If it was just the two of us standing here getting ready to confess, I’m pretty sure she’d just punch me in the arm and say, Don’t let it happen again, Finley, because she knows how highly I regard her and I have never, not once, over all these years questioned how good she is at her job. But with all the greasers hanging on her every word and her new boyfriend egging everybody on, she’s got no choice. She has to think of her reputation.
Kitten leans down, grabs my left wrist, and twists the ever-lovin’ hell out of it, and fine, I guess I deserved that. But then, I don’t know, ya know? Maybe she’s showing off for Butch or maybe it’s just that “time of the month” the eighth-grade girls talk about at recess or maybe I hurt her feelings or something, but Kitten grins with her corn teeth and says loud enough for all the greasers in the confession line to hear, “Finley here”—she hard-noogies the top of my head with her bony knuckles—“I guess she knows better than me and doesn’t need my information.” There’s lots of laughing and booing and cat-calling from the crowd. “Sooo . . . go ahead, kid. Show us what ya got. Find out on your own what happened to Sister Margaret Mary.” My wrist is burning and now I got a headache and I think I might toss my cookies, because I can tell that Kitten’s not done humiliating me for doubting her by the look on her pimply face—I’ve seen this look many, many times over the years. She’s about to growl out the dreaded life-changing challenge that no kid in the neighborhood ever wants to hear, “I dare ya.”
That’s when Mrs. Cumberland goes back to playing “Holy, Holy, Holy” on the organ, and the greasers go back to snapping their Black Jack gum, and Butch Seeback starts bleating, and brownnosing Jenny Radtke hyena-giggles because a dare is a very big deal around here. Especially one that comes out of Kitten Jablonski’s mouth. She’s dared kids to stay overnight in the abandoned haunted house on 70th St. where a murder took place or jump offa the roof of school or steal real gold St. Christopher medals off of gravestones when jumpy and armed Mr. McGinty is just a few yards away or slam back so many potato pancakes that they throw up on one of the nuns on Fish Fry Friday.
Now that I know that Sister Margaret Mary is not dead and not been kidnapped, that means that the only mystery The Mutual Admiration Society has left to solve is finding her, which I really, really, really, really don’t want to do. For Birdie’s sake, wherever our overly strict principal she is, I hope she stays there forever. But because of Kitten’s dare, I really don’t have any choice in the matter now, do I. Her legion of snitches will be spying on me from every street corner and alley and from behind every tree and garage in the neighborhood for the next three days, and if I don’t look like I’m at least trying to find out what happened to our missing principal, those snitches will report back to her and I’ll be so far up shit creek without a paddle that it won’t be funny.
It’s one thing to try and fail at a dare—razzing for a month or so, some sittings on the bubbler, gum in my hair, etc.—but if a kid doesn’t give it her best shot, well. If Birdie and me don’t end up running away, I’ll never be able to leave the house or walk down the halls at school or the aisles of church or anywhere else in the neighborhood without some kid clucking and calling me a yellow-bellied chicken shit or throwing an egg at me. They inflicted so much cruel and unusual punishment on Mary Olson when she ignored one of Kitten’s dares that her family had to move out of the parish. To another state.
So before I disappear through the red velvet confessional curtain to tell Father Ted my sins, I do what I gotta do. Trying to hold back my tears, I look up to Kitten and croak out, “I accept your dare,” and then I spit in my hand and she does the same, and when we shake on it, my fate has been sealed.
19
CLOUD NINE
Maybe as a reward for letting Father Ted get out of the black box and over to his favorite barstool at Lonnigan’s faster, and for not farting, he goes easy on me for a change. After I get done telling him a short list of some of my real sins that aren’t that bad—being mean to my sister, not saying my prayers, only half following the Fourth Commandment to honor my father and my mother—he absolves me with the Latin forgiveness words and assigns me my penance. “Say three Hail Marys, Shirley,” he tells me from behind the black curtain. “Send the Jablonski kid in, and tell the rest of those delinquents to say the Stations of the Cross,” and then he slams the window shut in a very thirsty way.