She went to work on the school newspaper in sophomore year. She had totally settled into her life at the convent by then, and made a few friends at school, but always met them outside, and didn’t want them to know where she lived. She was invited to a few parties, and she commented to Sister Regina that she had nothing to wear, and Sister Regina organized a shopping trip to a mall with her. Sister Xavier came along, and the three women enjoyed it, and came back with four new dresses for Alex to wear when she went out with her friends, and her first pair of high heels.
“Can you walk in those?” Sister Xavier asked with an incredulous look, and Alex demonstrated that she could, and then Regina tried them on just for fun. She looked terrific in them. They were high-heeled black suede sandals with gold studs. And Sister Regina was shocked at the miniskirts Alex tried on, but that time Sister Xavier was the indulgent one.
“Oh, why not? She looks cute in them.” Neither of them had ever owned a skirt that short, but Alex looked so innocent with her perfect face and straight black hair that they thought she could get away with the short skirts, and all the other girls her age were wearing them. They got her some new jeans too, and sweaters for school. They came home with bags full of pretty new clothes that were the first she’d had in a long time. And she had loved shopping with them.
Before, she had gone shopping with her dad, who spent as little time as possible in any store, and rushed to leave. Suddenly she had women to shop with, which she’d never had. And instead of the mother she’d always longed for, she now had two or three, or twenty-six. And Sister Tommy insisted on checking what they’d bought to make sure they hadn’t gone too wild. She raised an eyebrow at the miniskirts and high heels, but gave her approval in the end, and threatened to come along the next time, just to enjoy the outing with them. It brought back happy memories for her. They giggled like three friends when Sister Regina and Sister Xavier helped Alex put her new clothes away. And then Alex wrote a story that night about a murder in a department store.
“You have a very sick mind if you can turn a nice day like that into a crime like this,” Sister Xavier said when she read it, but she had to admit it was good, and Alex laughed at her as the nun walked away shaking her head. They had come to love her in the year that she’d been with them, and she was growing up before their eyes. She was maturing into a lovely young woman, and was always a willing participant helping in the classes they gave at night.
At the end of sophomore year, she won an award for her work on the school newspaper, and she finally got up the courage to send two of her stories to a crime magazine. They published both, written by A. Winslow, and paid her a hundred dollars for each, and sent her a letter praising her work and encouraging her to continue writing. She showed the letter and the check to everyone, and it was the buzz around the convent for days that Alex had sold two stories to a magazine, and they bought two more when she got back from summer camp again. She was sixteen years old, and she had to start thinking about what colleges she would apply to the following year, and visit them. Both Sister Xavier and Sister Tommy looked at lists and brochures with her to help her decide where to go. She wanted to stay in the Boston area so she’d be close to them, but Mother MaryMeg encouraged her strongly to live in the dorms when she went to college. She could come home to the convent whenever she wanted, but she thought it was time for her to enter the world of her peers, and fully experience college wherever she went.
She visited half a dozen colleges in the Boston area, as well as Middlebury in Vermont, Brown in Rhode Island, and Yale in Connecticut, and she went to New York for a day with Sister Regina to visit NYU and Columbia, but the school she liked best in the end was Boston College. There were ten she was going to apply to, but BC was her first choice.
Sister Xavier and Sister Tommy helped her with her applications the first term of senior year, and they urged her to write tamer essays than her usual fare, which she did. She had been selling stories to detective magazines for over a year by then, but since she wrote under a pseudonym, she didn’t put it on her application. But she did enough extracurricular activities at St. Dominic’s, had been a counselor at summer camp for three years, and had won two awards for her work on the school newspaper, so she had enough to beef up her application. And her teachers, school advisor, and the mother superior wrote glowing recommendations for her. The nuns were sure she’d get in everywhere, and when the letters came back in the spring, she had been accepted by Yale, Brown, Boston University, Middlebury, and Boston College, and was wait-listed at the others, but she decided on Boston College immediately, which was still her first choice.
“And I’ll be nearby and can come home on weekends, if I want,” she said, beaming at Mother MaryMeg. It touched her that Alex considered the convent home now after four years. The arrangement had worked out better than any of them had hoped. She was the child most of them had never had, and a fresh breeze of youth in their life. When she had her first date for the junior prom, a dozen of them had watched her get ready and seen her off in a pretty little black dress that set off her figure but was appropriate. Her date was wearing a tux when he picked her up and had to live through twenty-six nuns taking photographs of them and watching them pull away in the limo with his friends. Alex had told him where she lived, but he hadn’t fully understood till he saw it when he picked her up. They had become friends, and didn’t date again, so it didn’t matter to her what he thought of it. Alex was in no hurry to start dating. She spent all her spare time writing, which was her passion. She continued to publish stories regularly in crime magazines under the name “A. Winslow.” They paid very little, but it was gratifying to see them in print.
Word spread around the convent like wildfire that Alex had gotten in to Boston College, and there was celebrating in the dining hall that night. Mother MaryMeg managed to pull strings and got twenty-nine seats at Alex’s graduation, so all the nuns could be there, and the Buchanans. Alex invited Elena, but she had taken a job in New York and said she couldn’t come, and Pattie and her family had faded from Alex’s life by then and lost touch. Her family and the center of her universe now were the nuns of St. Dominic’s.