Devilish. Maureen Johnson

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      Here, for your edification, is Jane’s first law of lateness. Given that

      a. you don’t fall asleep until 3 a.m. because you sit up all night writing e-mails to your ex-boyfriend that you are never going to send,

      b. your power goes out somewhere around four in the morning because of freak wind and rainstorm,

      c. your obnoxiously loud green alarm clock doesn’t go off because you haven’t changed the backup battery since you got it (Christmas, age twelve), and

      d. you wake up with a sudden start and a horrible feeling in your stomach because you haven’t been blasted halfway across the room by the screaming antics of Boston’s most annoying morning DJ (station chosen expressly for this purpose),…

      the time will be exactly (and I do mean exactly) four minutes before you have to leave for school.

      Why four? Partially because five minutes is an accepted unit of time. Four minutes is just short of an accepted unit of time. But because you technically have some time because you aren’t late yet, you think you can use that time and do all the things you normally do… just a little more quickly, with the fine points ignored. But the truth is, you just make yourself later in the process.

      Joan was in the shower, so I made a pathetic attempt at washing myself up with peach-scented dish soap at the kitchen sink. I evaded any questions from my father, who was standing at the counter slicing a pile of grapefruit. I was still ten minutes late in leaving. I forgot my keys in the process.

      The weather was foul. It was pouring down rain. The trolleys were a mess, so I tried to walk. The wind blew my umbrella upside down halfway to school, and I couldn’t really get it to turn the right way again. And as a final gesture, I was so busy running up the school driveway that I didn’t even try to avoid the countless holes that I couldn’t see because they had filled with water. I went right into one, soaking one foot completely and banging up both my knees. Sister Rose Marie passed me a demerit in the lobby for ‘throwing open the door with excessive force.’

      I checked in at the front office with Sister Mary Bernadette, the principal’s secretary. Everyone loved Sister Bernie. She was a tiny slip of a woman, probably ninety years old, with a high, cheerful voice. One of the few blessings in the school was that if you were late, you checked in with Sister Bernie, who had endless sympathy for any story and believed that everyone told the truth. I once tested this famously boundless faith sophomore year, when I overslept. I came in and told Sister Bernie that a pack of dogs got loose from a dog walker and pinned me in between some Dumpsters for half an hour. Sister nodded sadly and patted my hand and said, ‘Poor dear. Dogs can be so unpredictable. Mother Mary was with you, though, and kept you safe. No demerits. And stop down in the cafeteria and have something to eat to calm your nerves.’

      Needless to say, I felt like such an evil heel after that, I brought Sister a bag of assorted chocolates on Christmas and her feast day every year from that point on. And I still couldn’t look her in the eye.

      Today I just told her the truth. She gave me some tissues to help me dry off and let me go with no more demerits. There is mercy in this world.

      I walked down the hall as silently as I could, considering that my school shoes were squeaking. It always gave me a very bad feeling walking around between classes. When the halls weren’t filled with other people and movement and noise, that’s when I noticed all the statues. I think we had more statues than the Louvre. But they weren’t statues you would want to find peeking out at you from a dark corner. They were all either clumsy ceramic renderings that managed to make saints look like rejected characters from Star Wars, or they were highly detailed, highly accurate images of saints in intense pain, like the one at the end of the hallway I was in — the one that showed you, in graphic detail, St. Sebastian as he was struck by a dozen arrows at once.

      I rounded the corner and found myself facing an entire wall of flyers. These flyers weren’t on the bulletin boards, which in itself was a shock. We were only allowed to use bulletin boards for flyers, and then only for official school club announcements. Someone had actually had the guts to plaster an actual wall with their own flyers. And they were all exactly the same, containing only one sentence. They read: WILL YOU BE ASKED?

      I followed the line of flyers with amazement. There was no way that anyone would have been able to do this without being noticed. I instinctively sped up. I didn’t want to be seen anywhere near these flyers, not with my recent warnings. They wouldn’t have even liked it if I was tacking up signs that said: SEX SUX! GIRLS’ SCHOOL RULES!

      The door to English was closed, of course. The period had started fifteen minutes before, which was well beyond the point of recovery. Our school hated lateness in general, but Sister Charles hated it in a very particular sort of way, like we were deliberately stealing time from her life and she planned on extracting it back from us somehow.

      As I opened the door, I heard her saying, ‘The overall poor quality of the last batch of essays you turned in makes me wonder if any of you know how to read, much less write…’

      She trailed off as СКАЧАТЬ