Of course Father Hughes was happy to see Katie Casey. She’s probably his favorite student. I mean, she gets good grades, she’s never in trouble, she’s always helping people – give the chick a blue pashmina and a carpenter boyfriend and she’s the Virgin friggin’ Mary.

‘Well, he was SUPER happy about our collaboration!’

Of course Father Hughes was happy about our collaboration. He probably thought Katie Casey’s chastity fairy dust would rub off on me.

‘So there’s just one little hurdle left,’ she concluded.

Until that moment, I had been floating along on a smug river of self-congratulation. Now my ears perked up. ‘Uh … what?’ I said. ‘What little hurdle?’

‘Just … Father Hughes wants us to get approval on the edited version of the text before it’s performed,’ Katie said.

‘The edited version?’

‘Well, I didn’t think you’d have time to put on the whole play,’ Katie explained. ‘So Father Hughes suggested we – or you, I guess – come up with an edited version to be approved by Father Vincent.’

My heart sank into my motorcycle boots. See, there’s this whole priestly pyramid of authority at St Mary’s. Father Hughes is the big enchilada at the top who gives the go-ahead to projects and events, and then the vice-principal, Father Vincent, handles the nitty-gritty details: the who, what, where, when and how. Or – in this case – the ‘how naked’ and ‘how many F-bombs’.

‘It’s fine!’ Katie reassured me quickly. ‘It’s just, the thing is …’ She gave a nervous, tinkling laugh. ‘Father Vincent isn’t quite as cool as Father Hughes.’

Yeah, no kidding. This was the guy Pat said got his priest panties in a twist over Beauty and the Beast.

‘So are you saying … I have to create a version of The Vagina Monologues, a play full of cursing and radical nineties feminism, that’s acceptable to a guy who is less cool than Father Hughes?’ I said.

‘Just that little hurdle,’ Katie Casey insisted. ‘And then we’re all good!’

She went back to her fondle-free flock, and I, in front of all the pink balloons, the abstinence books and the too-cool-to-fool-around poster couple, said: ‘Fuck.’

12

Before I got to St Mary’s, I’d never really interacted with a priest or a nun before, and they really freaked me out. Did they have superpowers? Did they have X-ray vision? Could they see through my green-plaid uniform to my leopard-print thong and the tattoo I regretted from the summer before freshman year?

Soon enough, like everything else at St Mary’s, priests and nuns became a minor annoyance that I mostly ignored. What were they but more authority figures, just like all the camp counsellors, detention monitors and Girl Scout troop leaders I had sassed, ignored and disrespected for years?