I’m one of the lucky ones. I grew up in a house where no one ever yelled. They just laughed, or pouted, or got stern sometimes. Like my dad did this morning.
Even then. My parents always seemed to understand each other. There was an order to the way they always were with each other. Knowing. Teasing. Full of affection.
I know what intrinsically disordered means.
It means I’ll never have a happy church wedding. I’ll never have all my friends and family near me at a pretty place, crying and smiling at my holy transition into matrimony. I’ll never keep a garden with a man, or go to church with him. I’ll never date in any honest way. It doesn’t matter what any laws say, as long as the Church says this. Intrinsically disordered means I’ll always have to fake it. It means I’ll always be alone, banned from making my own family.
Mrs. Scott leans over me. She smells like a combination of all the perfume samples at the Oaks Mall.
“You won’t have to turn this assignment in, Cory,” she says. “It’s just for you to think about.”
I realize she’s trying to reassure me. What can she see in me right now? I glance up at her concerned face and nod. She walks down the rest of my aisle. I look at my right hand and open it. There’s a huge black mark on my palm where I’d started gripping the bottom of my pen without noticing.
I get up and go to Mrs. Scott at her podium now. She frowns like my mom, suspicious.
“I think my stomach is a little upset,” I whisper.
I know, by how freaked out I feel, that I look weird already. Probably pale, as much as a brown girl can look pale.
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Scott says.
I leave my classmates’ dreams of Catholic-approved love and go into the hallway. It’s empty there, but the air is filled with voices from other classrooms: teachers projecting their voices, murmurs of group activities. I know I should go to the nearest bathroom. But I walk four classrooms away from Morality class, stop near a broom closet, then lean against a locker. I slide down the locker until I’m sitting on the floor.
Then the broom closet opens. I look up, then scramble to stand.
“Hey, Cory! I didn’t mean to freak you out, sorry.”
It’s Ms. Holden. The broom closet isn’t a closet. It’s a tiny, windowless office, with a small green lamp, one desk, and two rolling chairs. She’s sitting in one, her tattooed arm holding the door open.
“You supposed to be out here, Tagubio?” she asks.
“I was in class. Then, uh, I wasn’t feeling too well.”
Her forehead wrinkles with beautiful concern. “Need to go to the nurse?”
“No! I just—just needed some air,” I say.
“Okay. Well, you’re welcome to join me. Not much air in here. But a chair’s slightly more comfortable than the floor, at least.”
I stand up. Ms. Holden stands too, and drops a small stopper to keep the door ajar. I sit in the other chair.
“So what class suffocated you?” Ms. Holden asks, and smiles to one side.
“Morality,” I said.
“Ahhhh.” Her smile gets full. “I remember Morality class. I had Sister Perpetua, though. A bit more stringent than Mrs. Scott seems. Lots of . . . interesting material, in that class.”
I don’t know if it’s safe to agree. I just raise my eyebrows and nod, vaguely, the way I see my dad do sometimes when he’s talking to our townhome association head, or rich clients.
I look around Ms. Holden’s small office. She has a giant German-English dictionary, marked with Post-its, and a lot of books with long, complicated titles. There’s an inch-thick manuscript with black plastic binding. A map taped up to the wall of Southern California surf spots, with blocks of coastline marked red.
“Mrs. Carmody didn’t really have her own office,” Ms. Holden says. “She just kept her stuff in one classroom. I like to have a small space for my research, so the sisters worked this out for me. Not fancy, but not bad.”
I nod. Ms. Holden has only one framed photo on her desk. She looks ten years younger. She’s wearing a short-sleeve wet suit. The young guy next to her has shaggy blond hair and a smooth face, and small muscles rippling across his torso. He holds a shortboard in one arm. With his other arm, he holds Ms. Holden around her shoulders. They’re both wet with salt water. He smiles in that explosive way I’d expect someone to smile if they got to touch Ms. Holden.
“How are your other classes going?” Ms. Holden asks. “As well as mine?”
“I’m doing all my work. I finish everything on time.”
I should stop here, I know, but my mouth disagrees with my brain, so I bumble on. “It’s just—sometimes I don’t know if it’ll be enough, you know? Is anything ever enough? Especially in Morality. I mean even the name. Morality class. Having morals. How do you do that? The handouts? The exercises? Is it enough to just—do, and read and write, what they want?”
I stop before my voice starts shaking. I swing side to side in the chair and fake-smile, pretending it’s fun. I wait for Ms. Holden to say something adult: something about needing to stay balanced, how stress and uncertainty are normal parts of high school, how this is one of the best times of my life, etc.
But she studies me. Usually, when teachers look at me, I take an inventory of what to hide about myself. I feel that way in class with Ms. Holden.
But right now, with just the two of us here, I like that she’s looking at me. It feels like as long as she’s holding me with her gaze, I’ll be okay. For the first time in a long time, I feel calm. I don’t want to hide or run. I just want to be here with her.
“There was a guy who worked for the pope around the year 1200 in Germany,” Ms. Holden finally says. “Konrad von Marburg. Super-devout dude. The pope hired him to handle a group that was disagreeing with the Church. The Albigenses. The Albigenses had their own canonical ideas, and they were protesting corrupt bishops in western Europe.”
I like her pronunciation of the German and French names, the foreign languages making unexpected, graceful disruptions in her English. She drums her fingers against her desktop.
“So! Konrad von Marburg went to the Albigenses. He sat them down. Served them dinner. Had a reasonable dialogue with them. By the end, they were all friends, they understood their mutual differences, and peace reigned.”
“Really?”
She grins. “No. Von Marburg tortured and massacred them. He tortured and massacred a lot of people who disagreed with the Church. When folks heard Meister Konrad was coming to town, they’d panic. He said he’d happily murder one hundred innocents if it meant one might be a heretic. Even the corrupt bishops protested his excessive brutality. But, Pope Innocent was a huge fan.
“So Konrad kept at it until he was murdered, of course, in 1233. I could tell you some of the methods Konrad used against heretics. But it’s almost lunchtime so I’ll spare you. Let’s just say you’ll never look at a wheel the same way again.”
I imagine terrible screaming, pleading. An angry man smiling through it all.
“The Church is a very old, very powerful institution,” Ms. Holden says. “It has undergone its own particular evolutions. Thankfully, Meister Konrad and his ilk are out of business. But it makes you wonder what else might change in the Church, with enough time.”