Chapter 7 Caterina
CATERINA
Mother Superior’s office always smells like beeswax and lemon—as if holiness was a floor that could be made right with a rag and a ton of elbow grease.
The blinds slice the late morning light into neat bars across the rug.
There’s a crucifix over her left shoulder and a framed letter from my father’s lawyer over her right—the kind written on thick paper that tries to look like conscience.
She gestures to the chair. I take it. Hands folded. Ankles crossed. I’ve been practicing this posture since I was six and somebody told me it was what good girls do with their edges.
“I received several troubling reports,” she begins, and troubling does more work than any of the other words that follow.
“You were seen entering St. Brigid’s on Halloween.
Late. Unaccompanied but not alone. Costumed.
” Her mouth finds a thin line. “Halloween encourages unseemliness. I would have expected you to know better, of all of our students.”
I don’t say anything. I study the little snag in the wood of her desk, right where a pen chewed through the varnish. It looks like a tiny mouth, mid-protest.
“Caterina.” She does not lean forward. Women like her never have to. Authority travels on the starch of their habits. “What were you thinking?”
I could recite the script: I lost track of time. I wanted to pray where it was quiet. I didn’t know anyone was there. I wanted to be close to my mother.
Instead, I swallow and let the question hang until it stops trying to herd me.
“I went to church,” I say finally. “On a holy night. I thought that was the point of churches. Who cares if I was in costume? It’s my last year to do it.”
Her eyes flick down to my hands, up to my face. “But you were not alone.”
I don’t blink. “No.”
“And you were…not praying.”
Heat moves through me like a thread pulled quick. I lift my chin a fraction. “Sanctuary is there for any who seek it.” I’m not giving her an answer, but a truth that she can’t deny.
Something sharp goes through her expression, too fast to name.
“You were seen,” she repeats, slower, as if repetition can sand a thing into decency.
“Not only by students. Also by Mr. Nico Moretti. And the sexton. Plus a photographer from the campus magazine. You are not invisible, Caterina, regardless of what you thought.”
I almost laugh. It catches in my chest like a fishbone. I have spent literally years learning how to walk without sound, how to be small and excellent and unremarkable in exactly the right ways. Invisible is the prize and the punishment. “I’m aware,” I say.
She studies me the way a surgeon studies a stubborn growth.
“You are on a path,” she says, gentler now, like bringing the voice down can bring me down with it.
“There is a time to test the world and a time to renounce it. We have spoken about this. Your father has been most…generous really…in support of your discernment.”
There it is. The donation sitting in a frame to the right of the cross.
“His generosity,” she continues, “keeps certain doors open for other young women. It keeps a roof repaired and a scholarship funded and a pantry stocked. Do you understand what your recklessness threatens beyond yourself?”
As always, I feel the reminder that maybe I am not as good as my mother was, maybe I never will be, burn its way through my soul.
I should be better.
But I’m not.
I’m nothing more than a sinner.
A thought comes and I don’t invite it; it climbs out of me anyway. Even the Amish give their kids a rumspringa. The snort escapes before I can strangle it. Sharp. Inappropriate. Mine.
Her gaze snaps to mine like a trap. She slaps something flat—book, ledger, ruler—against the desk.
The crack echoes. I jump despite myself, a reflex born in rooms with tinier windows.
“This is not a game,” she says, and the softness is gone.
“You do not get a little rebellion as a treat. You do not get to practice sin because you think it will make your vows feel more real.”
I feel it then—everything I’ve swallowed for years rising like a tide through my rib cage.
The good grades and the clean hems and the careful shoulders.
Smiles that pass inspection. The way no one ever says thank you because obedience is supposed to be its own reward.
I stare at the crucifix over her shoulder and think, At least He got to rage for an afternoon before they nailed Him down.
Mother Superior exhales. Smooths the habit over her knees. Puts dignity back on like a shawl. “No matter,” she says, in a tone that means we will pretend it does not matter until it does. “We will restore what can be restored.”
“How?” Do they have a sacrament for photographs? A prayer for men with loud mouths?
A cure for the loss of the hymen?
“There are…conversations,” she says. “There will be a dinner at week’s end. Mr. Moretti and certain associates will attend. We will affirm our mutual goodwill.” She says goodwill like it’s a recipe card. “You, my child, will be modest. You will be silent. You will allow the men to do what men do.”
“Which is?”
“Make peace,” she says, not hearing the echo the way I do. Make peace. Like they make messes. Like they make women. “And you will do your penance.”
Ah. There it is. The tidy part.
She slides a small folded card across the desk, as if I’ve ordered it and she’s the waitress. “Twenty rosaries,” she says. “All five decades. The Joyful mysteries. It is good to return to beginnings when one has lost one’s way.”
Twenty. All five decades. The Joyful. The irony is so round I could roll it between my fingers.
“Yes, Mother,” I say.
She watches my face for a crack that will make her job easier. I make my face into the chapel walls. She nods, satisfied with plaster.
“You may go.”
I stand. My knees ache in that way that tells me I’ve been holding them polite too long.
I walk without hurrying, because hurrying looks like guilt and dragging looks like tantrum.
The corridor smells like chalk and incense and fundraiser coffee.
I hold the card in my palm like it might catch on fire.
Rebellion is a small, bright spark under my tongue. Shame sits next to it, trying to look taller. I let them both ride along as I cut across the foyer toward the side aisle that leads to the sanctuary.
“Cat!”
Prudence barrels into my path like a sunbeam who got bored with the laws of physics.
Fox-colored hair in a scarf that doesn’t match anything she owns, swallowed by an oversized sweater that looks like it belongs to yesterday.
And a grin you can see from the corner of your eye.
She hooks her arm through mine and tugs until there’s nothing I can do but follow.
“Not now—” I start, because the card is heavy as a brick in my hand.
“Now,” she says, steering me away from the church doors with the agility of a seasoned pickpocket. “Field trip. Therapy. Chicago dogs.”
“You’re not from Chicago.”
“I’m born from chaos and adopted by obscurity,” she says cheerfully. “That’s close enough to Chicago for me to love those dogs and devour them.”
We cut across the quad. The wind has knife-edges today; it makes the last leaves rattle like paper prayers.
Pru pulls me into a narrow street where the buildings lean toward each other like old women gossiping.
The hot dog place is a walk-up window two blocks from campus—year-round Christmas lights, a chalkboard menu that threatens to crumble in a stiff breeze.
Steam ghosts up from the grill, carrying mustard and onion and something neon that should not be a food and absolutely is.
She orders for both of us because she learned early that if she leaves me blank space I will fill it with duty. “Two dogs dragged through the garden, fries, and a Coke that could clean a battery,” she chirps at the kid in the paper hat. Then to me, softer, “What did the Mother want?”
I look at the laminated picture of a hot dog with more opinions than most bishops. “To remind me who pays for the new roof and what I have to do in order to earn it.”
Pru’s eyebrows do a sympathetic dance. “Donation drama. Excellent. We love when salvation comes with a plaque.”
“And with the reminder of a sit-down because of my mistakes,” I add. The words feel unreal out here, standing at a window with a tip jar that says BUN MONEY in sharpie. “Friday. With the Shannons.”
Her head snaps. “The Irish Shannons?”
“Yes.”
She whistles. “Spicy. Mob drama.”
“Potentially bloody,” I say.
“I prefer spicy,” she repeats, undeterred. “And what, pray tell, is our girl’s role in this…culinary melodrama?”
“Be quiet. Be pretty. Be present for the appetizer and then disappear so the men can congratulate each other on how very good they are at rearranging chairs and territory, I guess.”
She narrows her eyes. When Pru gets protective, she does not get quieter. “And why the sudden hustle to appease your benevolent overlords?”
Because I was seen. Because the sanctuaries I pick are made of wood and men and rules I write on my tongue with the one night of freedom that I stole. Because I said yes and meant it and the world wants to turn that into a ledger entry.
But I don’t say any of that.
I stare at the fog of my own breath, then cut her a look. “St. Brigid’s on Halloween,” I say at last. “They didn’t like that.”
“They?” She leans in like the word is a secret hiding in my collar.
“The Mother. My father.” I swallow. “Nico. The sexton. A camera.”
Pru goes still. With Prudence, still is rarer than profanity. “You were in the church, though…alone?”
“No.”
“Ca-at.” She sings my name like a threat wrapped in delight. “Tell me you were not alone in a church at midnight with a ghost.”
“I was not alone in the church at midnight with a man, not a ghost.”