The Saint
Agnes Passion
By
Jacqueline Jillinghoff
Kristen Lamb stirred uneasily in her
seat. There were ten minutes left in the school day, and every second weighed
on her like an armload of books. She couldn’t wait to get out of there. At the
front of the room, Sister Patrice was going on about the mystery of the Blessed
Sacrament. Sister Patrice was a wonderful teacher, and Kristen adored her, but
this afternoon she couldn’t keep her mind on her lesson, even a lesson about
God, delivered in Sister Patrice’s musical brogue.
The girls at St. Agnes Academy had
switched over to their spring uniforms this week — trading their green-plaid
jumpers for khaki skirts, white knit tops with the St. Agnes crest on the left
(Kristen’s was green, to denote her lowly status as a freshman), white
knee-highs and oxblood loafers — but today, even the lighter-weight clothing
felt as airless as rubber.
The April sunlight, angling though the
windows, was hot on her shoulder. Her socks were damp with perspiration, and
her panties chafed the hard tendons between her crotch and her thighs. Her bra
felt tight. She could imagine the red grooves it was digging under her arms.
All she wanted to do was get home, strip off her uniform and lie down on the
cool, crumpled sheets of her unmade bed. She gave her skirt
an upward tug and parted her knees, letting in a touch of air.
It wouldn’t be a sin, she was sure. If
she was alone, and no one could see her, where was the shame in taking off her
clothes? Or admiring her legs, or the way her small breasts leaned away from
one another, flattening at her breastbone, bulging delicately at the sides, as
she lay on her back? Vain, maybe, but not sinful, not really.
Kristen took seriously her Church’s teachings on sexuality, and she’d promised
herself she would remain a virgin until the day she married. Then her husband,
whoever he might be, would fill her with his love — a sacramental act that, to
be holy, must be open to the transmission of life. She glanced at the pathetic
bumps beneath her shirt, and she imagined a child sucking her bare breast. Stretching the stiff nipple, kneading it between its wet gums.
Sucking so hard —
“Miss Lamb? Miss Lamb!”
Kristen fell back to
the present with a jolt, and there was Sister Patrice, giving her an
understanding smile.
“Miss Lamb, I know
it’s a beautiful day, and we’d all much rather be out-soyde, but if you’d give me your attention for another foyve
minutes, you might learn something more about your fay-eth.”
A mocking laugh went
up among the other girls, but Sister cut it short with a raised hand.
“Be charitable,” she
said. “If you learn nothing else in this class, learn that.”
Dear Sister Patrice!
She never raised her voice. She never embarrassed anyone — not like mean old
Sister Saint Augustine, Kristen’s math teacher. If she had caught Kristen
daydreaming, she would have hauled her up to the front of the room and smacked
her bottom with a yardstick. She made her victims pull their skirts up and show
their panties. Spanking ninth-graders like they were little kids: there was
something pervy about that. And a senior told her a story once about a girl who
wasn’t wearing panties when her turn came. Kristen didn’t believe it. It had to
be a school legend, something everybody knew but no one had seen, even though
the upperclassman swore it was true.
Kristen shook off the
image. She straightened up in her chair, resolved to pay attention, only to
find one more distraction to deal with. Lying on her open catechism was a piece
of notepaper, torn from a spiral pad and folded twice. Suzie must have passed
it to her while she was daydreaming. Kristen glanced across the aisle, but
Suzie was facing front like nothing was going on. Kristen could see only the
edge of her brown profile behind the sheet of her black hair. She opened the
note slowly, when Sister wasn’t looking, and read, in Suzie’s loopy handwriting
—
Sister
Patrice has big tits!
Oh, of all the
stupid things! What was her problem? Suzie knew Kristen was a good girl, and
she was always talking dirty to shock her. Kristen liked the naughtiness, the
flirting with sin, but to write something that crude about a teacher as nice as
Sister Patrice was too much. She folded the note again and hid it inside her
skirt, under her leg. She looked back across the aisle. Suzie, eyes still
front, was pressing her lips together, like she was holding back a laugh.
The joke
really was on Kristen. Now she couldn’t help but think about Sister Patrice’s
breasts. And Suzie was right: they were big. It was a pity no baby would ever
suck on them. Sister was young, only a couple years out of college, or the
novitiate, or boot camp, or wherever it was a nun became a nun. She wasn’t as
tall as Kristen, but she was round and womanly everywhere Kristen was straight
and boyish, and her black habit, cinched at the waist, only drew the eye to the
swells of her hips and boobs. Her veil perched on a half globe of orange hair
that swept across her forehead, skirting the high arches of her eyebrows. The
eyes themselves were an ever-changing green, their value shifting with the
light: spring leaves, then a churning sea; jade, then pine. Her cheeks were
full, but her chin was sharp, and when she turned her head just so, Kristen
saw, behind the veil, curling points at the tips of her ears. She looked like a
voluptuous elf.
What did she look like when the habit came off? This was sinful, imagining someone else’s body — and a nun’s body,
too — but Sister had to undress sometime, if only to take a shower. Her breasts
would bounce and jiggle as she massaged them with soap, and she’d lift them in
her slippery fingers, daring a proud smile at their fullness and weight. Here,
Sister, let me do that for you. Kristen, naked, took
the almond-scented bar, rubbed it between her hands, and when they were thick
with foam, placed them gently over the pointed hemispheres …
The bell rang.
All at once, everything was chatter and motion, in the classroom and
the hall. The other girls packed up and headed for the door. Kristen slumped in
relief.
“Tomorrow is Holy Thursday,” Sister said over the din. “The front doors
will be locked. If you’re coming for the retreat, come in through the rear
entrance and meet in the chapel. Ten AM. I hope to see you all they-er.”
“You’re a freak,” Kristen said. “You’re trying to get us killed.”
“It is our duty to bear witness to the truth,” Suzie said. That was
what Sister Patrice had said about the faith.
“That’s not what she meant.”
“How to you know what she meant? Truth is truth.”
Sister had said that, too.
They were the farthest from the door and the last ones out. Kristen
followed Suzie across the room. Sister was erasing the word “accidentals” from
the chalkboard.
“Will I see you young ladies tomorrow?” she asked over her shoulder.
“I think so,” Kristen said.
“You think so? Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.”
“Yes.”
“That’s excellent.” She put down the eraser and turned around, wiping
the chalk dust from her hands.
“What about you, Miss Nguyen?”
“We don’t have to, do we?” Suzie said.
“No, you don’t have to, but I think you can use the pray-yer much more than Kristen.”
Sister had the most beautiful way of trilling her r’s.
“OK,” Suzie said, like was being asked to a dance.
“Well don’t be tew excited,” Sister said.
And Suzie’s note,
which Kristen was smuggling out of the room stuck to the back of her thigh,
peeled off and parachuted to the floor.
“You’ve dropped
something,” Sister said.
Always humble, always helpful, Sister bent over to pick it up, but
Kristen was quicker.
“It’s all right,” she said. She stepped on the paper, then got it herself.
But it was a mistake. Her panic had showed, and it only aroused
Sister’s suspicions.
“Let me see that,” she ordered.
Kristen had no choice but to hand it over. Sister examined the note
intently, and Kristen went cold all over as she watched her life come to an
end.
“How about the both of you stay after class?” Sister said finally.
“Miss Lamb, you have just volunteered to clean the room. And when you are
finished, you wait here until I re-ter-rn. You — Miss Nguyen — come with me.”
“See ya,” Suzie said.
She was in a lot of trouble — a shitload of trouble, she would say —
and it didn’t seem to faze her. Nothing fazed her.
The door shut, leaving Kristen cut off, trembling with rage and fear.
Darn Suzie. No — damn her. God damn her. God damn her to fucking hell. How’s
that for breaking the Second Commandment? She’d been inches away from her
Easter break, and now she was being punished for a stupid joke that she didn’t
even make. Who knows how long she’d have to stay after, or how many days
detention she’d get? They’d probably call her mother, too. Maybe even suspend
her.
Worse yet, it would be hours before she could get home and strip.
Kristen dropped her catechism on
Sister’s desk. She went to the back of the room, and, taking hold of the
long-handled broom that was leaning against the wall,
she proceeded to march through the aisles. Down one, up the
next, down the third, never lifting the bristles. It sucked, but work
helped her breathe, and every few moments, she forgot the trouble she was in.
The noises in the hall died away. One last locker smacked shut, and the
school was silent. The girls of St. Agnes Academy were free, all of them but
Kristen. And Suzie, but Suzie didn’t give a shit.
Kristen swept the floor soot into a dustpan and dumped it into the
wastepaper basket. She put the broom back where she found it. Next to it stood
a bucket of snot-green water with a fat sponge floating in it. Kristen wrung
out the sponge and wiped down the chalkboards. A drop of the dirty water crawled
up her arm and into her sleeve. It was gross, but the cold tickle in her armpit felt nice. It was the only relief
she’d have for a while.
When she was done, she showed some
extra initiative, straightening the girls’ desks. Sister noticed that sort of
thing. Maybe she’d go easier on her. Kristen sat at a desk in the middle aisle,
at the front of the room. There was nothing left to do but pray. The Blessed
Mother would understand she was innocent, even if Sister Patrice did not. She
undid the two top buttons of her shirt, and reaching inside, she clutched the
gold cross that hung about her neck. She closed her eyes. Her lips moved
silently to the Hail Mary. Maybe, if she had thought to do this when she first
saw Suzie’s note, she wouldn’t be in so much trouble now. Certainly, she
wouldn’t have committed the sin of imagining Sister Patrice in the shower.
“Yes,
gur-r-l, pray. Pray for all you are wer-r-th.”
Kristen opened
her eyes. Sister Patrice stood over her. She had entered the room without a
sound, the way the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples.
“What have you
got to say for yourself?” she asked. “Well?”
“I didn’t
write that,” Kristen said.
“But you got a dirty laugh out of it,
didn’t you? When I was a gur-r-l in Dublin, if I had been caught with a piece
of filth like that, they would have flayed me alive. The Irish nuns had no
mercy. But you American girls, you have to be treated like fine china.”
“Where’s Suzie?” Kristen asked.
“She is being taken care of,” Sister said. “It’s you I want to talk
to.”
She brought her chair over from behind her desk and placed it sideways
in the aisle.
“Face me.”
Kristen turned in her seat, and their knees touched when Sister sat
down.
“You are a veddy good gur-r-l,” Sister said. “I see how devout you are,
and I think, of all my students this year, you might be the one to have a
vocation. Did you ever think of that?”
“Yes, Sister. Sometimes.”
“But the company you keep—”
She placed three fingertips on Kristen’s bare knee. Light as the touch
was — angel-light — it sent a ripple up her thigh. Her panties felt tighter
than ever.
She imagined Sister in the shower again — one more sin to add to the
list, brought on by another random thought she couldn’t help. But she didn’t
dare glance at Sister’s breasts.
“Listen to me, child,” Sister said. “That girl is a bad influence. I
hear her using foul language, and joking about … indecent things. You don’t
enjoy that, do you?”
“No, Sister.”
“And yet I see you drawing closer together all the time. Can you tell
me why you two are friends?”
Did those three fingers move? Yes. They had snuck under the hem of her
skirt. The full palm was resting on her knee.
“You have such lovely legs,” Sister said. “When the young men looked at
me, with their indecent thoughts, they looked at my breasts. When they look at
you, I’m sure they look at your long, lovely legs.”
The soft hand went all the way
up her skirt. It came all the way back.
“How would you feel if someone wrote an obscenity about them?”
“Suzie wrote it, not me—”
“Deny her once more, and the cock will crow,” Sister said. “Is there
anything between the two of you? Anything inappropriate?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are a holy fool,” Sister said. “Have the two of you ever
had a lesbian experience?”
“No, Sister!”
“Calm down.”
Miraculously, she produced a tissue and dabbed the wet corner of
Kristen’s eye.
“Then what is the hold she has on you?”
“I don’t know. She’s—”
“She’s what?”
“She’s the only friend I’ve made here.”
“Stop your crying.”
But being told to stop only brought it on. Sister leaned in, clasping
her by the neck.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right. I’m not angry.”
She drew the girl toward her, and she kissed her on her forehead, and
on her wet eyes, and on her wet nose. And on her mouth.
How weird was this? Sister had just asked her if she was a lez, and now
she was acting like one. The Church says it’s wrong for girls to kiss other
girls. But this was Sister Patrice doing it, the woman who spoke to her every
day about the fine gradations of guilt and sin. And yet her lips were soft, and
reassuring.
“It’s all right,” Sister said. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
She ran her hand up and down Kristen’s
thigh, raising the flesh in needle-fine bumps.
“Stand up,” she commanded. Kristen
obeyed, and Sister’s fingers dug between her legs.
“Soaked,” Sister said. “What have you been thinking of, you wicked
thing — my big tits?”
“It’s warm today,” Kristen said.
“That’s not sweat, child. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? A girl gets
wet — down there — when she is sexually aroused. And you are very
sexually aroused.”
She rubbed through Kristen’s panties, and something new, some strange
power, wrung Kristen’s guts from deep inside. Her knees gave, and she had to
grab Sister’s shoulder to keep from falling.
“Do you ever touch yourself like this?”
“No, S’ster.”
“Do you like it?”
“Uh …”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Yes, S’ster.”
“That’s God’s gift,” Sister
said. “But we must be strong.”
Sister stood, too, and, with Kristen’s skirt bunched over her wrist,
she tugged at the waistband of her panties. The air seemed to rush in as the
seal was broken, and Sister’s soft hand went down inside.
One finger
easily slipped through the hairy husk that guarded Kristen’s soft spots, and it
found that funny, flicky bump near the top. Kristen had wondered about it since
she was little, what it was for, peeping out at her when she washed. It felt
nice when she’d touched it, but never like this, tightening her jaw and
clenching her butthole and curling her toes and —
“Don’t come, child. Don’t.”
“Huh?”
“This is a test. It is important that you control yourself. It’s sin if
you don’t.”
Sister was just tall enough to kiss Kristen’s neck. What was that a
test for? But it sent a luscious chill down her leg. She didn’t dare ask what
was going on. She couldn’t speak, anyway. The only sound she made was a
stuttering series of short, choking gurgles.
She could feel herself leaking. Sister’s fingers slipped and glided
over that swollen bump, circled it, mashed it. They slid along the wet groove
between her legs, and one, then another, sank into her buttery hole.
Sister stepped up the pressure, so gradually that Kristen didn’t notice
just when rubbing left off and the jerking and pumping began. Before she knew
it, Sister’s hand was thrashing about in her cunt. The helpless girl nearly fell
to the floor. She flung back her head and clung to Sister’s shoulders. The
forbidden thing was happening, and she was powerless to stop it.
“Sister, you said fu — ah!”
The word was choked off, and a red fog
blinded her as the first orgasm of her young life pierced her like a spear. Something — blood? water? — flowed
from her vagina, and her strength drained away with
it. In her weakness, she surrendered. Willingly. She
loved the fingers inside of her, the mouth on her neck. They both knew she had
failed the test, and yet Sister kept on, kissing and licking her face,
unlocking the mystery of down
there. A second thrust of pleasure transfixed her, then a third.
“You see?” Sister said. “You see how
overwhelming the urge can be?”
“Nobody ever
told me it would be like that!”
“We failed
this time, but that’s all right. We’ll try again, and again and again, until
you’re worthy. Do you want to be worthy of a vocation?”
“Yes, Sister, I do.”
“I have to go now. I
have to go. I want you to go home and say a rosary. And come to the retreat
tomorrow ready to pray. And not a word to anyone — promise
me, darling?”
“I promise, Sister.”
“That’s a good
gur-r-l. You know it’s a sin to reveal the secrets of the order.”
She gave Kristen a
lingering kiss on the mouth. Then she turned away and was gone.
Kristen sat down. She
stayed there a long time, not wanting to move, with her skirt hiked up and her
panties half off her butt. They were soggy, and they itched. She took them all
the way off. No one would know, and the air was cool on her crotch. She looked
at it with fascination. Yes, exposing herself was another sin, but not as big a
sin as the one that just happened.
But she was mixed up, because she didn’t
feel sinful. She felt … great. The only thing that spoiled it was that Sister
Patrice had run off so fast. Kristen missed the fullness of Sister’s fingers
inside her. She wanted to lie in Sister’s arms, doze against her beautiful
breasts, and inhale the clean scents of her starched habit and her almond soap.
“Next time,” she told herself, and she
got to her feet.
The spot around her was in disarray. As
her final Christian duty, Kristen straightened the desks again and returned
Sister’s chair to its proper place. No one would know anything had happened
here. But Kristen knew, and she’d think of it every day she set foot in this
classroom, from now until graduation. She started to stuff her panties in her
skirt pocket, but checked herself, and, with a grin that bespoke her newfound
knowledge of good and evil, she picked up her catechism from Sister’s desk,
left her panties in its place, and went home.