The Stars Never Rise

“No, as a matter of fact—”

“You know what the world really needs?” She turned to watch me through eyes wide with excitement as she wound the rubber band around the end of her hair. “More exorcists. I mean, if you’re determined to damn yourself to a life of servitude, communal living, and celibacy, wouldn’t you rather be slaying demons than wiping noses on kids that aren’t even yours? You’re gonna need some way to work off all that sexual frustration.”

“Don’t swear, Mel,” I scolded, but the warning sounded hollow and hypocritical, even to my own ears. We both knew better than to curse in public, but there was no one at home to hear or report us. “Profanity is a sin.”

Melanie rolled her eyes. “Everything worth doing is a sin.”

“I know.” And honestly, it was kind of hard for me to worry about the state of my immortal soul when my mortal body’s need for food and shelter was so much more urgent.

I plucked the two slim silver rings from the top of our dresser and tossed her one. Melanie groaned again, then slid her purity ring onto the third finger of her right hand while I did the same. “Nina Kane” was scratched into mine because I’d “misplaced” it four times during the first semester of my freshman year and Sister Hope had engraved my name on the inside to ensure that it would be easily returned to me.

Ours weren’t real silver, and they certainly weren’t inlaid, like Sarah Turner’s purity ring. Ours were stainless steel, plucked from the impulse-buy display at the Grab-n-Go one afternoon when I was fourteen, while Melanie distracted the clerk by dropping a half-gallon of milk in aisle one.

Fortunately, the sisters didn’t care where the rings came from or what they’d cost, so long as we wore them faithfully beginning in the ninth grade as a symbol of our vow to preserve our innocence and virtue until the day we either gave ourselves to a worthy husband or committed to celibate service within the Church.

I knew girls who took that promise very seriously.

I also knew girls who lied through their teeth.

I didn’t know a single boy who’d ever worn a purity ring. Evidently, their virginity was worth even less than the stolen band of steel around my finger.

I grabbed my satchel on my way out of the room, and our conversation automatically paused as we passed our mother’s door. In the kitchen, I pulled the last half of the last loaf of bread from an otherwise empty cabinet, and Melanie frowned with one hand on the pantry door, staring at the calendar I’d tacked up to keep track of my erratic work schedule—I worked whenever the nursery needed me. “What’s today?”

“Thursday.”

“Thursday the fourth?” Her frown deepened, and I had to push her aside to grab a half-empty jar of peanut butter from the nearly bare pantry. “It can’t be the fourth already.”

“It is, unless four no longer follows three. Why?” I glanced at the calendar and saw the problem. “History test?”

“What?” Melanie sank into a rickety chair at the scratched table. “Oh. Yeah.”

“You didn’t study?” I set a napkin and the jar of peanut butter in front of her, then added a butter knife and one of the two slices of toast as they popped up from the toaster.

She shrugged. “It’s just a fill-in-the-blank on the four stages of the Holy Reformation.” But the way she spread peanut butter on her bread, her gaze only half focused, said she was worried.

“And those stages would be…?”

Melanie sighed. “The widespread decline of common morals, the subsequent onslaught of demonic forces, the glorious triumph of the Church over the worldwide spiritual threat, and the eventual unification of the people under a single divine ministry.” She was quoting the textbook almost verbatim.

“Good. Come on.” I took the knife from her and made my own breakfast, then tossed Melanie a modest navy sweater and herded her out the back door, where the town perimeter wall was easily visible between the small houses that backed up to ours. The wall was solid steel plating fifteen feet tall, topped with large loops of razor wire. In the middle of the night, I heard the metal groan with every strong gust of wind. I saw the glint of sun on razor wire in my dreams.

But clouds had rolled in since my predawn activities, and the sky was now gray with them.