Conversion

When a Girl's on a pedestal, there's nothing some people would like better than to shove her off it, just to know what kind of noise she'd make when she shattered.

But an attentive researcher--like you--might be able to see something that all the experts can't see. If she asks the right questions.

Il est bon à savoir. It is good to know.

I was impressed. She had already mastered the art of not saying much of anything at all.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.

When she said that last part, she raised her eyebrows, or at least, I thought that's what she was trying to do. The Botox made it so all she could do was widen her eyes until they bulged.

resent her, or feel like she was so much smarter than them that it was annoying. She played field hockey well enough that

My life was such a careful balance, a fragile nexus of work and attention and preparation and planning, like the old vaudeville trick of spinning plates on poles all over a stage, running from one to another to another, not letting any of them fall. I’d been so good at it, the running and the spinning. I’d been getting up before dawn and staying late after school and running and spinning the plates for as long as I could remember. I was getting so tired. I didn’t want to run and spin anymore. But I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know who I would be, if one of the plates broke.

She wasn’t even sick, not really. She’d just had a bad reaction to a vaccine. What had been a theory at school in the morning had solidified into fact, at least within my own self.

I desire to lie in the dust,

it’s easy to point fingers from a position of comfort, and nothing he or Jesus says will change that.

Reverend Green grows sad in his eyes. “And yet, consider how Jesus would’ve treated the likes of Sarah Good,” he remarks. “He’d have fed her without thought, and washed her feet with his own hands. The true Christian doesn’t hesitate to make himself humble.

Aristotle said to Alexander, that a mind well furnished was more beautiful than a body richly arrayed. What can be more odious to man, and offensive to God, than ignorance. Reginald Scott, A Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1654

Betty,” I say, shaking her shoulder. “What?” she moans. “Leave me be. I’m bewitched. It makes me tired.

Tittibe’s gaze floats up to the ceiling of the meetinghouse, as though hoping to find the answer scrawled there. When she brings her eyes back to rest on the judge, she says, her voice clear and true, “A yellow bird. And she would have given me one.

I didn’t like to hurt the children anymore, so I said, ‘I will serve you no longer.’ Then all of a sudden he looks like a man and threatens to hurt me. When he was like a man, he had a yellow bird he kept with him, and he told me he had more pretty things that he would give me if I would serve him.

And I hated how most of us had grown up together, so that we never had a chance to really change. We could try, but people just kept seeing an earlier version of us. We each had our own narrative, our own character we were required to perform in the daily play that was “St. Joan’s Academy for Girls,

One stupid quiz about one stupid thing that happened three hundred years ago to a bunch of people nobody cared about, that didn’t have anything to do with real life.

standing in front of ground zero for the Mystery Illness, and it looks like . . .” “. . . where some of the North Shore’s most pampered daughters have . . .” “. . . are asking if the HPV vaccine could possibly . . .” “. . . side effect of an age of oversexualized childhood, when girls are . . .” I paused, frowning, before shoving my way inside.

And so, when she fell ill, it seemed a natural thing to me.” “But I don’t understand. I thought you said she was pretending.

Recalling our band of firebrands to him fills me with longing. Those girls are married now, most of them, and the better part have moved away. But then, it was never the same with us, after.

It’s possible that they had a slight allergic reaction to a preservative in the vaccine.

My favorite was the one of her on horseback, dressed in armor, her hair streaming behind her. She held the reins in one hand and a spear in the other, and her mouth was open, urging all the troops behind her onward into battle. Both of the horse’s front legs were drawn up, as though about to rear, his eyes rolling back in his head. I got shivers whenever I looked at it. My least favorite was the one of Joan burning at the stake. The flames were made of these long shards of red and orange glass, and there were coils of smoke in black iron tracery all around her. But Joan looked different in that panel—her mouth closed, her hands bound before her, and her eyes looking up at heaven in this beatific way. Instead of her armor she was dressed in a white linen shift with a bow at the neck, like what a little girl would wear to bed. A crowd of people milled around her, their hands clasped in prayer, looking on with these fake sorrowful faces, as if they really wished they could do something but couldn’t be bothered. But Joan didn’t seem to mind. Her face was smooth and passive. It pissed me off. I hated seeing Joan look okay with being burned alive.

belonged to an order that flickered out of existence sometime early in the twentieth century.

Joan of Arc was their patron saint, and I heard that they died out in part because girls were required to join by the time they were fifteen.

We’re here to talk about the safety of teenage girls, Father Molloy. Or isn’t the church concerned with that anymore?

I’m no one, and I’m nothing.

I want to lie in the dust,