worship. They gave her three chances. When she still refused, Brother Phillip said refusing to recognize the Church’s authority was the first sign of possession. He called in an exorcist, and two hours later, Clare was sentenced. The exorcist said that since her possession was recent, her soul could be returned to the well of souls—if it were purified by fire.
They forced her to her knees on the dais, closed the steel cuffs above her calves, then burned her alive in front of the entire school.
She was seventeen years old.
What if they thought Melanie was possessed?
Terror pumped fire through my veins and pushed my feet faster. At the rear entrance to the administration building, I turned to make sure no one was watching, then slipped inside. My shoes squeaked on the tile and left wet footprints, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Careful not to slip, I snuck through the back hall, then ducked into the laundry room. When Mellie was little, she loved to hide in the bundles of freshly laundered sheets before they were folded and distributed in the children’s home attached to our school. The laundry was the only place I could think of to look for Mellie on campus, and at first I didn’t see her.
I’d almost decided to climb over the fence and go look for her at home, when the pile of clean white sheets in a huge wheeled cart moved.
“Melanie? It’s me. Come on out.”
But she didn’t move or make a sound, so I had to pull the sheets off her one by one and pile them on a table until I found my sister curled up in a ball at the bottom of the cart. Her hair was soaked, her braid destroyed. Her face was red and swollen from crying, and the terror in her eyes made her look about ten years old.
“Mellie, you have to go back. It’ll be okay if you apologize and take your punishment.”
Fasting? A week of silence? Public lashing? Any of those would be better than suspicion of possession.
“It’s not going to be okay.” Melanie sat up, sniffling, and wiped her nose with the back of one hand.
“Not if you don’t get up, it won’t. Hurry, before they decide you’re possessed.” Any reasonable person could see that she was just scared and upset. But the Church saw what it wanted to see, and it wouldn’t want to see a fifteen-year-old it simply couldn’t control.
Melanie shook her head slowly, and two fat tears rolled down her cheeks as she stared up at me. “I’m not possessed, Nina,” she said, her voice raw and hoarse. “I’m pregnant.”
“Pregnant …?” My voice sounded hollow, and when Melanie nodded, I sank to the floor on legs that would no longer hold me up.
No.
My sister climbed out of the cart, then knelt next to me on the floor, wrinkling her navy slacks and her drenched white blouse. “Nina, say something. I don’t know what to do.”
“Are you sure?” I grabbed her hand and squeezed it, looking for any sign of doubt in her eyes.
“Pretty sure. I missed last month entirely, and I’ve been feeling sick all week.” She sniffled and swiped one hand across her dripping nose again. “Not just in the morning, though. Kinda off and on all day.”
But for one long moment, I could only blink at her, and even once I was capable of speech, the words seemed to get stuck on my tongue. “How …? Who …?” She looked at the floor, and my eyes narrowed. “Adam Yung?” I demanded in a harsh whisper, and she nodded miserably. “Melanie, how did you think you’d get away with this? You knew your physical was coming up, and even if you hadn’t gotten pregnant, they can tell when you’ve lost your virginity!”
I could get away with having sex. Because I’d been declared unfit to procreate, then rendered unable to procreate, the Church no longer cared whether I preserved my virtue, so long as I still presented a facade of innocence and purity to the world.
I had gotten away with it, several times in the months following my sterilization, when my anger at the Church couldn’t be controlled without an outlet. I’d met in the dark, in the middle of the night, with boys who would hardly meet my gaze in school. A private screw-you to the system that had defined my future without so much as a “Hey, Nina, what would you like out of life?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, and I certainly hadn’t been sure at fifteen. But I was damn sure I didn’t want anyone else making that decision for me.
Had I done this? Had Melanie seen my months of rebellion—back when I’d had time for such things—and assumed that what had worked for me would work for her too?
“We weren’t really thinking about that,” my sister said in response to a question I’d almost forgotten I’d asked. “We weren’t really thinking about anything. We were just … I love him, and he loves me, and it just happened, Nina!”
“Once?” I sat on my heels to keep my slacks off the laundry room floor. “You got pregnant the first time?” Not that that mattered. Once was enough.
Studying in the basement, my ass.
Melanie shook her head, and more tears filled her eyes. “We tried to stop. We knew it was wrong, but it didn’t feel wrong.”
“How does it feel now?” I demanded. Fornication was a sin. Melanie wouldn’t have been the first fifteen-year-old to present a torn hymen at her annual physical, and if the whispers in the bathroom were accurate, several of my own classmates had already lived to tell that tale. They were sterilized, of course, and they’d been punished privately because our school didn’t want smudges on its record any more than the offenders wanted to be outed as sinners.
But Melanie was giving them no choice. A pregnancy couldn’t be hidden by a school uniform. Not for long, anyway.
My head spun with the details, and the consequences, and the potential outcomes, but in that deluge of possibilities, I couldn’t see a single good way out of this. Not one.
“Does Adam know?” I rubbed my forehead, trying to fend off the pressure growing behind it. We were screwed.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell him. I just kept ignoring it, hoping I was wrong, until I saw the calendar and remembered about the physicals.”
“Unlicensed pregnancy is forbidden, Melanie. For—”
“Please don’t say ‘Fornication is a sin.’ “ More tears rolled down her swollen cheeks. “I know fornication is a sin. Please don’t be mad at me right now, Nina. I need your help.”
“I’m not mad.” I was furious. I was so angry I could hardly think, but I couldn’t deny my own hypocrisy, and being mad at Melanie wouldn’t help either of us, so I pushed my anger back. Way back. All the way to the back of my mind, where anger at my mother festered, rotting our
