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tones, which would have simply washed out that luminous, holy skin.
    This painting of Mary had been good to Lindsey when she was a student. The saint had kept Lindsey's secrets and conveyed compassion in Lindsey's times of need. She may have been just a Chinese kid in Buster Browns and a ricebowl haircut, but disturbing signs of evil had lurked in her non-baptized, pagan baby heart.
    The threat of mayhem, idolatry, and sloth had begun in kindergarten. On the first day of school, Sister Boniface, the classroom teacher, had searched all the Chinese kids' pockets for Buddhist trinkets such as beads, necklaces, prayer cards or anything else with the graven image of any non-Jesus entity. Not realizing that Buddhists were simply not as doodad-oriented as Catholics, the nun was disappointed when she found nothing but lint and plum wafer crumbs in their pockets. Determined to single out the unsaved, she suggested a quarantine for all the Chinese kids in the back corner of the classroom, but Sister Constance, the sixth-grade teacher and principal, countered that perhaps they should all be seated in the front row because their slanted eyes most likely made it difficult for them to see the chalkboard. Eventually, a think tank of nuns and priests decided to evenly distribute the Chinese kids among the Irish and Italian kids to better dilute their heathenness.
    Thus thwarted, Sister Boniface didn't give up. She proceeded to single out the wee Chinese kindergarteners with threats of physical violence. For instance, any time a student whose last name began with an "O" and an apostrophe misbehaved, the nun was lenient. Furthermore, she ignored the shenanigans of any redhead. However, whenever any kid whose ancestors hailed from east of Palermo ever so much as uttered a peep out of turn, she let loose her inner rage-a-holic and threatened to "box their ears" or hang them upside down from the exposed ceiling pipes. When agitated, Sister Boniface's throat closed up and she sounded like the mayor of the Emerald City on helium. But instead of enthusiastically encouraging the children to follow a yellow brick road, she stared down at them, and slowly enunciated, "I… will… crush… you."
    Rumor had it that Sister Boniface had come from Dublin after having planned all her life to join the Irish Republican Army. Instead, she decided to teach five-year-olds. Why was this diminutive nun at St. Maude's choking them by their collars and disciplining them with her Vulcan death grip instead of lobbing Molotov cocktails into Paddy's Pub?
    Maybe it was because she was only four foot eight. She was barely taller than some of the children, and perhaps being that short made it tricky for her to balance a machine gun on her hip. So rather than planting bombs beneath Citroens, Sister Boniface educated children with jaunty little tales of hell and its environs. She caused deep feelings of dread in Lindsey who, even at age five, was very worried because she had never been dunked in a pool of holy water as a baby. Nor was she one of the majority of kids undergoing training to receive First Communion. Having been uncleansed of her infant sins and now facing the certainty of a waferless life, Lindsey knew that the best she could hope for, destiny-wise, would be a place among the Ethiopian babies in what sounded like a very crowded purgatory. She secretly hoped her soul had a slim chance of recovery if the old Italian ladies in church lit enough votives. Through the prayers of the devout, perhaps a rising tide of pity would lift all sinners in their rickety-ass dinghies. But Lindsey didn't count on it. Deep down inside, she knew she was doomed.
    Around midyear, after having just mastered the alphabet, Lindsey seriously began to suspect that she was the Antichrist. The previous Sunday afternoon, she had watched
Rosemary's Baby
on television and discovered that she and the fruit of Satan's loins shared the same birthday, June 28. Roman Polanski had a hidden message