Molly picked her nose and wiped it on the back of Julia’s skirt when she wasn’t looking. Julia lied to her parents about the grade she got in English for her paper on the rebirth of Lazarus. Sarah touched herself while she stared at the crucifix nailed to her dorm room wall. Mary likes girls. It’s their confessions. Of course, Mary won’t tell Father Johnson she’s gay. She’ll lie, as she did to the other girls this morning as they swapped offenses in their communal shower room. She’ll say she took the lord’s name in vain or stole a hair tie from her roommate’s drawer or that she questioned the Word— anything but the sins of her flesh’s desire. In lying she will commit a new sin and won’t have to lie again next week when she goes behind the altar’s veil.

Mary didn’t tell Tara she was gay, either. Tara just knew. They shared a room. Tara saw Mary going through her underwear once, after she had bragged to the other girls about hiding a lacy thong. She watched Mary pull it from the folds of cotton, drape it between her fingers like Sister Aggie’s rosary beads, and bury her nose into its strings, inhaling. Tara didn’t mind—kind of liked the secret admiration— being the only atheist raised daughter at St. Cecelia’s. For the most part, Tara feels on the outskirts of her peers. There’s no rule saying you have to be catholic to attend, but she is singular in her devotion to no religion at all—and to her, being a lesbian is not a sin, but wiping your boogers on someone’s skirt definitely should be.

Mass is conducted and mandatory three days a week: Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Friday—today— is reserved for confessions. Once a month—again today— the girls are hit with the double whammy of communion and confession. Tara walks up the aisle with her arms crossed over her white Peter Pan collar, the school’s dove insignia embroidered on her blouse’s breast. The gesture marks an X: a target, a mistake, a body on its deathbed, an outcast. One time on a family trip, a lifeguard asked her to make the same posture before dropping her down a water slide. So Tara likes to think about that with her arms crossed as she walks between pews— or that she’s the treasure on a pirate’s map.

Truthfully, it’s the only time she doesn't feel watched, their sister-teachers stretched thin across the rows as they conduct the order of their lines to the altar. The other girls feel it too. Tara watches Molly tug the girl in front of hers ponytail until the band falls out, leaving a nest of tangles. Sarah stares up at the big stone carving of Jesus on the cross suspended over the altar. She should probably have to confess foul thoughts twice today. Tara can see the appeal—this depiction in particular—with its hard, cold, and smooth alabaster abs. If you ignore his dreadful stare of agony, he has a chiseled jawline and long hair like a surfer. The pool, even for fantasy, is limited here. Tara herself once pretended that the plaster figure of the Ronald McDonald clown sitting on his bench was her boyfriend with his arm over her shoulder.

Mosaic light from stained-glass windows spread rays of purples, yellows, blues, and oranges like halos on their heads. Tara saw a TV show about a medium once where a woman could see colors she called auras and they said things about people. Sometimes she assigns meaning to the colors here the same ways but—depending on which classmate falls under the light—the meanings change. Blue on Julia’s brown downy hair feels like intelligence, like she stands—not confident, but secure of her ability to answer correctly if Sister Aggie calls her name in class. That same blue on Mary is insecure, lonely, hesitant. Tara tries to decide what the colors mean for herself too, but it makes her mind argue and she starts thinking too much about her posture, the way her face is set, what to do with her hands once they uncross. Just like when Mary felt alone and safe to sniff her undies, someone is always watching—always passing judgement—and God has nothing to do with it.

A girl named Gabriella is in front of Tara in line. Some classmates call her Gabby, but Sister always uses her full name, Gabriella-Alicia Alvarado— Tara thinks because she likes saying it, especially during Spanish class. In fact, right now they are the head of the snake— next in line behind Sister Aggie at the lead—standing in front of Father Johnson. It all feels like kindergarten snack time, waiting for a little parcel of Goldfish and a juice box, rationed to a single bite and sip. Sister Aggie’s hands tremble. Tara isn’t sure if it’s God or Father Johnson that makes her so nervous.

Tara doesn’t call her Gabby either—mostly because they don’t talk at all. She does like her though, because of one time in history class. They were studying the Holocaust with Mr. Baumer. He’s St. Cecilia’s only non-nun teacher—still Catholic—just not as catholic as the rest of them and male. Molly admires him, thinking he could walk on water like Jesus. Tara thinks he’s mean, which is too bad because he is also very interesting. He makes history interesting. Anyway, he likes to trip his students up, belittle them and on this day he used the holocaust to do it. He had been describing how Jewish people were treated: how they were tattooed, starved, and shaved—how their hair was used for pillows—scary stuff. He wanted to frighten all the little girls sitting at their desks under his shadow.

He called Gabby out, made her stand. Tara isn’t sure why he picked her. He could have singled Tara out, her being the only girl with no religion. It would have made sense for him to cull her from the heard, but he picked Gabby. Mary said it’s because she has the longest and prettiest hair out of the whole school—dark and cascading to her waist. Julia thinks it’s because she isn’t white and everyone else was. Usually she’s right about things. She looks smart with her big glasses at least, but Molly says being blind doesn’t mean she’s a genius. Even so, Tara does typically think she’s right. This time though, she knows more than Julia— she knows Gabby was crying. Mr. Baumer probably picked her because he saw she was the weakest, the wounded animal in the pack. Whatever the reason, he called her to stand and she stood.

“Now imagine Miss. Gabriella is a Jew,” he said. The other girls gasped. Tara thought Gabby looked ready to pee herself. She wouldn’t even judge her for it if she did. Mr. Baumer had all her classmates turn their desk away. At first, Tara only heard him pull something from a drawer—a click, and then a buzz. She turned her head and saw an electric razor in his hand. He pointed to Gabby again and said—unless one of her classmates raised their hand to help Gabriella—he was going to shave her head. Several of the other girls clasped their hands over their mouths or their own hair. Tara thought about what she’d look like balled, kind of like a baby with a bigger head.

She wasn’t as shocked as her classmates seemed because she knew she would help Gabby—wouldn’t they all? Maybe not Molly. If anyone would look better shaved it was Mr. Baumer himself, with his hairline receded and combed across his forehead. Tara thinks about a Bible verse—the one about not pulling a plank from your own eye. He fit that story pretty well right then and—if you asked Tara— maybe that should be his confession today. Mr. Baumer said if anyone raised their hand to help Gabriella that he wouldn’t shave her head. But—that the volunteer would have their eyebrows shaved instead. Tara imagined what she’d look like with no eyebrows—kind of like an fat-headed alien, like you could fit an extra finger across your forehead—as if her peers didn’t think she was alien enough.

Tara waited for Gabby to start begging, but she didn’t. All of them turned around to look at her—staring at Mr. Baumer with her fists clinched. An egg timer ticked. She was like Joan of Arch, like a crusader against their classroom tyrant. No one volunteered to help her. Tara tells herself she would have—probably—if Gabby had asked her to. Gabby just stood there, tears running down her face. Tara understood that somehow this isn’t what Mr. Baumer had expected, but he tried to make it fit his lesson mold.

First he turned off the razor and tucked it back into his desk drawer. He asked why no one helped, but he didn’t call on the girls whose hands were raised—not even Julia who always got the answers right. He just kept talking. He pretended to be disappointed, acting like each of them caused the Holocaust by not doing anything. Tara thinks the lesson was supposed to be that people should care more about each other—or something. He made them all feel ashamed because Gabby should be their friend. Tara barely even knows Gabriella, but for some reason she did feel ashamed.

Next Mr. Baumer approached Gabby. He said he wasn’t going to shave her head, which Molly later said was very anticlimactic—a word she probably got from Julia. He asked Gabby why she didn’t ask for help. She was still crying. She said her mom has cancer and that she was already bald—that the pictures made her miss her mom. It made them all miss their moms. Tara notes, then and now, that she never actually answered Mr. Baumer’s question—and he didn’t make her. In fact, that was the last class they discussed the Holocaust at all. They moved on to the war instead. Still Hitler, just without the scary stuff.

Gabby’s aura is orange, and right now it means brave, complicated, and rebellious. Tara really does admire her.

Sister Aggie sips from the communion cup. It stains her lips purple like lipstick. She never wears makeup, of course, and none of the girls are allowed to even have chapstick. It’s some God rule about vanity. There are a lot of God rules about vanity, rules they say protect their purity. Tara wonders why that’s so important here. It’s not like the boy and girl schools. The only non-celibate man here is Mr. Baumer, and he’s married. Maybe it’s to protect us all from being lesbians like Mary—she still likes girls though, so it must not work all the time. Sister Aggie says it’s important to stay pure in the eyes of God, so maybe wearing lipstick or having a too-short hem line might tempt Jesus to come down from heaven and touch us. Sarah must be very disappointed about it.

Tara thinks the wine-stain lipstick looks nice on Sister Aggie. She takes her hands from her crossed shoulders and folds them in prayer like the other girls. Maybe Father Johnson will forget and let her smear her own lips with the blood of Christ. She is envious that they have all tasted wine except for her. As Gabby steps into place for her turn, Father Johnson sneezes into a white cloth in his hand. Tara watches him use that same napkin to wipe the rim of his gold communion cup, a practice to keep it clean between blessings. Gabby sips from it. Tara recrosses her arms. She might have been the only one to see it, but thank God she did. Sometimes it’s good to watch. Tara keeps her arms like that time at the water slide, takes her place and allows Father Johnson to bless her with the sign of the cross. Then she returns to her pew to watch the remaining students and faculty drink from the contagious cup, taking an almost guilty pleasure when it’s Molly’s turn. She waits for their confessions and is glad she does not have to share her own.