Page 15 of Of Heathens & Havoc

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 theyavoided 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?”

---