Nunzilla revisited

Life seemed particularly secure, and exciting, that first year on Harborview Drive. He looked forward to starting at a public school, a Junior High School, and to making new friends. He also liked having his father around home more often, working together in the garden, and doing carpentry. He even began to appreciate Sunday mornings again. He liked going to the bakery after mass to pick up bear claws, a peach cobbler, or a cinnamon-almond wreath, and then sharing the thick comic section of the Sunday Chronicle. Death – including comic death - had yet to appear on his map of the world.

His sisters had recently begun to initiate him to some of the snags to expect growing up. They had told him hair-raising stories about the nuns at his old school who didn’t like boys, especially the older ones. They had warned him about women who seemed to be perfectly virtuous, but who actually took great pleasure in watching boys cry, not from physical pain, but from wounded pride. They also tried to describe some of the devious games that the nuns played to trick boys into believing that they were inferior. He didn’t really understand, but was nevertheless glad that he had managed to change schools in time, and avoid whatever torture he might have been slated to encounter.