Chapter 6

Alex’s new school was much bigger than what she was used to. The classes had more students, conditions were crowded, and the kids were rougher. They had to go to mass before their first class every day. The teachers were both secular and nuns, but since none of the nuns wore habits, it was hard to tell which was which. And she was shocked by how little homework they were given. It was a good school, but much less demanding than her exclusive private school. But here she knew she would get even better grades. When she got back to the convent at the end of the day, she went straight to her room and finished her homework in less than an hour, and then got to work on the story she had thought of the night before. It was particularly violent, and the crime itself even more disturbing than usual, and the surprise ending she conjured up even surprised her. She sat back looking pleased when she took the last page out of the typewriter, and was smiling to herself when Sister Xavier knocked and walked in.

“Need any help with homework?” She noticed that Alex was smiling, and hoped she’d had a good first day at her new school. “How was it?”

“It was okay, and the homework was easy. I just finished a story. I think it’s really good.” She grinned and Sister Xavier smiled.

“Can I read it?” Alex nodded and handed the ten pages to Sister Xavier, who sat down on the bed, and looked up several times with a startled expression as she read. She was dazed when she finished and glanced back at Alex.

“What do you think?” Alex asked her, anxious for her opinion, since she liked mysteries and had read a lot of them.

“Do you always write like this?” She wondered if she was even more disturbed by her father’s death than they thought, and was reacting with violence.

“Yeah. Sometimes they’re bloodier than that, but this is about right.”

“You write some brutal stuff!” she commented, but she had to admit that it was seamless, the pace relentless, the characters haunting, and the story very tight. She wrote like an adult, and she had talent. But definitely a quirky mind, or a lot of experience reading crime thrillers. She had written a detective into it inspired by some of the thrillers she’d read, she told Sister Xavier, and she was pleased. It struck the nun that her story was much tougher than anything she normally read, and she would have guessed it was written by a man, and surely not a fourteen-year-old girl. The writing was brilliant. “I like it,” Sister Xavier said once she recovered from the shocking crime and surprise ending. “I just didn’t expect you to write something like that. Have you ever tried publishing your stories?” she asked with interest.

“My father was going to do it for me, but then he got sick, and he never got around to it. I’ve got three binders full of my stories, I brought them with me.” They were under her bed with his books.

“You should try publishing them,” she encouraged her. And then she laughed. “I can see why you don’t read Agatha Christie anymore and loved Silence of the Lambs, given what you write. I couldn’t sleep after a story like that.” Alex laughed too, pleased with the effect on her new friend.

“I’ll give you some of the other stories in my binder,” Alex promised. She loved having someone to show her stories to, although Sister Xavier readily admitted she preferred a different type of mystery.

“Not at bedtime, please,” Sister Xavier said, and mentioned the story to the superior later. She was still worried about it, even if it was flawlessly written, and Mother MaryMeg looked intrigued.

“It’s shocking for a child that age to have thoughts like that,” Sister Xavier whispered to her. She liked crime fiction herself, but Alex’s story had been extreme.

“Is it lewd or inappropriately sexual?” the mother superior asked, mildly concerned.

“Not at all, but it’s the most violent thing I’ve ever read. Brilliant, though. There’s everything from murder to dismemberment to cannibalism in it, and the crime is committed by the man’s wife. The story is complicated, and she kept me turning the pages, but it was still very upsetting, all in all. I thought about it for hours afterward, it haunted me.”

“Maybe that’s a skill, and not an aberration. Apparently her father encouraged her and shared his favorite books with her. According to my cousin’s husband, who knew him, her father thought she had real talent.”

“She does, unquestionably,” Sister Xavier agreed. “It’s just disturbing to think that comes out of her head. She looks so innocent.”

“Are you afraid she’ll kill us all in our sleep, and chop us up and eat us?” Mother MaryMeg teased her.

“No…but it’s very scary stuff, if that’s what’s on her mind.”

“I’ll have a look,” the mother superior reassured her, and said to Alex later that Sister Xavier had been impressed by her story, and she’d love to read one.

Alex looked serious at the mention of it. “I think I upset her. I’ve been working on that kind of story for a long time. I was inspired by some of the writers my father liked. He always passed his books on to me after he read them.” She gave the story to Mother MaryMeg to read after dinner, and the older nun was stunned. It was even more powerful than Sister Xavier had said, and the mother superior thought it was brilliant. She had an incredible way of telling the story. Her timing was flawless, and her character descriptions and development showed great insight into the criminal mind. Mother MaryMeg handed it back to Alex with a look of profound respect.

“You are a very, very talented writer, Alex. That’s a gift. Don’t waste it.” Alex thought that she was going to tell her to write gentler stories about saner people, but Mother MaryMeg seemed to approve wholeheartedly. “I’m sure you’d win an award with it, if you publish it one day. Keep working at it, to develop your gift.” She walked away duly impressed and saw Sister Xavier again later. “I think we’re living with one of the future great writers of the era. She really has an extraordinary mind.”

“You don’t think it’s a little twisted?” The younger nun looked surprised. She had read high school essays for years and had never seen one like that.

“Of course I do. That’s the whole point. It’s supposed to be, and she works hard at it. She certainly doesn’t leave anything to the imagination. We should encourage her, not hold her back,” Mother MaryMeg admonished, and Sister Xavier walked away after saying that Agatha Christie, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot were more her cup of tea. But definitely not Alex’s, or not in many years. Her writing was razor sharp and wielded like a scalpel. Both nuns thought about her again that night. The elder of the two was in awe of her ability, and the younger shaken by the horrors she created in her mind. But both of them were haunted by the story.

Alex went to bed with another idea for a story that night. She just wished she could show them to her father, who understood her style and knew how to comment on where it needed work to improve it. His editing had been a big help to her. She didn’t feel her writing was as strong without him, and it made her miss him even more. But it pleased her that the mother superior had liked her story, and that Sister Xavier was terrified by it. It made Alex smile as she thought of it and fell asleep.

Alex’s first month at St. Dominic’s flew by. They celebrated her fifteenth birthday three weeks after she moved in, and baked her a cake. It was her first birthday without her father, but they helped her get through it. She found her new school unexciting and uneventful. She made a few friends between classes, but no one she wanted to spend time with. She didn’t want to have to explain to them why she was living at the convent. Elena came to visit her on her birthday and cried the whole time, but Alex told her that she was fine and the nuns were good to her. She had told Bill Buchanan the same when he called. Mother MaryMeg had corroborated that she was doing well.

Alex was pleased that she could be alone in her room to work on her writing, but she was also helpful to the nuns when they needed her to be. She was no trouble at all. She was closest to Sister Regina, and despite the thirteen-year difference in their ages, they had become friends, and they confided in each other. Alex was very fond of Sister Xavier too, who had helped her prepare for a math test, on which she got an A. She was getting perfect grades in school.

At the end of the semester, the teachers handed out slips at school for the students’ parents to sign up for parent-teacher conferences, and Alex didn’t know what to do with hers so she threw them away. She had no parents to attend. Two of her teachers kept her after class to remind her that her parents hadn’t signed up yet. They didn’t know her story or where she lived, as her records were confidential. Only the principal knew that she was living at the convent.

She told Mother MaryMeg about the problem that night. “Can’t they just skip it? Why does someone have to go to their dumb conferences? My grades are fine.” Mother MaryMeg thought about it for a minute. She didn’t want to put the spotlight on Alex as different.

“What about if Sister Xavier goes for you, or Sister Thomas? Or both of them if you want. How does that sound to you?” She was trying to be creative, so the school didn’t feel that Alex’s family was disinterested in her, or disrespectful of her teachers or the school. Faculty didn’t respond well to that.

“Okay, I guess. My father hated those conferences too, and he didn’t always go. I never had a problem at school, my grades were good, and he didn’t think it was necessary. And once my English teacher called him in to complain about my stories.” Mother MaryMeg had read several more and that didn’t surprise her at all. She could clearly see Alex’s gift, and also why a teacher would find it disturbing, just as Sister Xavier had at first, although she was used to Alex’s stories now.

“I’ll see if Sister Xavier can make time to go, or Sister Tommy,” which was their nickname for Sister Thomas. When she asked them, they both said they wanted to go, since they had grown attached to their young ward. Alex got new slips for them, and they signed up and went together. They were very satisfied with what they heard, except that all of her teachers found her introverted and withdrawn and said that she needed to socialize more with her peers. But the nuns she lived with knew another side of her now, since they saw more of her, and at times they found her gregarious and funny, and she loved to tease and play tricks on them. But outside of her home environment, which the convent was now, she was quiet and shy, and she seemed to have trouble making friends with young people her age. Both nuns mentioned it to her when they told her about the teacher conferences. At school, one of her teachers said she had met her aunts and Alex wondered if that was who they had said they were. But another teacher said she had met her mother and aunt. No one seemed to be clear about who the two nuns were, nor cared, which was fine with her. She didn’t correct them either, and didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her that both of her parents were dead. It would have made her seem like a freak to the other students, and in her own eyes.

Mother MaryMeg was satisfied with their reports. She arranged to send Alex to a Catholic camp that summer in New Hampshire, where she would be an assistant counselor. And although Alex complained bitterly about going, she actually enjoyed it, and came back healthy and tan after swimming and sailing and taking care of younger kids for two months. But she couldn’t wait to get into her writing again as soon as she returned. Her stories were becoming more intricate and longer, and the nuns who read them could see progress and growth. Sister Xavier said they were more disturbing than ever, which Alex took as a compliment, and she was particularly pleased when Sister Xavier said she had had nightmares for two days after reading the latest one.

“Yes!” Alex said, and did a little victory dance around her. “And wait till you read the next one. You won’t sleep for a week!” she promised, and Sister Xavier rolled her eyes. But they had missed her when she was away, and were happy to hear her tales of the camp, the other counselors, and the campers, whom she had loved. It had been a great summer, and she had played baseball on the counselors’ team against the older kids. It reminded her of playing baseball with her dad.

She went to work on the school newspaper in sophomore year. She had totally settled into her life at the convent by then, and made a few friends at school, but always met them outside, and didn’t want them to know where she lived. She was invited to a few parties, and she commented to Sister Regina that she had nothing to wear, and Sister Regina organized a shopping trip to a mall with her. Sister Xavier came along, and the three women enjoyed it, and came back with four new dresses for Alex to wear when she went out with her friends, and her first pair of high heels.

“Can you walk in those?” Sister Xavier asked with an incredulous look, and Alex demonstrated that she could, and then Regina tried them on just for fun. She looked terrific in them. They were high-heeled black suede sandals with gold studs. And Sister Regina was shocked at the miniskirts Alex tried on, but that time Sister Xavier was the indulgent one.

“Oh, why not? She looks cute in them.” Neither of them had ever owned a skirt that short, but Alex looked so innocent with her perfect face and straight black hair that they thought she could get away with the short skirts, and all the other girls her age were wearing them. They got her some new jeans too, and sweaters for school. They came home with bags full of pretty new clothes that were the first she’d had in a long time. And she had loved shopping with them.

Before, she had gone shopping with her dad, who spent as little time as possible in any store, and rushed to leave. Suddenly she had women to shop with, which she’d never had. And instead of the mother she’d always longed for, she now had two or three, or twenty-six. And Sister Tommy insisted on checking what they’d bought to make sure they hadn’t gone too wild. She raised an eyebrow at the miniskirts and high heels, but gave her approval in the end, and threatened to come along the next time, just to enjoy the outing with them. It brought back happy memories for her. They giggled like three friends when Sister Regina and Sister Xavier helped Alex put her new clothes away. And then Alex wrote a story that night about a murder in a department store.

“You have a very sick mind if you can turn a nice day like that into a crime like this,” Sister Xavier said when she read it, but she had to admit it was good, and Alex laughed at her as the nun walked away shaking her head. They had come to love her in the year that she’d been with them, and she was growing up before their eyes. She was maturing into a lovely young woman, and was always a willing participant helping in the classes they gave at night.

At the end of sophomore year, she won an award for her work on the school newspaper, and she finally got up the courage to send two of her stories to a crime magazine. They published both, written by A. Winslow, and paid her a hundred dollars for each, and sent her a letter praising her work and encouraging her to continue writing. She showed the letter and the check to everyone, and it was the buzz around the convent for days that Alex had sold two stories to a magazine, and they bought two more when she got back from summer camp again. She was sixteen years old, and she had to start thinking about what colleges she would apply to the following year, and visit them. Both Sister Xavier and Sister Tommy looked at lists and brochures with her to help her decide where to go. She wanted to stay in the Boston area so she’d be close to them, but Mother MaryMeg encouraged her strongly to live in the dorms when she went to college. She could come home to the convent whenever she wanted, but she thought it was time for her to enter the world of her peers, and fully experience college wherever she went.

She visited half a dozen colleges in the Boston area, as well as Middlebury in Vermont, Brown in Rhode Island, and Yale in Connecticut, and she went to New York for a day with Sister Regina to visit NYU and Columbia, but the school she liked best in the end was Boston College. There were ten she was going to apply to, but BC was her first choice.

Sister Xavier and Sister Tommy helped her with her applications the first term of senior year, and they urged her to write tamer essays than her usual fare, which she did. She had been selling stories to detective magazines for over a year by then, but since she wrote under a pseudonym, she didn’t put it on her application. But she did enough extracurricular activities at St. Dominic’s, had been a counselor at summer camp for three years, and had won two awards for her work on the school newspaper, so she had enough to beef up her application. And her teachers, school advisor, and the mother superior wrote glowing recommendations for her. The nuns were sure she’d get in everywhere, and when the letters came back in the spring, she had been accepted by Yale, Brown, Boston University, Middlebury, and Boston College, and was wait-listed at the others, but she decided on Boston College immediately, which was still her first choice.

“And I’ll be nearby and can come home on weekends, if I want,” she said, beaming at Mother MaryMeg. It touched her that Alex considered the convent home now after four years. The arrangement had worked out better than any of them had hoped. She was the child most of them had never had, and a fresh breeze of youth in their life. When she had her first date for the junior prom, a dozen of them had watched her get ready and seen her off in a pretty little black dress that set off her figure but was appropriate. Her date was wearing a tux when he picked her up and had to live through twenty-six nuns taking photographs of them and watching them pull away in the limo with his friends. Alex had told him where she lived, but he hadn’t fully understood till he saw it when he picked her up. They had become friends, and didn’t date again, so it didn’t matter to her what he thought of it. Alex was in no hurry to start dating. She spent all her spare time writing, which was her passion. She continued to publish stories regularly in crime magazines under the name “A. Winslow.” They paid very little, but it was gratifying to see them in print.

Word spread around the convent like wildfire that Alex had gotten in to Boston College, and there was celebrating in the dining hall that night. Mother MaryMeg managed to pull strings and got twenty-nine seats at Alex’s graduation, so all the nuns could be there, and the Buchanans. Alex invited Elena, but she had taken a job in New York and said she couldn’t come, and Pattie and her family had faded from Alex’s life by then and lost touch. Her family and the center of her universe now were the nuns of St. Dominic’s.

When she walked across the stage in her cap and gown to receive her diploma, Alex was beaming and the nuns sent up an embarrassing cheer in unison. They were all thrilled and so proud of her, and Sister Tommy said she felt as though her seventh child was graduating. Sister Xavier was crying, Mother MaryMeg looked on proudly, and Sister Regina gave Alex an enormous hug when they joined her after the ceremony. It was hard to believe that she’d been with them for four years and they’d watched her grow up from a young girl to a beautiful young woman, and she was off to college now.

Mother MaryMeg had convinced her to live in the dorms, although Alex was nervous about it, but she’d agreed. Five of the nuns went to settle her in her new room at the end of August. It reminded them all of the day she’d moved into the convent, but this was an exciting, happy event. She had two roommates, and the nuns unpacked for her, made her bed with the sheets and bedspread she’d bought, and helped her put up posters on her side of the room. One of her roommates asked if they were her aunts, and she didn’t answer. She set out a photograph of her father on her desk. She had brought her typewriter with her, and a laptop for her schoolwork, and had bought her books a few days before. She was all set, and all of the nuns who’d come with her had damp eyes when they left her in the dorm with her new roommates, and they cried openly in the car on the way back to the convent, already missing her.

“I feel as though my baby just left home,” Sister Xavier said, blowing her nose in a tissue, as Sister Tommy wiped the tears off her cheeks and agreed. Sister Regina was quiet, and was going to miss Alex acutely. And although she was thirty-one, and Alex eighteen now, their friendship had deepened, and she had confessed to Alex a few weeks before that she was having doubts about her vocation for the first time in sixteen years, and she was no longer sure she had made the right decision. Alex was shocked to hear it, and had promised not to tell anyone.

“What are you going to do about it?” Alex had asked her, as they whispered in her room late at night, while Alex was starting to pack for school.

“Nothing for now. I can’t leave. I don’t want to. But I’m not sure I can stay either. All of a sudden I can’t imagine never having children, and not being married. I don’t know what’s happening to me. And what if I regret it forever if I leave…or if I don’t?” She was seriously confused and going through a personal crisis, and Alex had urged her to think about it and not do anything hasty, which was wise advice. Her words were still ringing in Sister Regina’s ears as they drove back to the convent, and she felt intensely lonely without Alex in her little room right down the hall from her own, clacking away on her typewriter in every spare moment. Her stories had matured and were more complicated, but just as violent, and Sister Xavier said she couldn’t read them anymore, but the magazines loved them and couldn’t get enough.

Dinner at the convent was a mournful event that night, without Alex. Mother MaryMeg began the meal with a prayer for her that she would find joy and growth, knowledge, and wonderful friends in her new life, and there were tears in many of the sisters’ eyes as they prayed for her. And a few miles away at Boston College, Alex was getting to know her roommates.

They all went out for pizza, and met boys from the neighboring dorm. There were a dozen young people at dinner together, boys checking her out, girls chattering around her, pitchers of beer passed around, and for a moment Alex missed the sisters at St. Dominic’s, and then started talking in earnest to her roommates. There was no stopping it now. A new time in her life was beginning. She had grown up, and she felt as though she was spreading her wings and taking flight, awkwardly at first, and then she could feel herself soaring. It was exciting and exhilarating, and terrifying all at once. Here she was, starting college. She just sat there for a minute, watching all of them, and as she did, she had an idea for a story about a murder in a college dorm. She could hardly wait to write it that night. And when the others went out after dinner to explore the campus, Alex rushed back to her room to write.