The Good Sister Read Online Free PDF Page B

from Cardinal Ruffini, the neighboring all-boys Catholic school.
    He saw her looking at him and instead of glancing away, said hello.
    “Hi,” she said, expecting him to go back to his book, but he was still looking at her, as though he expected her to say something else.
    So she gestured at the apple. “How do you do that without even looking at it?”
    “Practice.”
    “Really? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to cut your fingers?”
    He shrugged. “Nah. I’ve peeled a million apples and I’ve never cut my fingers once.”
    “Still . . . that must be a really good book,” she said. “What is it?”
    He held up the cover, and she recognized the Ray Bradbury novel she’d been assigned to read for freshman English.
    “Do you like it?” she asked.
    “I love it.”
    “Really?” Carley, who loves so many books, didn’t like that one at all. Too shy to tell him that, much less find out what he thought made the book so great, she hurried away.
    She occasionally spotted him out there after that, always with a book and an apple and a perfectly unfurled peel. As the weather grew more frequently inclement, she started to notice him inside the school, too. She can’t quite remember how she found out his name, or that he’s not someone’s boyfriend after all—rather, part of the custodial staff—but she does recall feeling an odd little spark of pleasure at the news.
    Not that she has a particular affinity for janitors, but . . . well, at least he’s not dating one of the other girls. Not that she wants to date him, because he’s too old for her and they have nothing in common but Ray Bradbury and finding themselves in the same little corner of the world at the same time, and he’s probably not interested anyway, but . . .
    She just happens to like the fact that he was obviously reading the Bradbury book because he wanted to. Not because he had to for an assignment.
    She began not just to notice him, but to look for him. She figured out, for example, that on the first Monday of every month, he can always be found outside by the big signboard in front of the school. It’s his job to change the listing of events using the big black letters he carries with him in a plastic case. She liked how in December, he wrote “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!” using plenty of exclamation marks.
    When she worked up the courage to compliment him on that one day, he told her that he would have used more, “But that was all they had in the box.”
    On the last day before Christmas break, he saw her in the hall and called, “Merry Christmas! I hope you can tell I said that with lots of exclamation!”
    She laughed longer and harder than she should have.
    Today, there’s no sign of Johnny in the hallway. Just the usual crowd of uniformed girls making their way to classrooms, and the occasional habited nun hustling them along or waiting in doorways to greet them.
    “Hi, Carley!”
    She turns, surprised to have been greeted—by name!—by a pair of passing girls from her social studies class.
    “Oh . . . hi.”
    She rounds a corner and another girl spots her and waves. “Carley, what’s up?”
    “Not much.” Carley waves back and walks on, feeling a smile playing at her lips. Maybe, at long last, she’s starting to fit in here. Mom promised that it would take some time but would eventually happen. “You’ll see, Carley, before you know it, you’ll feel as much at home at Sacred Sisters as you did at Saint Paul’s.”
    She doubted that. After all, Saint Paul’s was within walking distance of her house in Woodsbridge, not way up here in the city. And she was enrolled there from kindergarten through eighth grade, year after year, in the same building with the same kids and the same teachers who weren’t all nuns like they are at Sisters—well, almost all of them, anyway. And at Saint Paul’s, the nuns didn’t wear habits as they do here, where they’re part of a more conservative religious