Double denim, doubled down and soaked through. 17 bus line, headlights cleaving Canadian five pm. You are scratchy and wet. Stage left, glinting gold, the girl is muttering to herself. Turning a crucifix between her fingers, burnishing bronze under the motion. She is one of those ages you might follow by saying, “And a half.” Your tongue is scraping against the hymn at the back of your throat, closing around an idol you do not know how not to worship, the shape of a woman you do not know how to fill out. She is buttoned up and starched, cross between cracked lips. Her ankles are scuffed up, folded under the seat across from you. Skirt hiked credit card length above the knee. She stage whispers, rinses, and repeats. You watch, bone quiet, rapt focus chafing against her desperation. She starts again, and rocks a bit in her seat, like the motion of the words might rapture her then and there. You want to say, What are you asking for? You want to say, Do you think you will ever get it?
Prayer, to the uninitiated, sounds like some kind of nothing. She is taking the Hail Marys like multivitamins. You can taste the metal in your mouth.
◊ ◊ ◊
The right of Catholic institutions to be publicly funded was written into section 93 of Canada’s constitution. This right took effect in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and all the territories.
You’d like to be clear about the fact that your experiences are not isolated, that Catholic education has been used to perpetuate violence and colonialism in Canada since being founded in 1867.
Your particular stint begins somewhere around 2008 and ends in 2019. Your parents, both victims of straight-back pews, faux-silk white gloves, belts, and Bible verses, only have you attend one mass before this, for which you proclaim your hatred immediately and melodramatically. They never bring you again, which isn’t much of an issue since they don’t practice themselves. One problem with these schools being publicly funded is if you cannot afford private education, and one parent is baptized as catholic, the options are sending your child to Catholic school, or driving to the nearest public school, which in your case is forty-five minutes away. What you mean is that Catholic education is best suited for children already well versed in disappearing, it is not something that can be taught. You learn anyway.
You’d like to be concise, to quantify the experiences of approximately 840,000 students across 2300 maintained schools, with 85 of those schools operating within the OCDSB (Ottawa Catholic District School Board). Strip it down to metaphor chalk and how many Bible verses they had you write after you wore a shorter-than-average wool skirt and how your hand cramped for six days that felt like forty. You’d like to siphon 156 years of how unisolated your experience was through your own 10, and forty-five Google searching minutes. You’d like to get it right.
But you are thinking about the Menthols again. And the skirt. And your throat.
◊ ◊ ◊
At nine, you sit on the stairs with your mother and confess you took a wafer at gymnasium mass despite never having had your first communion. She reassures you that nobody will notice or care. Your mother, an atheist, doesn’t understand the breadth of your sin, and the ways such an action might corrupt your mortal soul. You cry into her shoulder, snotty and small. She holds you and asks if, at least, it’d tasted how you imagined.
You say, Yes.
What you mean is: that day you read a parable from the Old Testament in which a woman had doubted the command of her Lord, looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah one final time as she fled, informed by divine intervention. For this hesitation, she’d been turned to a pile of salt where she stood.
What you mean is: the body of Christ is a sacrament, taken and given with the understanding of unyielding belief, blessed by a surrogate of Jesus Christ, who is himself a surrogate of God.
What you mean is: all that empty space between you and the Son comes down to the way His body cracked in half and melted on your tongue, the way it’d gotten stuck between your teeth and you used a brown paper towel to scrape it out.
What you mean is: it tasted like a cracker.
◊ ◊ ◊
The day you stop believing in God, you are twelve.
Your dog gets loose in the neighbour’s yard, and your mom is mad again. That morning, your homeroom teacher instructs you to go over homework you forgot about. The same thing happens in French class. Your favorite classmates are all out sick. Your lips crack from the wet September cold. Your socks are soaked through from seven am to three pm. Play auditions only go okay.
That day, in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, a man sows a mustard seed in his field, it grows into a tree, and birds can lodge in its branches. The seed is the kingdom of God. So is the tree. Also probably the birds, you do not pay enough attention.
Your religion teacher who is very pale, with brutally long purple fingernails, has everyone recite the parable line by line, but it is more like word by word, it is a shorter one than you read last week. She counts these readings towards your participation marks, which go a long way, or so you are told. On your walk home, you squish down fifteen minutes of long sidewalk. You pray, not for the first time, that there is some sun before the steadily approaching Ontario winter. The sky cracks open, and the rain comes down, hot and heavy as the innards of a gutted animal. Your pleas are drowned out by thunder, washed down the drainage grate. And it is petty. And it is childish.
But you are a child.
So you say, out loud, If God is real, it will stop raining. You forgot your house key inside, so you have to sit on the porch until Mom gets home. She’s still angry about the dog, you need to be more careful with the gate. It keeps raining
You know God loves with a closed fist. You’d known since you read he’d cast Eve from the garden, you’d known since he’d flooded the Earth, you’d known since the salt, you’d known since the ship. You are thinking, I ate a chocolate bar just two days into Lent this year, late at night. You are not sure how to rectify this, other than to starve yourself for the remaining 38 days. You know God can be cruel. You should, probably, be thinking about famine and disease. How a benevolent Lord could allow such immense suffering.
But you are thinking about homeroom.
◊ ◊ ◊
The room is a knife, searing white. You are thirteen.
She hands you some ice wrapped in paper towel, you press it to your jaw, which doesn’t really hurt but the action feels like the cinematic choice. You spend a lot of time watching yourself from a bird’s eye view. Her age only really shows in the hands, folded, then refolded, refolded again. She wipes them on her dress pants.
What’s wrong? she asks.
You are thinking, Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Running your tongue over the coppery places in your mouth where molars cut into the rubbery soft inside of your cheek. You say, Nothing.
She folds her hands again, says Okay. Then she says, This is what we’re going to do.
Your ears ring around a lecture on how to solve disputes with your words, the example you are setting, and the anti-bullying policy outlined in the code of conduct she slides across the table. You are fixed on your knuckles, red and raw, a little dirty, you run a jagged fingernail over them, wincing as small as possible. She says the next time you feel like hurting someone, you should take deep, calming breaths. She says this behavior will not be tolerated once you graduate high school. She is talking about the world and you are looking at your hands.
She says, Do you understand?
You nod.
Genesis 65:7, The Lord looks upon the world he has created and decides to start anew, to forsake those who have dealt cruelty upon the Earth and one another.
She clicks a pen and licks the tip, asks, What happened?
Genesis 7:17-24, A flood covers the Earth, water rises over every high hill, devouring all flat and porous ground in its wake. Every being living on land perishes except a select few.
You say, She called me a faggot.
She purses her lips, which are lined a little wrong over the cupid’s bow, she’s glossed over it entirely so her mouth looks like a pale pink football. The moment bends around itself (folded, refolded, refolded again). Pushing up against the walls of the room.
She clears her throat. Asks, Are you?
You both know it was the wrong thing to say. She doesn’t apologize. You can hear her thinking, buzzing behind her eyelids. She has a gay friend, cousin, sister. She’s not.
When you were eleven, a girl in your class had braided your hair down your back and you hadn’t washed it for a week. She’d caught the picked-off edges of her nails in the frizz in a way that stung a little but you’d said nothing. Nothing.
You say, I don’t know.
She nods, slowly. Clears her throat again. You wonder what part of you is stuck in there. She says, You’re free to go.
The walk back to class clicks cold over the linoleum. You wonder, briefly, why she did not call your mother. You think about the squeaky stairwell, your busted lip, and all the ways your mother, who had majored in women’s studies, might take issue with an administration that makes lessons out of girls. You stop wondering that.
When you squeak into the English class desk, it stings your face, you feel it break against your shoulders, cresting over corroded rock. You sit up straight, flattened skirt against goose-pimple thigh. Wring the office from your hair, the band of your sweatshirt, the nape of your neck.
You breathe in, everyone is looking at you, swollen and scuffed up. You can taste salt water.
◊ ◊ ◊
When you practice, you like Ash Wednesday the most. Easter sermons always come around lunch, and you walk around the cafeteria looking at the misshapen black marks on everyone’s foreheads. You think it demonstrates a commitment to something, that everyone looks sort of funny for the same reason, at the same time.
You still think that.
◊ ◊ ◊
It is negative fourteen degrees, a month and a half after the world ended. He has one of those hockey boy faces, all pinched and red.
You know now that he did not want to kill you. You know that when a boy wants to kill you, you die. He is pressing glass to your jugular, empty bottle of red wine smashed over the dumpster.
You’d attended a game once at the request of one of his teammates, the one with soft honey-brown hair like a hamster who cries every time he shoots a gun. After the match, which they lose, he calls you a puck bunny. Which is Canadian for slut.
You go to the dumpsters because that’s where the upperclassmen hang out on their free periods, and if you get lucky, you go back to homeroom smelling like Menthols. Weeks or months ago, one of them called you theirs. Not in a romantic or sexual way, but in the way that thin older girls often possess their chubby younger counterparts. She is tall, with knobby knees and a swoopy side part, she wears smudgy pink gloss on her lips that she sometimes lets you try when you are being good. It smells like watermelon, it tastes like a cracker.
You are in her bedroom sometimes, she makes an after-school snack of nothing and paints some colour onto the waterline of your eyes. She is just tall enough that her chipped yellow ceiling light hangs behind her head while she talks, illuminating reddish flyaways and greasy concealer spots on her chin. On the bus ride from her house, you write down everything you can remember her saying, about boys and sparkly eyeshadow and the girl in her grade who vomits instead of going to gym class. When you are home, you copy your field notes into a moleskin journal you can hook shut. You hide it in your sock drawer. You don’t know why. You know why. You understand worship. You understand scripture.
You know that, in a way, she is making fun of you. That this possession is contingent upon the fact that you worship her, and she lets you ride in the backseat while she and her friends talk about sex. Part of this arrangement is your cluelessness, they can be the grown-ups with you around, bubble-wrapping the more risqué parts of their lives in innuendo everyone else in the car understands, or at the very least, pretends to. You haven’t seen them in a while. Maybe they flipped the Toyota into a ditch, or maybe they just heard, like everyone else.
You notice during the game he is the kind of player who acutely enjoys slamming his opponent’s faces against the plexiglass, leaving a sticky blood-saliva mixture in his wake. Not an uncommon practice, but one that gets him benched for about three-quarters of your watch time.
He is looking at his hand, not at your neck. You can tell, by the way he flexes it around the dark green remains of the bottle, that he is making some decision you do not get to be privy to. You are looking around, sucking the scenery dry for a girl with cigarettes and hoop earrings to pick the gravel from your knees, and the boy off of you like an insect.
You are thinking that lunch is probably wrapping up, and everyone will be headed back to homeroom. You are thinking that you are probably going to die.
◊ ◊ ◊
Later. Sixteen, the blood of Christ heavy on your tongue. You are writing some notes app poem titled “The truth about love.”
She sits next to you, another girl you’ve folded yourself around. She has your haircut if it suited your face, which sucks, astronomically. Last spring, the first time you kiss her, you were drunk on raspberry vodka and feeling like a girl in a movie who goes to high school parties. She buried her hand in your hair and you said, breathily, This is nothing.
Each time, she pulled away. After the third nothing, she’d said, What? She told you to relax. This is something girls do at parties. Her boyfriend didn’t even care.
You’d nodded, taking a new kind of liturgy, altar, and sermon.
Now, fresh fallen autumn beneath your rubber soles, she takes out one headphone, and says, You look like you figured your whole thing out, then. She is looking at you like you’ve turned inside out, she can see your heart beating, your lungs filling and emptying. The truth is, you don’t want to look like one of those buzz-cut girls with beer bottle hips, carabiners, and shark teeth. You’d like to neatly file away the part of you that kisses girls at parties from the part of you that walks home alone at night.
The thing about the boots is you hate them. You get them on a spontaneous mall trip and spend a full two-week Subway paycheque. The barista with an eyebrow piercing between Innes and Tenth Line Road tells you she thinks they might suit you, and you purchase them later that day. They crack into the soft spots at the back of your heels, warranting bandaging at the end of the night. They freeze in the unforgiving Ottawa January, so you break them in every day, and every day they break you right back.
Or maybe it’s the eyeliner you hate. Old men think you look like Amy Winehouse and say so, loudly, on any and all forms of public transportation. The eyeliner is uneven black, obtrusive against the paleness of your face. You wear it every day, which presents new opportunities to practice drawing a sharp line, which creates new opportunities to fail at it, again and again. And again and again and again.
Probably also the bangs, which you’d recently cut with kitchen scissors in the mirror. Or the rest of your hair, which you’d done the same to a year before, that still hadn’t grown out. You’d even considered one YouTube tutorial on How to Put On Eyeliner Neatly. You’d thought about hair clips and headbands. You thought about wearing boots that don’t feel as though they are branding your body every time you put them on.
Maybe, it’s that you mostly like to be within spitting distance of yourself. Maybe she is sitting too close to you.
You say, Thanks.
◊ ◊ ◊
There are no pockets of natural light in a church, everything is distorted through stained glass, which creates a dreamy yellowish hue over everything. The pews, the altar, the people. It feels like stepping into an alternate, smoothed-over universe.
Now, when you think about church, you still linger on the light as the thing they’d gotten right, that and setting the temperature about ten degrees warmer than it would be anywhere else. Making the whole building just hot enough not to be uncomfortable.
The chaplain at your school firmly denies any tampering with the thermostat when questioned, and says she couldn’t if she wanted to, as the whole building was always the same temperature.
She says, half joking, that it must have been God.
◊ ◊ ◊
The first thing he says is, You look like shit.
Like he’s in a TV show, and you would say, You don’t look so great yourself. And then you’d like, light a cigarette and start eating hash browns or something.
You would say, You should see the other guy.
You don’t say anything.
Last fall, you’d watched him get kicked around the basketball court by some upperclassmen. About two days after he’d changed his name. He’s a bit taller now, not by much.
When Ben and Tyler shout his old name in the stairwell so it echoes around everybody the whole way down, he yells back their mothers’ names. Which you thought was funny.
You ask, Why didn’t you just transfer?
He shrugs. And then says, I’m still Catholic. There are only public schools in the district, besides here.
You want to say, with much effort and intentional eye contact, Why. You don’t do that. You wait long enough that you feel like you can start some kind of conversation without choking on it.
It’s not— You say, then stop, which is like saying nothing. (It’s not true, it’s not the first time, it’s not the same as what happened to you, it’s not like that just because it looks that way, it’s not me, it’s not my whole life.)
He says, Yeah.
What you mean is: You want to cut your heart out of your body. Your nose won’t stop bleeding. The whole room is breathing and hot and beating and burning. You want to think of a bigger word than scared. Everything looks like a hammer.
He says something you don’t really hear. Then he says, I’m sorry. He starts crying, these sobs that wrack his entire body, and hugs you, chin against the muscle between your shoulder and neck. He says, I’m so fucking sorry. I’m so fucking—I don’t even know why I’m crying right now, I’m so sorry.
And you freeze. He backs off. Wipes his nose on the back of his sweatshirt sleeve.
You’d never spoken, not seriously. He’d shown you cartoon drawings in math, where you were seated next to each other, and you’d given him a thumbs up once.
You’d never apologized to him. And you should have. And you take his hand in yours, which is a smaller thing than a hug, but it is what you can take.
Then, he starts praying. Which you sort of can’t believe, that people do that outside of chapel, that people mean it. He works his way through a Hail Mary, which you know from the morning announcements. You let him.
He does the Our Father also. Then, he leaves.
He starts to say, I really hope—. Which is kind of like saying something.
You reply, Me too.
He transfers a month before you do. You never see him again.
◊ ◊ ◊
When you are home, back from a four-thousand-mile journey to and from the West Coast, your mom wants to take you to the grocery store with her.
Every time you drive past your old high school, you want to wring yourself out of it. Have everyone’s minds scraped clean of the time you’d spent there, the time you keep spending there. You look at the courtyard, and wonder if they are still making lessons out of girls. You wonder if you are. The truth is, everyone who loves you has the name of God in their mouth. Shaped their formidable disbelief around second-hand sin. You are worried that the way you feel about God is a religion also, that the disbelief and hatred and the blood and the wafer crackers have folded around themselves into a gospel of your own creation.
She squeezes your hand when you get around the bend. You can still see the brick in the rearview, a freshly painted mural illustrating a point that is lost on you.
And you are thinking about Sodom and Gomorrah. And you are always looking back.
Acadia Currah is an essayist currently residing on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her work has appeared in Defunkt Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Essays 2024.
