Secret, Saintly Schoolgirl Love

(This story contains graphic depictions of first-time f/f sex between two 18-year-olds in a Christian girl's school. Be aware, it also contains allusions to religious abuse, but no graphic physical depictions of it. The participants in all the physical contact depicted are enthusiastically consenting adults. Happy Valentine's Day!)

***

"Good morning, and happy Saint Valentine's Day, girls!" Reverend James began his sermon with particular emphasis, making his way up the aisle of the school chapel to the pulpit. "Can anyone here tell me what this day is all about?"

It was my last semester at True Light School for Girls, and Valentine's Day had happened to fall on a Sunday this year.

I was sure that what I knew of this notoriously lascivious day was not the answer Reverend James was looking for. Or, maybe it was exactly the answer he was looking for so that he could shoot it down, but it was definitely not the right answer.

Whatever knowledge my classmates had, none of them seemed ready to offer it up either.

"Come on, don't be shy," said Reverend James. "Everyone here has heard of Valentine's Day before today, right? From friends? Family? Sneaking some TV in the summer?"

Cautiously, three hundred and fifty-four girls bobbed our heads in acknowledgment.

"All right, then!" he said triumphantly. "Tell me. What have you heard?"

We all knew that he would pry some participation out of someone, sooner or later, but he hadn't done it yet.

"Everyone who can tell me one thing associated with Valentine's Day gets one of these," he sighed, pulling a giant bag of heart-shaped, foil-wrapped chocolates from under the pulpit and holding one of them up to the light.

"Chocolate," a girl near the front spoke up, just loud enough for everyone to hear, thanks to the choir-friendly acoustics.

"Chocolate!" Reverend James repeated for any who had not heard, tossing her the candy in his hand. "That was a gimme. What else?"

"Hearts," said someone else.

"Hearts! Too easy," he said, but tossed her the heart anyway.

"Roses," another girl offered, and received her prize.

I was sitting in the second-to-last pew, between my two best friends, Hannah and Barb, with my hands on my knees, careful as always not to whisper, not to laugh, not to touch my friends or sit too close or look directly at them. Careful not to do anything that would get us shuffled.

My mouth was watering. I hadn't had chocolate in I didn't know how long. But I didn't shout out any Valentine's Day symbols.

I didn't, because Barb's chosen method of rebellion for the day consisted of sitting with her legs apart, taking up too much space for the rest of us to fit in the row while still "leaving room for Jesus," and making her pleated plaid skirt ride up above the tops of her knee socks. None of the adults had noticed yet.

Well, none of the adults with authority, I should say, since the three of us were technically adults now too, for all the difference it made in our daily lives.

In any case, seeing little slivers of Barb's bare thighs peeking through into the daylight in the presence of adult adults was a little like watching someone juggle knives. Someone you knew to be mediocre and juggling.

I knew I probably couldn't save her, but I wasn't going to be the one to knock her over, either.

So, I kept quiet, and I did my best to listen.

I didn't always love our reverend's style or his interpretation of the Word, but I did love God, and between expanding my biblical knowledge through his sermons or doing nothing at all, I'd take expanding my knowledge.

Barb, as usual, made this way of getting through the service as difficult as possible. She had recently pointed out the way Reverend James tended to over-gesticulate with his eyebrows when he got animated. So, now, every time his eyebrows moved, I could sense her looking over at me and mirroring him in search of laughs.

Hannah challenged my focus in her own way. She kept her ankles crossed, knees together, hands folded neatly in her lap, and eyes on Reverend James wherever he went in his rambling about the room.

She smiled faintly at his jokes, nodded and shook her head correctly when he asked his semi-rhetorical questions, but mostly watched him with perfectly unobtrusive, appropriate attention.

She did everything right, to avoid stealing any attention back onto herself, and yet even more than I wanted to giggle with Barb, I wanted to look at Hannah.

I always wanted to look at Hannah. But when she was closed up like this, I felt that I needed to, as well.

Whereas Barb's casual contempt for the proceedings was right out in the open for all to see, anything could be happening inside Hannah's head. She could be formulating the mother of all jokes, or incisively contemplating the nature of the universe, or silently imploding, trying once again to crush her whole self into the tiny but endlessly sucking patch of emptiness her father's indifference seemed to have left inside her.

Whatever the case was today, Barb and I were they only people in the world who knew Hannah well enough to have a chance of catching the near-microscopic clues. It seemed like our duty to be on the lookout.

"Cupid!" someone contributed, in return for candy.

"Cupid," Reverend James tutted. "He's a pagan idol, you know."

"Cards!"

"Yes, definitely cards."

Just when I thought she wasn't going to, Barb did it.

"Sex!" she shouted, plain and clear, without changing her position.

Oh well, I tried.

The many, mostly pale shades of skin throughout the room grew collectively pinker.

Two spots of pink even appeared on the reverend's own cheeks, though they were gone almost as soon as they'd come.

To my surprise, he tossed Barb a candy.

"Yes, sex," he said to the congregation. "Well done, Barbara. Sit up straight and consider this your warning."

Barb crossed her arms with a self-satisfied smirk, but she crossed her legs too, and tugged her skirt down over them.

On a school day, the teacher would have shuffled her already and probably assigned some additional punishment too. Reverend James liked for us to think of Sunday mornings in the chapel a place of warmth and refuge, so there was a tiny bit more wiggle room. It wouldn't stretch beyond that first warning, though.

"Sex," Reverend James repeated, putting the chocolate bag back in its notch. "That's really what the secular version of Valentine's Day comes down to, doesn't it? The chocolates, the roses, they're all involved in various rituals people use for arranging sex, aren't they?"

Heads bobbed again.

"But in case anyone missed that great big clue I gave you at the beginning, Valentine's Day is a saint's day. So, as you might imagine, it's actually about something much higher than that."

We settled into more comfortable silence, prepared for the meat of the sermon, which we would not be required to assist with.

"Now Saint Valentine lived just a few hundred years after Jesus Himself," said Reverend James. "Does anyone know what he did to become a saint?"

We answered with more silence. Lovely, permissible silence.

"This was during the time when Christians were still living under Roman rule," said Reverend James. "The emperor at the time, Claudius II, had outlawed the holy sacrament of marriage. He wanted to make sure the men living under his rule had no commitments higher than serving in his army. So, of course, the thousands of Christians living in the empire who fell in love, who heard God's call to be fruitful and multiply, they had a choice to make. They could turn away from the call. They could live in sin. Or they could go in search of someone who would marry them against the emperor's decree. Saint Valentine was the man they turned to. He granted those couples holy matrimony, at the risk of his own life."

There were a few quiet sighs around the room. Stories of romance were rare at True Light, and usually shared in whispers after lights out. This was about the sweetest thing to be said aloud in the chapel.

Reverend James held the moment only briefly. He was gaining steam, as he usually did when he shared with us some horrific injustice suffered by our earliest spiritual ancestors.

"Eventually, Emperor Claudius found out what Saint Valentine was up to, and threw him in prison. And what do you think Saint Valentine did then? Did he apologize for serving God's will, and sharing God's love, and promise not to do it ever again?"

There were head-shakes, but still no need for an answer.

Reverend James provided his own impassioned, "No!" which echoed around the vaulted ceiling.

"Now, it just so happened," he went on, "that Saint Valentine's jailer had a daughter, and the daughter was blind. And at this point, the safest thing for our Saint Valentine to do would have been to keep his head down and try to convince everyone that he was not a threat. Instead, he reached out through the bars of his cell, put his hands on that young woman's eyes, and prayed to God to show His love through her. And when he pulled his hands away, praise Jesus, that woman was able to see, literally see the light of His love and all His creation around her."

There was a tenser sort of silence for a moment. This sounded dangerously close to a happy ending, which could never be right in a saint story, so it could only come crashing down from here.

"That was Saint Valentine signing his own death warrant," Reverend James explained. "Because once everyone saw that miracle, that woman accepted Jesus, and her daddy accepted Jesus, and everyone working in the whole blessed jail accepted Jesus. And old Emperor Claudius, he didn't like that one bit. The weddings, maybe those could have been brushed offs, but converting that many of the Emperor's servants to serve God instead? That could only be answered with death. So that's how Saint Valentine came home to God's arms knowing that he had helped spread His love and truth to every last person he could, right up to the end."

Faces around the chapel varied in their combinations of joy and solemnity.

Barb wiggled her eyebrows some more. I couldn't help noticing.

"There's one more chapter to Saint Valentine's story, though," said Reverend James. "In the short time they had on Earth together, he and that young woman fell in love. There was no one to marry them, of course. Saint Valentine never got to share in the same earthly joys he helped sanctify for so many others. He never touched any part of that woman but her eyes. But he went to his death leaving her a message of love, his own and God's, written on the shape of a heart and signed, 'Your Valentine.'"

A few more sighs escaped.

Mine was one of them. The mouth-watering feeling I'd had at the sight of the chocolate spread through my whole body at the thought of the two lovers spending their whole brief relationship on the opposite side of bars. My skin was all tingly with what I was pretty sure was hunger to touch someone. Once it got started, that feeling was maddeningly hard to get rid of.

Well, there was one thing I'd found that helped for a little while, but I tried to keep it a last resort.

"That is the love we Christians celebrate on Saint Valentine's Day," Reverend James raised his finger emphatically. "True, pure, selfless love of the soul. Love that exists in harmony with the love of God, and not against it."

#

After services, there was brunch, the most flavorful meal of the week, with fruit and even bacon. After that, we were supposed to spend the afternoon of our day of rest in quiet contemplation of our reverend's words.

In practice, it was some of our freest time. We could go wherever we wanted within the campus's common areas, as long as we didn't run, didn't shout, and stayed in our assigned groups of three.

The privilege of choosing our own groups was one of the most precious we could earn, and the threat of being shuffled out of them was the only thing that could force even Barb to somewhat toe the line.

Legend had it, True Light girls used to be allowed to walk in pairs, until what happened with Madelyn and Ginny.

No one I knew remembered their last names, or what had become of them, or even exactly what it was they had been caught doing, but their first names were immortalized together, etched into the hidden side of a loose brick at the back of the chapel that none of the staff knew about.

If we asked about the policy, we were simply told, "Threes are safer than pairs."

Once we were outside, Hannah stretched her arms up and outward, fingertips extending to embrace the whole cosmos. She twirled around on the toes of her Mary-Janes, like she was shaking off the crumbling remains of her best-behavior shell.

"Would you look at that sky?" she sighed blissfully. "It's like a painting. It's like the painting of the sky all other paintings of sky are trying to imitate."

I felt a breath of relief slide out of me, now that I could see her properly and be sure she was well.

Then I joined her in looking up.

I loved that she noticed things like that, when she was in a happy mood. I never did. A moment ago, the weather had been nothing to me but a tolerably mild winter afternoon. Now, it was a postcard, saturated with brilliant blues and fluffy whites.

By silent agreement, with Barb slightly in the lead, we headed down toward the boathouse on the campus's small private lake. There were never any boats in the boathouse, expect for when the school rented a few for brochure shoots or open house days, but it was far from everything and had two whole walls, which made it a rare bastion of privacy.

"So, let me get this straight," said Barb. "Saint Val performed secret weddings for people who legally weren't allowed to get married. Even though everyone involved could get in big trouble. Even though when the couple said, 'Guess what? We're married,' the emperor could just say, 'Guess what? No, you're not. Come fight for me and die, asshole.'"

"They'd still be married in the eyes of God," Hannah pointed out. "I think that's why it's important. He gave people a chance to declare their love before God, so that no matter what happened to them on Earth, as long as they did their best and had faith, they'd get to be together forever in the end."

The corner of Barb's mouth that was closest to us curled upward. "Shit, I could do that."

"Do what? Secretly marry people?" I asked.

"Sure, why not?"

"Well, you're not ordained, for one thing," I said.

"So? Those are men's laws for marriage," said Barb. "It's only God's laws that count, right?"

Barb was really good at saying things like that. Things that you knew were tugging you toward danger, but gave no footholds for argument.

"Are you actually spending your Sunday afternoon contemplating this morning's sermon?" I teased her instead.

"Fuck no!" said Barb, pulling a cigarette from the pack she kept in her bra, and lighting it.

She and God alone knew where she got them from.

This was the third boarding school Barb's parents had sent her to, after finding her fooling around shirtless in their basement with her boyfriend and an open bottle of Kalua. Apparently, they'd decided on the spot that she was an alcoholic slut, who needed to be either broken down to her component elements and rebuilt into someone else, or removed from their house and lives forever.

When she'd first arrived, Barb had tried pretty hard to get kicked out of True Light the way she had out of all the others, but True Light was different. They understood that escape was not a punishment, and that their reputation among parents hinged upon being the never-fail place you could contain a troubled girl who had been kicked out of everywhere else.

In her first week, Barb had stayed awake and on her feet in a featureless room for five consecutive days (a school record), rather than join prayers so she could go to bed.

After that, it was like nothing could touch her. She eventually shelved the idea of getting expelled, and instead started to revel in the idea that no matter what she did, no matter how much punishment she incurred, True Light was never going to be able to get rid of her any other way besides putting a diploma in her hand on graduation day.

There was a certain freedom in that, I supposed, though it took a person tougher than me to take advantage of it.

Barb had once made me put my hand on her bare ass in the dark of the dorms at night, just to show me what all the canings had done to her skin. It was like touching a leather purse.

"Seriously, though," said Barb, releasing a snort of smoke through her nose, "I kind of like Saint Val. Stain glass windows have a lot of worse role models than him."

"Well, if we find anyone who needs a secret, not legally binding wedding," I said, "we'll let them know where to go."

The ember of Barb's cigarette glimmered as she took a draw on it. Her eyes did the same, as she let the smoke out through smiling lips.

"Oh, I think I've already found them," she said.

Her gaze flicked between Hannah and myself.

"Ha," I said, and followed it up with a little actual laughter, of the nervous variety.

Hannah did the same.

And then the laughter was over, and the moment was still going, and now we had to deal with that.

"No offense," I said, trying to keep the mood light, "but isn't this all a little sudden?"

"Sudden?" Barb laughed. "You two have only been joined at the hip, figuratively, of course," she rolled her eyes, "for the last four years. When you're not finishing each other's sentences, you're planning out your whole future together. How's it going to go again? You've told me a million times."

"I'm going to be a reverend," I said, suddenly feeling more guarded about it than the last million times.

"And I'm going to be the music director," Hannah added in a small voice. "And we're going to get our own cottage or apartment somewhere, where we can serve the same congregation together."

"Just the two of you?" Barb prodded her.

I reached out and squeezed Barb's free hand, trying to root her to us.

I knew that Barb couldn't wait to leave True Light School and the whole church behind, and build herself a life in "the real world," as she always put it, but I hoped that she at least felt the same way about Hannah and me that we did about her.

This trinity, this family, that we had formed together, was the whole reason why, in spite of the beatings, the boredom, the mostly flavorless food, the isolation, the ban on physical contact, and all the other things about True Light that Barb kept insisting were not normal, I was not yet ready for senior year to end.

I had never been to Barb's mythic "real world," but I had spent time in this world both with and without friends. The with part made True Light the happiest place I had ever been.

"I'm so sorry if we've ever made you feel like a third wheel," I said. "If we thought—"

"Shut up, this has nothing to do with that," Barb waved me off. "I just feel like doing something nice, something saintly, even, for my two besties. So, go on, stand right there."

We had reached the boathouse, and she was pointing to the swinging walkway at the lake-facing end, which was now, as always, closed.

Hannah and I looked at each other. I was back to not knowing quite what she was thinking.

"Like you've got something better to do with your afternoon? Come on," said Barb.

We really didn't, so by the potent twin forces of boredom and peer pressure, Hannah and I sidled out onto the walkway. It was barely even a walkway, really, more of a fancy plank tacked onto the top of the gate that held our nonexistent boats in place. It took a continuous effort not to fall into the frigid water.