I
Connecticut
1.
June 1956
It was Isabella who invented the game Dead Nun. Before she moved to St. Cyrus, we had simply played Nun. Decked out in white pillowcases, we knelt between the beds in Flora McDonald’s spare room until someone guessed which nun we were aping. It was easy enough; Sister Josephine was a characteristically heavy breather, and Sister Mary Benedict blinked in long, slow strokes, like a dairy cow. But when Isabella joined our sleepovers, she insisted on the morbid finale. And so Flora moved the beds apart until four girls at a time could lie side by side on the floor. That’s when the challenge began: the last girl silent won. The last girl silent was always Isabella.
My job was to count Mississippis. Partly because pretending to be dead was a terrible jinx, but mostly because I was never actually invited to join. Instead, my place was by the window, where I perched on the sill with what I hoped passed for easygoing cool. Since Flora had once been a Girl Scout, her job was to make sure nobody cheated. Flora claimed she could judge best by standing in front of the door, but I knew it was strictly preventative, since Mrs. McDonald was the kind of mom who covered Kleenex boxes in ruffled quilts for modesty. And even though Flora made me say Hail Marys with her after each sleepover, and even though watching girls lying still and being quiet wasn’t much of a Friday night, I appreciated that the game gave me a chance to be close to Isabella. To observe how she wrinkled her nose when Sophie LeBaron giggled and spluttered. To cheer her when she rose victorious from the floor, red-faced and clammy, her pulse beating in the hollow of her throat.
* * *
When Isabella arrived at our high school that year, I never dared to hope we would be friends. The rumors of her malaria had awarded her an irrevocable celebrity even before she enrolled.
On her first day, she’d turned up wearing old sneakers, as if school regulations were already of no consequence to her. She possessed heavy, quirky good looks—straight, dark eyebrows, full lips—and we immediately recognized her potential for womanly beauty. Her hair was long and black with a wealthy sheen to it, and though the rest of us had been wearing our hair in pageboys, I decided then to grow mine out. She had a low voice and moved with a careless confidence we studied with reverence. Mrs. Stockley, the dance teacher, was always telling us to sit like ladies, to cross our ankles like ladies, and occasionally she made us practice gliding up and down the gym with hardback copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer balanced on our heads. But Isabella gnawed her fingernails and crouched on the cafeteria bench with her knees pulled to her chest. She was perpetually jiggling her foot during classes, and as she passed through the corridors, she whistled, like a boy. Around her right wrist was a band of pale skin she said was a tan mark from the hospital bracelet. I realized later it couldn’t have been, because surely nobody wears their hospital bracelet to the beach.
Isabella’s robust constitution took on a mythic quality. Girls began minimizing their coughs and colds, keeping Isabella in the corner of their vision as they stoically refused to complain about strep throat or sinus infections. There was a sudden mad fashion for charity work. Talent shows and bake sales and raffles to auction sunset cruises and Calder mobiles. And all the proceeds going to the African Trust for Tropical Diseases. Never mind that Isabella wasn’t actually in Africa when she got malaria. The rumor alone was enough to sustain our guilty frenzy of conspicuous altruism.
And over the course of the year, Isabella’s infamy had only grown. Samantha Bleath said she’d seen Isabella diving from the top board at St. Cyrus Country Club. Eleanor Robinson said that while drinking a milkshake at the Creamery, she’d seen Isabella pass by, check to see that no one was watching, and kick Mr. Anderson’s Scottish terrier. Flora reported that Isabella’s father brought her back a new charm for her bracelet from every country in Europe. I covertly appraised Isabella that year during Mass: the raw fingernails, the charm bracelet tinkling above her not-a-hospital-band tan line. But I understood my role as second-tier acquaintance. I would be allowed close to Isabella at sleepovers, at lacrosse, and during games of Dead Nun. It seemed selfish to wish for more.
But then a rumor spread around high school that we were playing Dead Nun, and our game was busted. The nuns got the wrong idea and thought girls were giving each other sacraments. The whole grade was called into an assembly. With rheumy eyes, Sister Marie Carmel warbled on about the sinfulness of mocking the last rites while we muffled yawns and stared at the gilded list of prefects inscribed on the far wall. Flora was sitting straight upright, the tips of her ears turning pink. Sophie LeBaron was picking at a thread on her kilt, and Eleanor Robinson was studying the back of her Bible with unusual concentration. Three rows in front of me, Isabella turned and caught my eye. Slowly, she crossed herself and then mimed a knife through her heart.
My pulse shot into my eardrums. I didn’t care that everyone would see. I was glad everyone would see. Isabella. Acknowledging in front of the whole school that we were allies. That we shared a secret. From the teachers’ bench at the front, Sister Mary Florence flinched and her lips grew tight. She tapped her wristwatch, mouthing, “Corridor,” with a menacing arch in her eyebrows.
After the closing prayer, Isabella and I waited in the corridor while girls filed by us into classrooms. As they passed, they whispered and nudged each other, looking at us, or conspicuously not looking at us. Isabella chewed her fingernail and began trying to balance on the edge of the banister, as if she weren’t in trouble at all. My ears were hot. It was the first time I had ever been sent into the corridor.
“Demerit,” Sister Mary Florence said, appearing from the auditorium. “Both of you.” She took out the little leather book she used to record the names of delinquent girls.
I’d expected worse. A lecture. A Bible reading at the least.
Sister Mary Florence flicked through the book to find a blank page. “And detention until four p.m. in the library.”
Isabella’s mouth fell open. “But I can’t!” She turned to me, as if I had any say in the matter. “I have a dress fitting today.” Her expression was so stricken it prompted something inside me, a bubble of inspiration.
“It was my fault,” I said.
Sister Mary Florence snapped her book shut and stared at me. I don’t know that she’d ever looked at me properly before. “I beg your pardon?”
“It was my fault,” I said, more loudly now, pressing my fingernails into my palms. “I dared her. Before school.”
Sister Mary Florence sighed. “Fine. Report to the library after class. Miss Crowley, you are dismissed.”
Isabella shot me a wild look that was part horror and part relief.
“You can call your mother from the office,” Sister Mary Florence said, beginning to turn. “And explain why you’ll be late home.”
I didn’t move.