seven
The Merciful
I’m on edge the rest of the week. I’m scared to go to confession after the last one was recorded, and I don’t want to increase the sinful thoughts I’m already battling every day. Lusting after a priest has to be an even greater sin than lusting after a normal man… Probably unless the man is your brother.
Nonetheless, I have no other confidant, and finally, the dirty desires in my body lead me back to Father Salvatore. I don’t know how else to deal with them. Giving in is certainly not an option, for a hundred different reasons. I have no one else to turn to. I love my aunt, but I’d die before I’d share this humiliating weakness with her. The other students in my classes are friendly enough, in a surface level way, but I can’t confide in them.
The few people who try to strike up conversations quickly back off when they realize how painfully awkward I am, notice how strangely I wear my uniform, or sense the wariness in my demeanor. In turn, all I can do when I look at them is wonder if they signed up for HAVOC night too, if they were willing participants or coerced into it the way I was. I see Eternity in every face, and pain twists the knife of her absence deeper into my heart.
How can I disrespect her memory by trying to fill the hole she left in my life, as if I think it’s that easy to replace her? And more selfishly, how can I make a friend like her again, when I know I could lose them just as easily?
I don’t fit in, and I don’t try.
I figure that’s what drew the Sinners’ attention the first day—the dowdy way I dress and the way I present myself, along with the invisible shield I have up. While others sense that I don’t know how to engage with them or assume I don’t want to be messed with, and therefore leave me to my loneliness, bullies do the opposite. They sense when someone doesn’t fit, and they take it upon themselves to stamp out those who don’t conform. But they always go for the weakest member of the herd, the one they think is easy prey.
That’s why they came after me, a freshman girl in an ill-fitting uniform, but they backed off when the Hellhounds arrived. Bullies don’t like to fight their equals. They don’t want to risk losing and looking weak. Their greatest fear is my favorite disguise.
I slide into the confessional and close the door, sinking down on the bench and arranging the long skirt of my prairie dress around my knees. A shiver works its way up my arms when I think of Father Salvatore on the other side of the screen, waiting for me to begin. Does he dread what terrible things come from the lips of his congregants each time he sits behind that screen?
Or do our salacious tales titillate?
I squeeze my eyes closed. Of course he doesn’t want to hear these things. It’s his burden to bear, which is why we’re allowed to unburden ourselves in this holy place.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” I shift on the seat, pressing my knees together as the familiar ache begins deep inside my core. Even being this near him is turning me into a heathen, as filled with demonic desires as the boy who rubbed his bare shaft against me while I begged for a mercy I didn’t deserve.
“How long since your last confession?”
“It’s been two weeks since my last confession,” I recite, trying not to get distracted by the sound of his smoky, addictive voice. I force myself not to inhale deeply, seeking the comfort of his masculine scent through the screen between us.
“What’s weighing on you today, lamb?”
I squeeze my fingers around my rosary, wishing I had the strength to tell him I don’t want him to call me that. But I don’t. I love when he calls me that, love it to the depths of my sinful soul.
“I don’t know what to do,” I admit. “I guess I hoped you could give me some advice.”
“Where do you need guidance? Is it the same issue you were having last time?”
I shiver and lay my head back on the wall, both thrilled and humiliated that my confession was memorable enough for him to recognize my voice weeks later, when he must have heard dozens of confessions since then. I comfort myself with the thought that maybe he only knows because I emailed to ask him for a private confession in the booth again. He definitely doesn’t know who I am, that I sit in his class every day, having thoughts about him that would make him recoil in horror and disgust. If he did, he would excommunicate me from the church and damn me to hell with the vilest monsters.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Some of it is the same, but some is new.”
“That’s understandable,” he says. “You’re entering a new phase of your life, with new challenges and temptations.”
“He’s here,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything.
“The boy I used to know, the one who did that thing to me,” I go on, rearranging my skirt and crossing my legs under it. “The other boy and my brother too. They’re all still friends.”
“That must be hard to see,” he murmurs, his voice filled with nothing but warm consolation.
I turn that over in my mind. He didn’t say he was sorry they were here and I had to see them, but that it must be hard to see them together.
It hits home because it’s true. They still have each other, an unbreakable bond. I’m alone, with only a priest to talk to through a screen because I can’t bear to show my face.
And as hard as it would be to make new friends here, I miss them so deeply it aches into every bone in my body, every drop of blood in my veins. Not just Eternity, but all of them.
But they’d never take me back. Their brotherhood may have been forged in campfires where marshmallows roasted while stars twinkled through the trees overhead and our little sleepy eyes fought to stay open; bonfires we danced around in Halloween costumes and sat beside to tell scary stories; but it was sealed shut the day I opened my mouth.
I was locked out of it that day, out of the friendship that had bound me to them before that, tethering me and providing me a place where I belonged as surely as they did.
Now they hate me for what I did. Maybe I deserve to be ostracized. Maybe that’s the punishment for my crime against the Quint—the crime of disloyalty, of choosing the truth over a lie to protect what we had. But more than that, it’s a lesson.
That’s what Aunt Lucy used to ask.
What did that experience teach you?
I didn’t tell her what I really learned—that things that are obvious to others, things they take for granted and assume everyone knows, are a puzzle to me. Maybe that’s what morals are—knowing what’s right without having to think twice about it. That’s when I started to think maybe I was missing that part of myself, something that was evident so early that my birth parents knew, the way the parents of sociopaths know from a young age that something’s not right. Maybe they knew the danger I could pose, the destruction I could cause, and they avoided the disaster before it could happen. Maybe that’s why, as much as I like to pretend it was Eternity’s death, the group started to pull away from me before that.
I didn’t know what to say to the judge, but the others all knew. I tormented myself to tears during every long, sleepless night leading up to the trial. I asked Mom. I let Saint talk me out of it, and then I talked myself back into it. It’s not that I’m missing the desire to do the right thing. I just don’t recognize it. And that makes me even more determined to find it, to do the moral thing, to show people that I can still be good, even if I’m a sociopath or sinner or whatever word people would use for someone who can’t tell right from wrong.
I should have known, like they all did.
I didn’t realize when I told the truth that I’d lose them. I knew they’d be mad, but I couldn’t have anticipated the consequences of doing what was right. It was supposed to make the right things happen. But everything went wrong after that day I told the judge what happened.
“It hasn’t been easy,” I admit to the Father, some pathetic part of me hoping my brother hears this confession and takes pity on me. Surely Heath shares the confession tapes, and even if he’s let the hatred and havoc take him over, my brother is more level-headed. Maybe under the layers of cold loathing, he still harbors some ember of warmth in his heart for me.
“And how are you dealing with that?” the Father asks. “Are you struggling with the sin of envy?”
“No,” I admit. “It’s still the other one.”
I feel my face heat, and I can’t bring myself to say the word.
“Lust?” he says, his voice dropping an octave, the word sounding like pure sin rolling off his tongue. There’s a dark undercurrent in it, something that takes my breath and makes impure thoughts lick inside my brain.
Is he hard?
“Yes,” I manage, my pulse quickening dizzyingly.
“From seeing the boy from your childhood?”
“All of them,” I admit. “They’re men now and…”
I can’t say all the sins aloud, not even to the man who can absolve me. I can’t admit that the hunger inside me is kindled not just by Heath, but Angel and even my brother. It’s bad enough to harbor sinful thoughts for one man, but that’s not the end. I have to lust after all three of them, including a member of my own family. Not to mention the way I’m squirming on the seat at the sound of a priest’s voice. This time, I know it’s wrong, but I can’t find the solution to the puzzle, the piece that snaps into place and turns it off like a switch.
“Why am I like this?” I whisper, desperate for him to give me some relief, to pour the solution into my ears in that voice that threatens to send me to the depths of hell.
“God made each of us in his image,” Father Salvatore murmurs. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
“I wish that were true,” I say, running my fingertips over the texture of the screen between us, wishing I could make him see all the ways I’m flawed, the ungodly things I’ve dreamt about on the nights when sleep won’t come.
“You don’t trust my word?” Father Salvatore asks.
“I do,” I say. “I trust you, Father.”
“Then believe me when I say, you are perfectly made, lamb.”
A shudder of heat ripples through my wanton flesh. “I want to believe that,” I say despondently. “But I feel like I am made of sin by the devil himself.”
“None of us is without sin,” he assures me. “Have you ever considered your desires were put there by god, not the devil?”
“That’s not possible,” I whisper, clenching my knees together.
“Nothing is impossible with God,” he says.
I swallow hard, past the trembling, liquid feeling in my throat. Images swirl through my imagination and memory—Heath’s bare skin against mine, milky liquid and throbbing muscle, dirt floors, blood and hot breath, grunts of pain and sighs of rhapsodic relief…
“If someone sins against me, that’s not my sin, right?” I ask. “I can’t help it if they do something to me.”
“Of course,” he says gently. “God does not punish us for hardships we face or the actions of others. We are only responsible for our own actions.”
I ponder that, wondering if inaction counts as an action. Maybe it doesn’t, but desire is a sin. If I don’t do a thing, but I desire what they do to me, that makes me as bad as them. I want to cry. I can’t find a way to escape my body and the weaknesses of its flesh, and it seems determined to see me burn for eternity like the fires burning inside me even now, as I sit with a holy man in a holy place, where sin should not be able to enter.
“And if I knew someone else was going to sin, and I helped prevent that, would that make me a more righteous person?” I ask. “Would that absolve me of some of my own sin?”
“Again, you’re not responsible for the sins of others.”
“But it would be a good thing, right?” I press. “To prevent more sin from entering the world?”
“What sin do you wish to prevent?”
“I was invited to this… This Halloween event,” I say haltingly. “But I think it’s a satanic ritual, Father. I think they’re doing something unholy.”
My heart stammers in my chest, and I swallow again, blood rushing in my ears. If Heath records all the confessions, and he hears me ratting him out to the Father, and the school puts an end to their night of depraved revelry…
But then, they already think I’m a rat. I told on them to a judge. What’s the difference? I didn’t save Eternity last time, and I probably won’t save myself this time. If I shut down their game, they’ll punish me the same way they will if I don’t. But maybe I can save someone else from the sins they might fall prey to that night.
“And you want to stop it,” he clarifies.
“Yes!” I cry. “You could do that. Right, Father?”
He’s silent for a long, long moment, and I hear him shifting on his side of the partition. “I’ll see what I can do for you,” he says at last. “But Thorncrown is more complicated than what meets the eye. There are things that go on at this school that might seem strange to the ordinary student, but there’s a reason for everything. There’s meaning and tradition behind every organization at this school.”
I swallow hard. “You can’t stop them?”
“I’ll look into it,” he says.
“If I go… If I go, and something happens to me…”
“Are you afraid you’ll be corrupted by what you see or experience?”
“Yes,” I admit. “More than I already am. Is it a sin to go, Father? If I participate, even to keep someone else from sin, that means I’m as sinful as they are, doesn’t it?”
“That would be your only purpose in going?” he asks.
“They said—the signup form for participation said I would absorb their sins,” I say, my voice shaking. “Is that possible? Could I be worse than I am?”
“There is nothing wrong with you, lamb. You are exactly as you were designed.”
“It feels like there is,” I whisper.
“Is it a sin to take sin from the world?” he asks slowly. “I don’t think so. Do you?”
“No,” I say, closing my eyes in relief. “But what if… What if I… Like it?”
“If you could wash away someone else’s sin, and therefore leave the world with less sin, I don’t think that makes you sinful,” he says. “No matter what you feel about it. What you feel is there for a reason. Your feelings are not a sin. They’re feelings. God made us to experience these emotions, just as He made us to experience the sensations in our bodies.”
My breath comes quicker as I listen to the velvety intoxication of his voice, a smoky tone that is its own sacrilege.
“So you think I should go?” I ask.
“I think only you can know the right thing for yourself, lamb,” he says. “When I’m uncertain, I ask for guidance and listen for the answer. I often find what I seek in the silence.”
I nod slowly, though he can’t see me.
“Have you prayed on this?” he asks gently.
“No,” I admit. “I’m scared to ask.”
“Are you afraid you’ll get the answer you desire?” he asks. “Or that you won’t?”
This time, I remember to answer aloud, the whisper slipping between my trembling lips.
“Yes.”