Page 165 of The High Tide Club
I nodded, but I still couldn’t speak. It was like my mouth was full of cotton.
Sister sighed. “Well, I’m afraid you will have to leave this school immediately.”
I jerked my head up then. “Leave school?” I whispered. “But graduation isn’t until two more months.”
“You will not be graduating with your class,” Sister said. “And I’m sorry about that, but Mother Superior has rules. We can’t let the other girls and boys in this school be exposed to something like this. Most Pure Heart is not a school for fallen girls like you.”
“No, Sister,” I whispered.
She drummed her fingertips on the top of her desk.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me? Some… special circumstance you’d like to tell me about?”
“No, Sister.”
“Was it a boy at this school? This is very serious, Varina, because if the boy is a student here, I will see that he leaves this school too.”
“No, Sister.”
She drummed her fingertips some more. “Would you like to see Father? I realize you are not Catholic, but perhaps a good confession and an Act of Contrition…”
I shook my head hard. That priest went around with a mad face all the time. I could never tell him what had happened to me. Besides, I was kicked out of school, so there was nothing more to say.
“May I go, Sister?” I said.
“I suppose.” She rummaged around in her desk drawer and brought out a black leather change purse. I’d seen her take that change purse out before, on the sly, when some of the boys and girls who came to school looking hungry and raggedy and didn’t have enough money to buy milk in the school lunchroom.
She walked over to me and put one hand on my shoulder as I stood for the last time beside my desk, and she pressed a coin into my hand. “For the streetcar fare,” she said.
I wanted to throw that money back at her face. I wanted to scream that I hadn’t been wicked and that I wanted to stay in school and read all the books and someday, maybe, be a teacher, like her.
Instead, I said, “Thank you, Sister. I still have your book. Would it be all right if I brought it back to you tomorrow?” Sister lived at the brick convent attached to the school.
She wrinkled her brow. “What book do you have?”
“It’sTreasure Island, Sister.” I didn’t tell her that Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s book was my favorite one so far, even better thanJane Eyre.
She hesitated, looking down at me, and that’s when I saw her eyes get all watery. “You keep it, Varina. Keep reading. Keep learning, no matter what.”
“I’ll try,” I whispered.
“Take care of yourself, Varina. And the baby.”
75
“And you never told anybody?” Felicia asked.
“He told me he’d kill me if I told anybody what he’d done. And he took my pretty pearl pin that Millie gave me, because he said I’d stolen it,” Varina said. “I couldn’t go home the way he left me, so I snuck back here, to try to clean up, and that’s when Josephine found me. She guessed, just as soon as she saw me, what had happened, and she made me tell her everything.”
“That bastard,” Felicia said, the color rising in her cheeks. “Raping a child. I wish you had killed him, Auntie. I wish he were still alive so I could kill him for you.”
“No need,” Varina said. “He’s dead and gone. Everybody, all my family, all my friends, they’re all gone. Josephine was the last one, and now she’s gone too.”
76
Varina
March 1942
