Sisters - a preview, part 2

“We have decided to let the issue rest for the time being.”
Sitting beneath a large Spanish School painting of a very suffering Jesus Christ, Mother Veronica of the Shroud, director of Saint Catharine College for (Very Rich) Girls, looked like a bulldog in a cowl, only less pretty.
I glanced at Sister Marie, sitting on the chair next to mine. It had taken a whole thirty-six hours for the school to take a decision on Michaela and Christine’s pot-smoking indiscretion. Truly was religious justice faster than the secular branch, I thought.
“What does this mean for the girls?” Marie asked.
The bulldog face contracted in something that was possibly a smile, but gave me the shivers. “They will get off with a reprimand. We have talked with their parents—”
And the parents had put their foot down, I guessed. After all, one does not pay a cartload of money to have to take responsibility for their girl smoking a joint with a friend.
“— and the families agreed with us that a scandal would only damage the girls.”
And the school. I suppressed a laugh. And so, after letting the girls feel the pressure for two days, now they were off the hook with just a slap on their hands.
“So everything’s forgotten and forgiven?” I asked.
The Director looked at me like I was a street hooker asking for an extravagant price. “Forgiveness is a virtue, professor Barin.”
Her voice sounded like a slap on my face. She opened her desk drawer and placed my neatly printed report and the bag of pot in the middle of her desk.
“Make this disappear,” she said. “And we’ll forget this whole unpleasant business ever happened.”
I turned and stared at Sister Marie. She scoffed, and stood.
I stood in turn. I let the nun pick the bag of dope, and I took the two pages of the report and folded them in four.
“I am sure you will be discreet about this whole thing,” the Director said.
That was our cue to get out of her office.

#


“Ah, I see I am not the only one working late!”
Professor Alexander gave us the leer he called smile, and kept filling his bag with papers.
By my side, Sister Marie turned slightly on one heel, and hid the bag of pot in the folds of her habit. “Administrative duties,” she said, dryly.
Alexander nodded his bald head. “It’s your call, I guess,” he said. Then he looked at me. “And you? I hope they pay you overtime.”
I did not like the way he looked at me. I did not like the way he looked at the girls. I did not like the guy at all.  I knew the type, strong with the weak and weak with the strong. A lecher. And nasty.
“I am not in this just for the money,” I said.
Which was the truth. The nice bit about Catholic Schools is that they charge a lot and pay a little. My work as a teacher basically paid for my vices. Had I not maintained a well-paying second career, I’d be broke.
“Ah, the sacred call of teaching,” he grinned. “You should join the order! You’d look great in black and white.”
“You should hurry or you’ll miss your train,” I replied.
He glanced at his cell-phone. “You’re right!” He picked up his bag and grinned at us. “I should ask the Mother Superior for a cot here somewhere!”
We watched him go.
“Jesus what a creep!”
Sister Marie shot me a glance. “Elena!”
I shook my head. “Sorry. But he is a creep!”
She put the bag of weed on the table and sat down with a sigh. “I admit I do not like the idea of him being around the girls,” she said.
I took out my cigarettes and I lit one. Then I put the flame to the folded report, and dropped it into an empty metallic waste bin.
“Case closed,” I said.
I sat down facing Marie and I slid packet and lighter to her.

“I shouldn’t,” she said. But she took a cigarette out and lit up. She took a short drag and shook her head. Watching her smoke, I could see she was not as young as she looked.
“They say it was him, that posted that note to the Mother Superior,” she said.
“They?”
She shrugged, exhaling a short breath of smoke. “The girls. It’s not like the whole thing went unnoticed.”
“I guess a lot of the girls were quick to change place to their stash,” I chuckled.
“Elena!”
I took a drag and dropped some ash on the floor. “Come on, they are teenagers. We all did some stupid things when we were teenagers.”
She sucked on her cigarette and finally nodded. “Yes, you are right.” She taped the filter, dropping some ash in a paper cup. She was an expert smoker. “What I don’t like is the ambiguity,” she said. “We ransack their rooms, and we treat them like criminals, but two days later everything’s forgotten, like it never happened. It’s like authorizing them to keep doing what they did.”
“The eleventh commandment,” I said.
She stared at me.
“Don’t get caught.”
She sighed out a lungful of smoke. “You are so disrespectful.”
We finished our cigarettes in silence.
She stood and walked to the bin, and dropped the spent butt of her cigarette in.
Then she turned towards me and nodded at the bag of weed.
“What do we do with that?”
I picked it up and gave it a close look.  “We could hand it back to Michaela and Christine,” I grinned.
“Elena!”
“You said they have the implicit permission to go on—”
“Do not be so flippant.”
I shrugged. “Then I guess we either flush this stuff down the toilet,” I said. And then something wild sparked in me. “Or we smoke it ourselves.”
Sister Marie stared at me with eyes a-goggle.

PS: for reasons I can't understand, I can't reply to your comments, guys! But I hope to have the full story up this week, anyway, hoping Amazon does not play up.