Page 33 of The Sinner and the Scholar
Prudence shares a look with the Rev, then gestures for me to follow her. “I’ll show you to your cell.”
I’m both mortified and cautiously optimistic when we reach my monastic cell. I had to share rooms at the group home, but I have my own space here. There’s nothing in the room, though. No fancy toys or pretty dresses, and I worry I’ll live like this forever.
“Thea sounds kinda like Thelma, right?” Prudence plops on my cot and grins.
I nod. “I guess it does.”
“Then the Rev gets what she wants, and so do you. We’ll call you Thea.”
“Okay.”
She takes in my sad face. “Look, kid. If there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it’s what they don’t know won’t hurt them. You catch my drift?”
My frown says I don’t, so she leans over, tugs a book from beneath my cot’s mattress, and hands it to me. I almost drop dead on the floor when I see the cover, and I’m too afraid to take it from her. Every time I get caught with these books, I get in trouble.
She smirks and wiggles it at me. “I heard you like reading romance.”
“I’m twelve,” I say reflexively, repeating what the Matron would tell me. “I shouldn’t be—”
“Bah,” she says and waves me off. “There’s another girl here who’s been reading them since she was ten. How do you think they know which of us is good to recruit? Girls who read romance grow to be dangerous women. We aren’t ashamed of what we want. We ask questions, and we tell the judgmental pricks to fuck off. Just… hide it inside your Bible.”
Sighing, I return to the present and glance again at Prue’s empty cot. She failed to mention that we were also easier to lean into sin… and in the eyes of the Sisterhood, and the church, we’re going to hell for our deviant desires.
Fortunately, my reading tastes have broadened since I was a child, but I still love falling into a world where everything is safe once in a while. It beats the hell out of reality.
And I am a dangerous woman.
Thirteen
Thea
My first thought when I wake up is that I forgot to put away the manuscript, but something stops me from moving. The room is dark and cold, and a breeze shifts the gauze curtain. When did I open the window?
Prue must have done it.
I turn toward her, but my bones are cement—my body is paralyzed. The only part I control is my eyes.What the ever-loving-hell?
And then I feel it… an ominous presence lurking in the air.
Every hair on my body lifts as the evil soaks into the shadows, making them impossibly darker. The walls have ears and eyes. The air has teeth. My pulse spikes. Sweat prickles my brow. Something heavy sits on my chest.There’s nothing here.It’s my imagination. I’m having a night terror.It’s just the breezy curtain and the all-consuming sense that a malevolent force is trying to get inside me to rip open my chest and claw my heart out.
I feel guilty about how I spent the afternoon and then never went to confession. I’ve sinned, and now I’m open to this evil.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?
The need to remove my eyes from the breezy curtain seems necessary. Break eye contact. Set myself free. But it won’t work.
Panic consumes me until I remember my prayers, just like in that alley. I remember the words drilled into me as a teen kneeling on the painful pews while tutored by the old Reverend Mother. She was a cruel master.
Thwack! Her bamboo cane hits my knuckles when I mumble. “Start again, Dorothea. From the top.” Thwack! Thwack!
But now the prayers are drilled into my mind, so I can’t hate her. I recite the Hail Mary and put every inch of my being into delivering the words in my mind.
Shame, shame, little Sinner,the voice hisses in my head, trying to drown out the prayers.I see your perverted heart. I see all of you.
Its words are meant to undo me, but they give me strength. Fuck you, evil presence, trying to shame me. I give myself enough of that in the Sin Bin. I don’t need it from you too.
Ahhh… so juicy and defiant.
