden tucks the package carefully into her bag. “No, she’s not. She just didn’t want to eat those cheese curds you brought from Minnesota.”

  Max looks stricken. “But they’re so good! Did you know if you feed cheese curds to rats they gain the ability to digest beer?”

  I check my watch for the eighth time in two minutes. Lunch is nearly over, and Lucy hasn’t stopped by her locker yet. She always makes a stop before theology, because that textbook’s a monster, so where is she?

  She appears in a flash of skirt and ribbon, thankfully without Avi by her side. She undoes the combination lock, and my heart pounds with every click and turn, and then it drops into my guts as she yanks the lock down and off. She stares inside the locker. Pulls out the package. She looks left and right, and I dive back behind the hallway corner. I count to five, slowly, and by the time I look around the corner again, she’s got it unwrapped. In her arms, she cradles a small pot of flowers in full bloom. Hellebore.

  “Lenten roses!” the woman at the flower nursery said as she rang them up yesterday. “Don’t they bloom so nicely this time of year?”

 
A couple of the flowers are dented from the wrapping paper, but they’re vibrant and bright, and look brighter in her arms. It’s not enough to replace all the flowers she lost, not enough to make up for the storm and her mom and the things I said, but it’s a start.

  Lucy stares down at them and gently fingers a petal. She snaps her head up more quickly than I can react, and then she’s staring at me, holding the flowers, trying not to cry. I stare back. She shoves the flowers in her locker and walks off, forgetting her theology book and leaving me and an open locker in her wake.

  30

  LUCY SKIPS THEOLOGY. I catch Avi glaring at me, like he knows I’m responsible for this, like I’m responsible for everything else. I try to focus on Sister Helen and her lesson, but my notebook stays blank and my mind stays stuck on Lucy at her locker, Lucy who hasn’t forgiven me, Lucy who rejected the flowers.

  Eden was right, this never had a chance. I thought it was the perfect gift—something to replace what she lost, something to show I was still thinking of that day, something she couldn’t get herself, not without a car. And it still wasn’t enough.

  The topic of Sister Helen’s lecture is the change between the covenants of the Old Testament and those of the New. I admit, the whole thing’s more interesting now that I’ve skimmed Leviticus and read all the hyper-specific laws for myself, but the intricacies of animal sacrifice are starting to make me feel sick.

  “As you can see,” Sister Helen says, “much of ancient Israelite worship revolved around the idea of sacrifice, from food to animals, a holdover from older practices. During Christ’s life, Jewish people still made ‘burnt offerings’ of goats and sheep at their temples.” She turns to the board and writes HOSEA 6:6. “But even before Christ, a shift was being made. In Hosea, God says, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ and Christ himself repeats this scripture in the Gospels.”

  I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

  I remember this line, and I remember Lucy wrote that for mercy, you could also read loyalty or love. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. What I gave to Lucy was a sacrifice, not burnt and bloodied like a slaughtered cow, but a sacrifice. I said, “Here, take a gift in exchange for the pain I’ve caused you, take a bought thing in exchange for the hurt in your heart.” Lucy, like her God, desires mercy, loyalty, love. She doesn’t want my burnt offering.

  There are tears threatening the corners of my eyes, frustration curling my fingers, and a touch of anger hunching my shoulders, because there is nothing I can do. I can’t make Lucy talk to me again, can’t make her see me the way she once did. The anger’s growing stronger, because why not? Why can’t my offering, my sacrifice be enough? Why won’t she forgive me, why won’t she plant the flowers or say my name? I’ve done all I can do, apologized and paid for what I did. Her Bible, the book she lives her life by, says you’re supposed to forgive someone who has wronged you seventy-seven times over. So why won’t she?

  But then—it also says no person can be forgiven until they first forgive. I forgave Dad for dragging me here. I’m starting to forgive Father Peter and everyone at St. Clare’s for the things they’ve done. But maybe I’m still not done, maybe it’s easier to forgive some people than others. Maybe I haven’t forgiven Lucy.

  I have to forgive Lucy for not forgiving me. I have to let her go.

  The chapel is different when it’s empty. During Mass, with a hundred kids and teachers shifting and rustling their hymnals and the terrible organ bleating, it feels awake and alive.

  Empty, it feels more like a museum, silent and cavernous, light reflecting off stained-glass windows and onto the altar, bare and warm. The world outside might as well not even exist. There is nothing but silence and space.

  I sit in the front pew, the same one I sat in on Ash Wednesday, and can still feel the slick coldness of the ashes on my forehead. I don’t know why I’m here, other than school’s over and I don’t want to go home yet. At home, there’s Mom and Sophia and Dad now too, but there’s no silence. I want silence, for a minute.

  “Are you all right?”

  Sister Helen stands a few pews back, some books in her arms.

  “Yeah,” I say, but it comes out as a whisper. I clear my throat. “Yes. Sorry, Sister, I can go.”

  “No, no, stay as long as you like. I was putting some hymnals away.” She deposits them in a pew and makes her way down the aisle, lowering herself into the pew next to me. “It’s nice like this, isn’t it? Quiet.”

  I nod, but then feel like I should explain, like I have to be clear. “I’m not a—I mean, I don’t believe in any of this, or—”

  Sister Helen waves her hand. “I’ve been in Egyptian mosques, in Buddhist temples, in beautiful synagogues in Warsaw and Jerusalem. I don’t need to believe in Buddha or wear a Star of David to find peace there.”

  Peace. I want that, but I don’t know if I’ll find it here.

  “Believe in what you like,” she says. “But there is a place for you, here.”

  That’s what Lucy said, the first day I met her. There’s room for people like us.

  “You know, there’s a long tradition of challenging authority within Catholic history,” Sister Helen continues. “Rebels and revolutionaries have always been part of the church.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But don’t they usually get burned at the stake?”

  She laughs. “Thankfully, the church has evolved on that front. And it will keep evolving.”

  “Not fast enough,” I say, thinking of Ms. Simon and her wife. Of Lucy, who will never be a priest.

  “Very slowly,” Sister Helen agrees. “Just like real evolution. It took millions of years for Homo habilis to become Homo sapiens, but I don’t think it will take quite that long for the church.”

  I stare at her. “You believe in evolution?”

  “I have a degree in human genetics, so I think I’d better.”

  I don’t know why I assumed she wouldn’t, just like I assumed she didn’t have a degree in anything but Jesus. What else don’t I know about her, about Father Peter, about Sister Joseph Marie? About everyone?

  I focus back on the altar, decked in dark, somber purple for Lent, and listen as Sister Helen shuffles slowly back up the aisle to the chapel doors. I expect to hear the heavy wooden doors shut but instead hear someone coming back down the aisle. Did Sister Helen forget something? No, it’s not her labored, heavy walk, but footsteps crisp and quick.

  Lucy.

  I feel her before she’s there, before she does her half bow and crosses herself in front of the altar, before she takes a seat in the pew across the aisle. We sit in silence. She’s come for a reason, and I’ll let her take her time. She stares at the altar, at the hemorrhaging Jesus in front of us, anywhere but at me.

  “Max told me he saw you come in here,” she says. “I thought he was kidding. I looked everywhere for you—literally, everywhere—before I came here.”

  The thought of Lucy searching for me swells my heart and brightens the fluttering, fragile bit of hope I have left.

  “Is this, like, a ploy?” she asks. “Did you come here so I’d think you were sorry, you were different? Do you want me to believe you’re religious now?”

  “I’m still me,” I say. This is the closest she’s been to me in days, weeks. I don’t even care that she thinks I’m playing her. “But I am sorry. So, so ungodly sorry.”

  She gives me a quick glance, then focuses on the altar. “And the flowers? That’s because you’re sorry, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you chose to apologize by breaking into my locker?”

  “I didn’t know when else you’d get more.”

  “What?”

  “The closest flower nursery’s a half hour away. You’d need a car.”

  Lucy looks at me then, full on, her brown eyes battling something. “That was . . . nice of you.” She shuts her eyes. “God, I don’t want to be mad at you anymore!”

  I didn’t know there was a fifty-pound anvil on my chest. I didn’t even know
until this second, when it lifted.

  “Well,” I say, and my voice sounds squeaky. “I don’t want you to be mad at me, either?”

  “But I am,” she says. “I am and I’m not sure if I ever won’t be. Avi says I should never talk to you again, but I don’t want that, but I don’t know what I do want, and I don’t know why you’re in this chapel!”

  I get up and slowly move across the aisle to sit next to her, leaving space between us. She doesn’t ask me to leave. I wait for a moment, then say what I’ve wanted to for weeks, possibly forever.

  “I do not believe in God,” I start off.

  “I had no idea.”

  “Hear me out. I do not believe in God, I do not believe in heaven or hell or in aliens, honestly, but I can believe in what I see and feel on earth, and I’ve felt . . .”

  What have I felt, in the last six months? Joy, and despair, and rage, and love, I think. And more, threads in my veins and surges in my blood that can’t be described.

  “I don’t have a God,” I continue, “and I don’t have a religion. But I do have a church. I do have a place that makes me safe and protected and known, like you said about Easter Mass when you were a kid. I have a place I feel known.”

  Her lips part a little, and I think she knows what I’m about to say.

  “It’s you,” I finish. “You’re my church.”

  Lucy stares at me. She shakes her head like a dog clearing water out of its ears. “No. You can’t do that to me; I can’t be that. I’m a person, I need to make mistakes, too. I can’t be God.”

  “I didn’t say God,” I remind her, “I said church. God is perfect and infallible, right?”

  She nods.

  “The church does its best to interpret, to pass down what’s good, to shine a light and be a safe haven, right? But the church can make mistakes, and it has, yours especially. You can make mistakes, you can be human, but—you’re still the greatest good I’ve ever known.”