As if! Hey, it hadn’t been my fault Heather had gone berserk. Well, not really, anyway. If anybody should be going to confession, it was her.

As I stood in line – behind Cee Cee, who couldn’t hide her delight over what had happened; you could practically see the headline forming in her mind: Father Serra Loses His Head Over Vandals – I craned my neck, trying to see over to the seniors. Was Bryce there? I couldn’t see him. Maybe Father Dom had gotten to him already, and sent him home. He had to have recognized that the mess in the courtyard was the result of spiritual, not human, agitation, and had acted accordingly. I hoped, for Bryce’s sake, that Father Dom hadn’t resorted to the head lice.

OK, I hoped it for my sake, I admit it. I really wanted our date on Saturday to go well, and not be cancelled due to head lice. Is that such a crime? A girl can’t spend all her time battling psychic disturbances. She needs a little romance, too.

But of course, the minute Assembly was over and I tried to ditch homeroom and hightail it to Father Dom’s office, Sister Ernestine caught me and said, just as I was about to duck under some of the yellow caution tape, ‘Excuse me, Miss Simon. Perhaps back in New York it is perfectly all right to ignore police warnings, but here in California it is considered highly ill-advised.’

I straightened. I had nearly made it, too. I thought some uncharitable things about Sister Ernestine, but managed to say, civilly enough, ‘Oh, Sister, I’m so sorry. You see, I just need to get to Father Dominic’s office.’

‘Father Dominic,’ Sister Ernestine said coldly, ‘is extremely busy this morning. He happens to be consulting with the police over last night’s unfortunate incident. He won’t be available until after lunch at the earliest.’

I know it’s probably wrong to fantasize about giving a nun a karate chop in the neck, but I couldn’t help it. She was making me mad.

‘Listen, Sister,’ I said. ‘Father Dominic asked me to come see him this morning. I’ve got some, um, transcripts from my old school that he wanted to see. I had to have them FedExed all the way from New York, and they just got here, so—’

I thought that was pretty quick thinking on my part, about the transcripts and the FedEx and all, but then Sister Ernestine held out her hand and went, ‘Give them to me, and I’ll be happy to deliver them to the Father.’

Damn!

‘Uh,’ I said, backing away. ‘Never mind. I guess I’ll just . . . I’ll see him after lunch, then.’

Sister Ernestine gave me a kind of Aha-I-thought-so look, then turned her attention to some innocent kid who’d made the mistake of coming to school in a pair of Levi’s, a blatant violation of the dress code. The kid wailed, ‘They were my only clean pants!’ but Sister Ernestine didn’t care. She stood there – unfortunately still guarding the only route to the principal’s office – and wrote the kid up on the spot.