Missing Sisters -SA by Gregory Maguire Page A

over,” said Mr. Shaw, more tired than annoyed. “That’ll do, Miami Shaw.”

    “I hate you all,” said Miami. “With a very special hate. You have just ruined the rest of my life. Thank you very much with whipped cream and a cherry on top.” She pushed away from the table and ran back to the tower. No one called after her or followed with a worried look to see if she was going to pitch herself out the window. What did they care! Just to spite them she wouldn’t even do it. She’d stay alive and inflict herself on them for the rest of their natural days.
    The big, fat, stupid jerks. Garth more than anyone.

    Two evenings later Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and Miami and Garth drove downtown to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Patty had come over to baby-sit Fanny and Rachelle.
    Miami huddled as far into her corner of the car as she could. She wore a scarf on her head even though the teachers said you didn’t have to do that anymore. She didn’t want anyone she knew to see her.

    Garth was already over the novelty of a black king and could feel in his bones a long, boring church evening ahead. At first he had tried to jolly Miami up by dancing, but Mr. and Mrs. Shaw were so drawn and sorrowful that soon he just gave up and looked morose, too.

    The church was packed; folks crowded into the aisles and the choir loft. It wasn’t even a holy day of obligation or a Sunday. Miami didn’t listen much to the readings or the sermon, but she stood on the kneeler to see around as far as she could. The place was full of nuns. Some had the new modern habits, but a lot of them were sticking to the old crowlike gowns and bibs. There were even a couple of dark, sensuous-looking sisters in pale blue veils with gold embroidery, whose habits were wrapped like sheets around their waists. They wore brass bangles and had red dots on their foreheads. If I were ever dumb enough to want to be a nun, that’s the kind I’d be, thought Miami.

    Every Catholic in Albany must be here. There were black people and white people, and yellow, and everything in between. Mrs. Jenkins, the witch from next door, was two pews over.
    The O’Haras, all nine of them, were there. Billy included. So that was all right; he wouldn’t have been able to come over with the geography book anyway.

    They all sang together. Even Miami sang. “We shall overcome,” they sang, and held hands in church. She held Garth’s hand. “I still hate you,” she whispered to him in a loving tone.
    “I hate you, too,” he said, “but don’t you hate this even more? It’s so boring .” They squeezed each other’s hands in joyful contempt. Mr. Shaw and Mrs. Shaw were crying, the Bobbsey twins of South Allen Street. The whole thing was totally embarrassing. “Oh deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday.”

Part Three

    SMITHEREENS

    Underwater, Alice was no deafer than anyone else. Velvet silence. Liquid light. What she could see of the world was a broad-brimmed plate; she wore it like a hat. A hat decorated with scraggly pines, run around with ribbons of cloud, pinned with skewers of sunlight. Yet for all that, it had no weight. She jostled her hips this way and that way, as if doing a hootchy-kootchy dance, and the world wheeled overhead in perfect balance.

    Then she shot up for air with a whoosh .

    The world clicked back into place. The shallows of the lake were churned by a hundred splashing, shrieking girls. Their screams knotted together into a big ache in Alice’s brain. The counselors—nuns in training, mostly, though stylish in pedal pushers and culottes—paced the dock, blowing whistles whenever anyone’s life was threatened by too much watery exuberance.
    “Fabia Lanahan! Stop doing that to Mary Jane Jones!” Alice flicked her hair expertly back with a toss of her head and grinned wildly at no one. Then she plunged deep into her element.

    It was the third day of her two weeks at Camp Saint Theresa. The weather was good, the