That Friday at St. John's, within just fifteen minutes of the bell that would end fourth-period religion, Sister Rose Marie Thomas said the word masturbation.

           “Masturbation,” she said, right out loud, and then fell silent, the way she’d let silences linger between the announcement of a new topic and the beginning of its discussion, and a thin, startled chain of laughter spread from student to student and sputtered out, yielding a dense, waiting quiet, and Alan Daly, alarmed at the rate at which his heart was beating, wondered if it was true that Sister Rose was crazy. He’d heard people say she was, and he’d heard Jimmy Martin's big brother, in the cafeteria, saying she’d been to a place for Sisters who have nervous breakdowns, and that was why she taught religion now, instead of Spanish. Then, too, Alan had sensed something flighty behind the fluctuations of Sister Rose's appearance, how one day she’d come in wearing the full, brown habit, other days just the veil. Now she wasn't wearing any part of the habit at all, but a gray wool skirt with a white turtleneck sweater, her shiny, reddish-blond hair drawn back in a tight bun.

           "Then when they go over the edge completely," Jimmy's brother had said, "they send them to the library." The freshman boys had all laughed, Jimmy most of all, and Alan, at the table next to theirs, had smiled to himself, knowing from all the time he spent in the quiet, pile-carpeted room how that might be true: the Sister-librarians all had a very distinctive look, especially Sister John Moore and Sister Mary Luke Wexler, who were always so irritable and disapproved of everything. Sister Wexler's cardigan never hung right, and there was a wildness to her loose, gray hair. She could be seen behind the counter, head bent, bringing the stamp down on the return cards; Alan was convinced the fiery script at the bottom of the overdue slips belonged to her: Two weeks late! Return at once! And it was awful, dropping pennies and nickels into her pale, wrinkly palm while she scowled and shook her head. Then Sister Augustine Murphy, who wore the black-and-white habit and black oval-frame glasses, would continually smile and hum as she wheeled around the metal cart, returning books to the shelves; and she’d smile, too, all the while someone addressed her, and all the while she answered him, as if anything anyone ever had to say couldn't help but be pleasant. And so, Alan considered, maybe Sister Rose wasn't as bad as that, because she seemed to him to be very smart, and to know about so many things--the past week, she’d taught the class psychology. He could remember vividly the term displaced aggression, and how Sister Rose had illustrated it with a story about a man who was angry at his boss, and then went home and kicked his dog. She’d swung her leg out a little when she told it, as if she were the man. "Just kicks him, poor defenseless creature. And why? Was he mad at the dog?"

           "No, Sister," Michelle Hansen, a girl at the front of the room, had said.

           "Did the dog do anything wrong?"

           "No, Sister."

           "Who does the guy really want to hit?"

           "The boss," Michelle said.

           "Class?" Sister Rose said, and then Alan and the rest of the students said, "The boss."

           "That's right. But it's the dog he strikes out at. It's the dog who gets the aggression. And that's why it's displaced."

            She walked over to her desk and moved an index finger down her page of notes.

           "But now, does that mean this sort of thing only happens with people who are mad at their bosses, or does it happen with other people as well? I wonder, for instance, how many of you have ever gotten mad at someone and then taken it out on someone else. Have any of you ever done that? Gotten mad at your mother, say, when she told you to clean your room, or at your father when he told you to do your homework instead of watching your favorite TV show? Do any of you have dogs you hit then?"

           "No, Sister."

           "Little sisters or brothers you hit then? Maybe you just smack them a little, because you're mad at your mother or father."

           "No, Sister."

           "Little smack on the arm, maybe. On the back of the head."

           "No, Sister."

           "No, you say. You all say no." She paced behind her desk, holding her chin in her hand, then said, "But some of you are lying," the words sending a shiver across Alan's shoulders, and he wanted to tell Sister Rose that his family didn't even have a dog, and that he’d never smacked Theresa on the back of the head.

           But you've yelled at her. He imagined her saying that. Haven't you yelled at your little sister when you were mad at someone else?

           No. And he was prepared to say no, if she should call on him, though he suspected that wouldn't have been true. Because just last week, after his mother had demanded to know why he wouldn't go to the semiformal, Theresa had asked and asked what it was everyone had been fighting about, and finally he snapped, "Leave me alone, already, will you? Don't be so nosy all the time." Had that been aggression? Had that been displaced?

           "Some of you have committed that sin," Sister Rose said, "of striking out at someone younger and weaker than yourself, even though you say you haven't," and while Alan thought it was true she wasn't crazy the way Sister Augustine Murphy or Sister Mary Luke Wexler was, she had a funny look to her then, the way the thick lenses of her tortoiseshell glasses magnified the earnest expression of her eyes, and the way her pale, puffy cheeks turned a blotchy red. They turned that way whenever she was passionate about something--and they were red indeed, like two hard red apples, when she stood up from her desk and said the word.

           Masturbation. And then she just stood there, silently, with her arms crossed and her eyes sweeping over the heads of all the students, and so much more unnerving, and strange, because Alan had only just come upon the word that winter. It was still fresh and foreign-sounding to him, bringing new rounds of butterflies every time it sprang up, into his thoughts, and now to have it snatched this way from the tentative grip of his mind, to watch her ride away with it, naked and squirming, well, it didn't seem fair at all. He’d searched long for the word, ever since he’d heard David Murdock say it on the bus in September, and ever since the public-school boys had tossed it, giggling, one to the other in the pool showers--first in the Webster's College Dictionary his mother and father had bought him for his thirteenth birthday. "So you can look up all those words you keep asking us about," his mother had said, and that had put an end, then, to his trips down to the kitchen and the TV room, books in hand; and that had put an end, in turn, to his parents' puzzling and frowning, and their reluctant suggestions to, Go ask your father, maybe he knows, or, Go ask your mother, maybe she. And he’d searched, too, through all the big unabridged dictionaries at the school library and the public library, not believing that he could find no term at all between master-at-arms and master bedroom, and then only after the word had continued to elude him, and he’d reached the conclusion that it must be the kind of terrible word dictionaries wouldn't include, the way they wouldn't include words between fucivorous and fucoid, or shist and shitepoke, did he stumble on it, more or less accidentally, while defining a list of terms for the different systems of government they were learning in social studies.

           And though Alan didn't fully understand how his eyes had jumped, with startling directness, from autocracy at the top of the page to autoeroticism near the bottom, clearly it was the second part of the word that caught his attention--for he knew very well what erotic meant, having spotted it long before in the little ads in the paper for the X-rated movies playing at the Regent Theatre in Bay Shore. That had been a word whose meaning, once he’d rushed up to his room and leafed through the new dictionary, yielded itself readily up: tending to excite sexual desire, and of course sexual was a word he’d looked up many times, pertaining to sex, and then sex meant anything connected with sexual gratification or reproduction or the urge for these, especially the attraction of individuals of one sex for those of the other--that was all very clear. And he saw, too, in the etymological information, how erotic was derived from Eros, a minor god from the stories he’d read in Bullfinch's Mythology, and Eros, evidently, was just another name for Cupid, whom he’d always known about, having seen, every February, all the red silhouettes taped to storefront windows and stapled to bulletin boards, and while that was all very interesting, and made him wonder how Valentine's Day and the gods of love might be connected with the movies in Bay Shore, learning erotic, and even eroticism, hadn't affected him greatly.

           But oh, the word autoeroticism astounded him, the smartness of it! And while he was certain he’d never come across it before, he felt from the first glance a sense of recognition, as if his mind, on perceiving the word, assembled its meaning and became familiar with it, all of an instant, making it almost unnecessary to look beyond the boldface to the small gray type of the definition: 1. sexual sensation arising without external stimulus, direct or indirect, from another person. 2. self-generated sexual activity directed toward oneself, i.e. not another person; masturbation.

           "And I can tell--" Sister Rose said, her words nipping the silence, "I can tell just by the looks on some of the boys' faces that you know exactly what I'm talking about. Some of you boys know exactly what that long M word means, don't you?"

           There it was: spelled, remarkably, with a u. And it was just seconds after that, the time it took him to flip through to the middle of the volume and find its definition listed on the opposite side of the page he’d pored over, again and again--deliberate genital self-excitation, usually by manipulation; autoerotism; also called self abuse, onanism--that his whole body exploded with heat: legs, arms, neck, face. It was incredible to him, terrible, that there should be a word for it, and it was tremendous, and seemed to point to something tremendous, to realize suddenly that the word had always been there, even before he’d started committing it, and, glancing around the classroom then, his heart pounding harder, he wondered did any of the others know what the word meant, as well as he.

           But Dawn Fogarty, in the seat to his right, had her legs crossed, the top one swinging, and Alan assumed by the way she smiled expectantly for Sister Rose to continue that maybe she didn't know. Then Michelle Hansen, in the front row, had her hand over her mouth, and Larry Keenan, all the way at the back of the room, was crossing his arms and squinting at the floor. Other boys, too, had their heads bowed--Drew Davison, running a ballpoint pen from one end of his pencil indentation to the other; Ed Herman, shielding his face with his hand, ears a deep red--and what must Sister Rose think, seeing them all look that way, that they knew or that they didn't know? And was it crucial, then, that Alan not look down as they did? He thought it must be, because what would be the punishment, what the disgrace, if for cutting a class you got detention, for smoking in the bathroom, suspended? It could never be admitted, ever, and, summoning up his boldness, he faced front and looked squarely at Sister Rose, to where she was standing yet to the left of the chalkboard, beneath the flag, and didn't drop his gaze, even as she directed her hard, accusing eyes at him, her hard-apple cheeks, even as she didn't scan on to the next student but continued to stare back at him, to stare at just him, as if it were a contest between them now to see who would look away first. And Alan, struggling against the impulse to concede, squinted up his eyes against hers until finally she nodded, just slightly, and cocked her head to the side, just slightly, too--as if she were agreeing to something, he thought, or recognizing something--before lifting her gaze, and passing on.

           "Jerking off," she said.

           Virginia Schaeffer gasped. "Oh my God."

           "Jumping the monkey. Am I right, boys?" She was pacing the length of the chalkboard, the fat gray heels of her shoes clacking across the floor. "How about rubbing yourself? Uh-huh. Or how about playing with yourself, or making love to yourself?" She said each phrase like she was reading from a list, bitterly.

           "I could go on." Instead she stopped beneath the flag again and turned at them. "See, I know these words. You think you're the only ones who know what they mean, but I know what they mean, too."

           Alan wasn't sure it could be happening, a Sister saying the kinds of words he thought he’d heard her say, some he hadn't even known before--he hadn’t known the monkey expression, and was it one, or did Sister Rose just think it was, was Sister Rose just confused? Because it looked as though she might be, that maybe her jaw was clenched too tightly, her head trembling a little. And then as Alan looked to his right, he saw that Dawn Fogarty had stopped swinging her foot, and that she was pushing the ends of her black hair to her mouth and nibbling at the tips. She stared back at Alan as she did it, the blush that had risen to her oily skin making her pimples look redder and more awful.

           "And I'm not talking to just the boys now, either. Girls, too. Girls can play with themselves. By some definitions, any one of you girls with your legs crossed are playing with yourselves this minute."

           There was the sudden patter of shoes slapping to the floor, Dawn's among them, and now she’d all but folded down on her desktop, covering her eyes with her hand, and whatever could Sister Rose have meant, to say girls could do it just by crossing their legs? Could they? Alan couldn't imagine it, nor could he believe any of them would ever try such a thing, right in front of everyone, in religion, especially not Dawn--for she’d only been sitting there, paying attention, and waiting for the teacher to say what the word meant, he’d seen the whole thing. And that had been mean of Sister Rose, hadn't it, to accuse the girls that way? Wasn't she being like a bully would be--not by pushing, or using fists, but just by standing there, talking? That was mean of you, Sister Rose. He imagined standing up and saying that. She hasn't done anything wrong. And then his heart was beating excitedly to think of the shock on Sister Rose's face, and on the faces of all the students; how terrible that would be, to yell at a Sister. It was terrible enough just to imagine it, and just to picture Sister Rose, the way he pictured her now at the front of the room, fists raised like a fighter: "Well, playing with yourself is a sin, see. It's a sin and I'll tell you why."

           He wanted to look up, to harden his eyes and glare back at her a second time, but before he could gather the nerve, she said, "Because God said the seed should not be spilled outside the womb," and an instant, sobering heat rushed to his cheeks. His head dropped farther, and his eyes fixed on the blank page of his notebook. He couldn't dare lift them now, for he feared that if he did their expression would betray him and his knowledge of the story of Onan, that Sister Rose would be able to divine, somehow, the clarity with which he pictured it all in his mind--the man, the seed, the spilling of it, right at the last minute, onto the ground by the woman's side; waste was the word the Bible had used, he had wasted his seed on the ground.

           "And do you know why?" she said, turning for the chalk ledge, and it was then that Dawn's pen jumped unexplainably from her hand, landing in the aisle with a little click. Alan glanced at her, as did Cindy Rizzo, and they all glanced up at Sister Rose, who was writing the word selfish on the board, before Dawn quickly grabbed it up again. Then as Sister Rose placed her chalk back and clapped the dust from her fingers--"Because it's selfish, that's why"--Alan picked up his own pen, and wrote the word in a light, tentative script at the top of his margin. It looked strange to him there, unexpected, because of all the adjectives he might have guessed Sister Rose would pick to describe such a thing, he didn't think he’d ever have guessed selfish. Even God hadn't called it that, to Onan; in fact, Alan couldn't remember Him having called it anything at all, but just the Bible saying God was offended.

           "Let's have an illustration, shall we, boys and girls?"

           He heard the snappy clacks of her shoes, and, without looking up from his pen and the fast, jagged scribbles it made down the margin, pictured her pacing before the board again, chin in hand.

           "Let's say you have a gift, a special gift from God that He’s given you to give to someone else. A gift so special, perhaps, that you're tempted not to share it with anyone at all."

           He squinted at the blue-lined page, his mind resisting the sudden image.

           "Has that ever happened to anyone here? Has anyone ever had a gift he was going to give someone--maybe something you made, or something you bought someone for Christmas--that was so precious, so beautiful, that it crossed your mind, maybe even just for one second, that you were going to keep it for yourself?"

           She paused, and Alan's hand stopped, and then it jumped up the page to list gift below selfish, as if the top of the margin were now a place reserved for unexpected words.

           "Well, let's say you did. Let's say you decided it was going to be yours and yours only, and let's say--well, here it is, class, here's the gift."

           When Alan looked up, she was pointing to her desktop, but there was nothing on it besides the regular papers and books, the green desk blotter.

           "Can you see it? Nice gift box, nice pretty ribbon, pretty bow? See it there on the desk? Well, it's been sitting there some time now, and you've decided it's yours, see, that you can do whatever you want with it, and so one day your curiosity--that thing, you know, that killed the cat--gets the best of you, and you say, 'Well, all right,' and take the gift out of the box, and you enjoy it a little, all by yourself. Then you put the gift back and put the box away and forget about it a little while." She placed the gift on a shelf in the air. "Some time passes, but then you remember how nice the gift was and you can't help it”--she took the gift down again and made untying motions where the ribbon would be--"you take it back out and enjoy it a little more . . ."

           Alan looked back to his zigzags and spirals, wondering what the box could have to do with the word, and if Sister Rose would get around to saying it again--for that was the truly dreadful thing, to hear her say the word aloud--and he wondered, too, how something could be a gift if you weren’t supposed to give it. They weren't like Onan, were they? They hadn't been told, "Unite with your brother's widow, and preserve your brother's line." Sister Rose would never tell them to unite with anyone, would she, to unite and not spill it? No, of course she wouldn't; that was a horrible thought. But was what Onan gave the woman a gift, then? Or would it have been a gift if he hadn't spilled it? And to do what Onan did and spill it, that wasn't exactly the same as being alone and spilling it, was it?

           ". . . and you give the gift to yourself over and over, again and again . . ."

           Because onanism, when one turned to it, meant first to withdraw in coition before ejaculation, and only secondly to M, and so one ejaculated onto the ground beside a woman after withdrawing, or one ejaculated onto one’s own stomach without having put it anywhere, and in either case one was an onanist--which could mean, Alan saw, spiller--and he wondered, even, if it could be used as a verb, if one could say, "He onaned the seed onto the ground." He didn't remember a verb form from the dictionary, though it had given the location of the story in Genesis, which he’d run to look up in the big family Bible in the hall; the book was dusty, and made little popping sounds when he opened it, like the cracking of stiff joints. Inside, it said how Onan knew the descendants wouldn't be counted as his own, and that was why he wasted it every time he united with his brother's wife. Alan pictured it happening in the kind of huts they had on Gilligan's Island, on straw mats laid on the hard, plain earth, and then it was somewhere outside the hut, in an ocher field, that the Lord struck Onan down, the way he’d struck his brother, Er, down before him--it wasn't said why the Lord had killed Er, just that He had, and so there was a widow without children.

           "Now, is that gift going to be worth very much to anyone? Class?"

           "No," Michelle Hansen said.

           "I should say not. A used gift."

           Later Tamar, the woman whose thigh it was, disguised herself as a harlot--Alan knew that word from reading The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck--and Judah, Onan's father, said to her, "Come, let me have intercourse with you," and then Tamar had twins, and a string was tied around the wrist of the boy who started to come out first, but he went back in, and his brother came out first instead, and though it was all very strange and involved, and Alan hadn't followed most of it, he’d been surprised at the Bible, that it would have harlots in it, and men who said, "Let me have intercourse"--and could they do that, without lifting the woman's veil and seeing her face?--and he’d been surprised, too, at how quickly babies were born and grew, at how harsh the people were with each other, and deceitful, and how strict the Lord was with everyone; it was like another world, and if Alan had lived in the time of Genesis, he didn't think he’d have felt very safe there.

           "Why do boys and girls play with themselves?" Sister Rose was scanning the room. "Anybody?" she said, but no one raised his hand. "All right. I can tell you why. Because it feels good, that's why. They play with themselves to make themselves feel good, see, and then once they feel good a first time, they want to feel good again. And again. And again. And they forget that it was a gift from God because all they're concerned about is how good they feel, their own personal gratification. We know what gratify means, don't we, class? To please? To satisfy? And so we satisfy ourselves, and then we don't need anyone else. Is that it? Is that the way it goes?"

           "No," several students in the front said.

           "No," Sister Rose repeated louder. "That was not God's intention. He did not give us ourselves so we would shut ourselves up. He did not give us life so we could put it out--snuff!--right from the very beginning. You are a gift from God. You are." She pointed to Renée Garafolo. "And you." To Nick Warren. "Everyone in this room, a special gift from God, a gift He gave to yourself, and to the world. And your body," she said, indicating her face, and then her shoes, "this outside is a part of that gift, your body is a temple of God's spirit, God's wonderful love, it's like--you know the red glass that protects the candle at Mass, the flame that reminds us of God's presence? Well, it's like that. It's like a vessel, or a little cup--yes, a little cup God poured some of His never-ending love into, and God made that cup to keep His love safe, see, and it's a very fine cup, one that must be treated with reverence, and--and with respect. And are we respecting ourselves, then, are we to be trusted with God's treasure, if we use it again and again to our own selfish ends, for our own selfish pleasures? If we just hug it up close to ourselves, and keep it from everyone else?"

            She paused, crossing her arms tightly to her chest, and it was this hugging gesture, together with the blotchy redness of her cheeks, that made Alan think she looked cold.

           "No. No, we don't. Because that is a deliberate, selfish refusal to share yourself with others. And because that is a deliberate desecration to the temple of God's spirit. And that is a sin." She nodded, and walked with an inspired look to her desk. Then as she turned a page of her long yellow pad and thought over her notes, Alan heard the sighs of several students around him, the faint shifting and repositioning of their feet, and it was shortly after this, as he considered adding desecration to his list of words in the margin, and felt the stirrings of a vast panic inside him, that his mind became distracted with the image of a plant growing beside the straw mat in Onan's hut--an ugly, poison plant with a sticky stem and whitish, over-ripe berries, and the berries falling to the ground and bursting, and their goo seeping into the dirt, making a thick, wavy mud.

           Alan squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't want to think of Onan's plant--it wasn't nice or beautiful in any way--and he tried instead to imagine daffodils, crocuses, tulips, all the clean and colorful flowers that would bloom in his yard in April and May, and then as he thought of the ones that sprang from blood in Bullfinch's Mythology--the red anemones for dead Adonis, and Venus beating her breast and tearing her hair while the wind blows open the blooms and carries away the petals; purple hyacinths for the boy Apollo loved, and the god falling to his knees and taking him up in his arms, "Would that I could die for you"--bursts of laughter rang out, and in the instant that Alan's attention returned to the room, and he saw all the students about him, twisting around in their seats, his face prickled with warmth, as if the laughing had been directed at the embrace he’d been imagining.

           "Something funny somewhere?" Sister Rose said, and as she looked up, her hand smoothed over the hair at the side of her head and felt for the bottom of the carefully-coiled bun.

           Near the back of the room, Drew Davison and Ed Herman sat frozen now in their seats, staring down at the aisle between them.

           "Perhaps we're not mature enough for today's discussion, is that it? Edward? Andrew?" But it was with the distant, dazed expression that she said it and ordered them to put their heads down on their desks. "The rest of you face front," she said, looking back to her notes, and the class became quiet again, and waited, and Alan, too, slipped back--into his thoughts of the boy Hyacinth, and how lucky he’d been to play discus with Apollo, to have a god carry his nets when he fished and follow him on his trips through the mountains. How does it happen, he wondered, that a boy becomes the one who’s chosen, that his name becomes the one that’s said now, every spring, whenever people, smelling the sweet smell, point and say, "Oh look, the hyacinths are in bloom"?

           "When do we give the gift of love?"

           Heads raised, and Sister Rose, letting the page of notes flutter down to the pad, walked from her desk.

           "We've talked long enough of when one shouldn't, but when should one share that gift with another? Can anyone tell me? Michelle," she said, moving closer to the girl, "how about you? When do a man and woman give the gift of love to each other?"

           Michelle's eyes widened. "When?" she said, and glanced behind her to Cindy Rizzo, who shook her head quickly and shrugged.

           "No idea at all?"

           "On Sunday, Sister?" Michelle said tentatively, and then Sister Rose rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sang, "Dum da dum da dum," the way she would when someone said something she thought was stupid.

           "I'm not interested in the day of the week, Michelle, I was simply asking what a man and woman must do before they give the gift of love to each other."

           It was clear to Alan what she wanted Michelle to say, just as it seemed clear to Nick Warren, who had his hand up now, "Oh, Sister. Sister Rose."

           She looked at Nick, then back at Michelle, and the timid, pinched expression on the girl's face. Other hands raised.

           "Well?"

           "Get engaged?"

           "Oh no, not just engaged." She shook her head emphatically. "They get engaged first, but what must they also do? Nicholas, what must they do?"

           "Get married, Sister Rose."

           "Yes, indeed. Get married. My goodness, Michelle, is that what you thought?"

           Michelle shook her head, and Sister Rose looked up at the class.

           "And who can tell me why? Why is the gift not given before masturbation?"

           There was a short, troubled silence, followed by a whispered, "Huh?" and Alan felt his stomach flutter, and saw the faces of the students around him, and the glances they gave to one another. Sister Rose watched the stirring, too, her forehead wrinkling.

           "M-Marriage," she said louder. "Why is it not given before marriage?" She cleared her throat and scanned the room in the usual way, as if she hadn't made the mistake, but all the hands had dropped to the desktops. "No one?" she said, pacing again. "No one remembers what we spoke about just a moment ago? That every time a gift is given it’s worth less and less? Didn't we agree that no one would want something that someone else has had his hands on first? Well? Does it make any difference whose hands those are? If they're our own hands that use the gift, or other people's hands? If, say, first the gift is given to Peter, and then it's given to Bob, and then Harry has his paws all over it, then John? Is that any different? Is that gift going to be worth very much by the time everyone finishes with it?"

            "No," the class said.

           "Worthless. We give the gift to one person, in marriage, till death do you part, then it’s a true gift."

           Alan looked back at his pen, scrolling and looping down the margin, and it was the sound of his sigh, then, and the voices in the classroom falling partly from his ears as he thought of the myths again, and of the way a man-god could love a boy, and play with him in a field, and cry when the discus bounced up and hit the boy's head. Why is the gift not given before masturbation?

           Alan. Alan, have I hurt you?

           But he’s lying limp in the kneeling god's arms, a bright flow of blood trickling down his forehead and falling to the earth.

            Speak to me. Tell me I haven't hurt you, he says, and there are all the wood nymphs and Olympians looking on the scene with tears and sympathy. At last his body quivers fitfully, and with the life that’s left in him, he raises his lips to the god's ear--to say goodbye, to whisper a profession of love--then his head drops heavily down. Apollo stands slowly, clutching Alan's lifeless form to his chest; and after he sends up his cries, and they bound through heaven and earth, splitting boulders and tearing curtains from top to bottom, there’s the commanding of the flowers, the alandalies, to spring from the blood.

           "Yes, indeed, they have children. Just like you and you and you. Born from the gift of God's love, not some selfish act of personal gratification."

            But maybe that wasn't the best way for things to turn out, even with the show of sorrow and the sympathy of the nymphs.

           "No, Sister," the class said together.

           "And why not?"

           Maybe he should have himself wake up, dazed, in Apollo's arms.

           "Why did I say it was a sin, that long M word that all of you boys were so embarrassed about?"

           Michelle Hansen raised her hand, reading her notes.

           "Michelle?"

           "Because it's selfish."

           "Because it's selfish, yes. Class?"

           I think I might be okay, he says, brushing the small trail of blood from his forehead.

           You're alive?

           Yes, the discus just grazed my head and knocked me out for a second.

           Then we will have days together still.

           Many days.

           Thank God, thank God you're alive, Apollo says and, offering his hand, pulls Alan to his feet. Come, let us run through the mountains.

           I've never seen such beautiful sky-blue flowers, Alan says, getting up.

           I made them for you. This is the much of my love. And as he waves his hand, the ground becomes full of them, fields and fields of sky-blue, and they’re running through them, and up the side of a hill, faster and higher and then, at the very top of it, Alan feels the god's hand squeeze down on his, he feels an extra tug on his arm, and his feet are leaving the ground, they're flying . . .

           "But Mr. Daly doesn't think so."

           Alan started and sat up straight, eyes blinking, and it was just an instant more before he realized that he hadn't imagined hearing his name, but that Sister Rose, at the top of the aisle, had said it, and that she and all of the students were looking at him now. "Is there something you want to say, Mr. Daly?" she said, squinting behind the big, tortoiseshell glasses.

           "Excuse me?" Alan said in a trembling voice, and a new surge of heat spread over his cheeks as the mousey sound repeated in his ears.

           “Excuse me, he says. Excuse me, what?"

           "Excuse me, Sister Rose?"

           "Isn't there something you'd like to add to our discussion?"

           "No, Sister."

           "Or are you keeping your thoughts to yourself today? That's it, isn't it? You don't want to share them with the class."

           "No, Sister."

           "But I didn't see you reciting the answers with everyone else."

           "Yes, but I--No," he said.

           "And if you were the teacher, and you were standing in front of the classroom and saw that one of your students wasn't reciting the answers, what would you think?"

           "But--"

           "Not just some Joe Schmoe who never does anything the rest of the class does, and will never make it beyond the ninth grade, but a bright student, an honors student, who wasn't reciting the answers with the rest of the class, what would you think? That maybe he disagreed with what was being said? That he--?"

           "But I was reciting with the class, Sister." He thought that he had been, that he must have been, though now he couldn't be sure.

           "Oh, you were. Well, I didn't hear your voice. Perhaps you were just mouthing the words and not saying them, then. Is that what you were doing?"

           He shook his head, and looked to Dawn, and to Michelle. Could they have seen him say the answers?

           "Maybe the fact that I couldn't hear your voice along with the other boys' and girls' points to a lack of conviction on your part. Maybe you’d like to contest me on this. Would you like to claim that masturbation isn't a sin?"

           His stomach leapt again at the sound of the horrible word. "No."  

           "Do you think maybe the Church is wrong in this? That jacking off is okay?"

           "No, Sister."

           "No, you don't think it's okay?"

           "Yes, Sister."

           "You do think it's okay?"

           "No, Sister."

           "No, Sister; yes, Sister. Which one is it?"

           "It's not okay."

           "Is that what you believe?"

           "Yes."

           "Oh, well." She lifted her eyes from him and walked to the next aisle. "See, and here I thought by that look on your face before, by that bold, fresh look you gave me a while ago, that maybe you would've had the nerve to contest me on this. But since, as you say now, you agree with the class, then I see no reason why you shouldn't recite what everyone else has." She spun at him. "So by yourself now, Mr. Daly, what is masturbation?"

           He cleared his throat. "A sin."

           "What is it? I can't hear you."

           "A sin," he said louder.

           "What's a sin?"

           "What is?"

           "Yes. What's a sin? Say it. The whole sentence."

           He moved his shoes over the floor, opened his mouth and closed it.

           "Say it," she said, and then he mumbled the sentence softly to himself, "Masturbation is a sin."

           "Louder."

           "Masturbation is a sin," he said, dropping his head and squinting down at the list of words in the margin of his notebook: selfish, gift, desecration.

           "And why is it a sin?" she snapped--just as the bell rang: a sudden, deafening, forgotten peal, and Alan, along with the entire class, jumped and slapped his hand to his heart.

           "Stay in your seats, everyone." Sister Rose raised her right hand as the peal ended. "Mr. Daly," she said over the noise of classroom doors banging open, the hall filling with students, "why is it a sin?"

           All around him the boys and girls hung to the edges of their seats, books on arms.

           "Because it's selfish."

           "Because it's selfish," she repeated, and it seemed to Alan that a look of disappointment crossed her face as she dropped her arm to her side. "That's right. And if you, young man, or if anyone else in this class, for that matter, is in sin--and I know that quite a few of you are--you had dare not receive the body of Christ on Sunday morning in such condition. No siree. You get yourself to confession tomorrow, and ask for God's forgiveness, and refrain from such disgusting behavior. Then maybe God will invite you back to His table."

           She turned, walked behind her desk, and sat down. Then it wasn't until she’d repositioned her pad on the blotter that she said, "You may go," and the room broke with the noise of students leaping from their desks and rushing for the doors, last of all Alan, who, twice dropping his notebooks on his way across the room, paused to say, "Good afternoon, Sister."

           But it was Ed Herman's muffled voice that answered him.

            "Sister Rose, can we leave now?" The two boys still had their heads down on their folded arms.

           "Yes, go," she said, waving her hand without looking up. "Babies."

“Sister Rose” is adapted from the unpublished novel The Other Way Home. It first appeared in The Gettysburg Review and was reprinted in Harper’s Readings.