Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield Page B

hot with whip.”
    We order something simpler and sit in a corner, as far away from the students with their glowing banks of laptops as possible.
    “There were no dogs released or guns drawn when I left the church. In fact it was my Mother Superior who suggested it,” she begins. “She’s a remarkable woman and did something that she could be easily chastised for, letting a neophyte free on her own recognizance for two weeks so she can find herself. It’s not something that’s encouraged within the order. They’d rather have the ones who are struggling or having a crisis of faith hunker down with books and religious instruction from counselors and other sisters. Grace, my Mother Superior, said she didn’t think that I was cut out for the life of a nun and that I might be better suited to doing God’s work living in the outside world. So she suggested I take a short sabbatical and, with God’s help, try to locate my rudder and find my course.”
    “That’s like a scene from The Sound of Music. ” I think I’m trying to be funny but I regret it as soon as I’ve spoken. A fairly regular occurrence in my world.
    She smiles anyway and agrees, “Yeah, it does a bit. ‘Locate my rudder?’ I don’t even know where the boat is.”
    “I’m sure the boat is out there somewhere. You just have to find it,” I reply, having no idea at all what I mean by this! After the obligatory uncomfortable silence, I continue.
    “So what were you doing in a bar at one in the morning?”
    “Seeing if the high life was something that still had a hold on me,” is her answer.
    I’m trying to grasp where this is going. “Isn’t that like saying ‘I used to have a heroin addiction so I’m going to do a little heroin now to see if I’m still hooked?’ ”
    “Maybe,” she answers, “but I was thinking I had a grander view of it than that. Maybe not.”
    “You said ‘still’ had a hold on you. What does that mean?” I am possibly probing beyond my capacity to actually help here and maybe doing it for more prurient reasons. I hope not. Stand down, Woody, damn you!!!
    “I was very young and got caught up in something I wasn’t ready for. A group of guys who were supposed to be friends took me away from a pretty messed-up home life. My father was an angry man. He beat my mother—and me occasionally—any time he felt bad. These boys gave me somewhere to feel like I had a place, y’know, where I could belong. They introduced me to alcohol and drugs and the party life. And then one night they gang-raped me. I was sixteen.”
    Silence from me. Mr. Clueless has no idea what to say. Prurient interest is out the fucking window. The longer the silence, the more embarrassed I am at not having said something after my probing. All the possibilities sound lame—“That’s terrible”? “I’m sorry”? “Wow”? “Must have been awful”? Sometimes it’s better just to shut up. In a very short space of time I have learned a stranger’s dark secret because she has entrusted it to me.
    I stumble. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
    “It’s okay,” she says, and I feel she is being truthful. “I think it’s part of my path to see where I fit into this world I’ve been cloistered awayfrom since I was twenty-two. And of all the pick-up lines I heard tonight, you asking me if I was possibly ‘God’ got my attention, considering where I had come from and what I am looking for,” she finishes.
    Oooooowwweeeeee!!!!! Although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work on most women, I actually came up with a winning opening line and this burnin’ babe wanted to talk to me over all those other handsome dickheads in that place! In your face! YEAH! . . . Wait, what am I saying? Damnit, Woody, shut the fuck up!!!
    My mind pole-vaults out of the gutter.
    “I’m sure there’s a whole lot more to your story,” I say to her honestly, though I am still uncomfortably aroused, given the proximity. But Alice is apparently done spending