The Dark Path by David Schickler Page A

urbane, funny men, very different from Father Anselm, the nifty priest I grew up with. Jesuits travel the world and some say “fuck” a lot and I often see Kelleher and Raminski sitting in the front-window table at Georgetown’s finest restaurant, eating rack of lamb on the university’s dime. I could get used to rack of lamb.
    But I’m keeping my Priesthood Ache secret from everyone until I’m sure.
    To hide my feelings of priestly vocation and to advertise myself as a Cool and Normal Guy, I start wearing a tie-dyed poncho everywhere I go. It’s midnight blue with long sleeves and psychedelic ribs of color radiating out from the solar plexus. When I walk around campus, hippie types come up to pet my sleeves and give me mellow kudos.
    One day, a week into school, I walk down O Street with an actor friend. I’m feeling tough and radiant not only because I’m in my poncho but because all summer long I painted houses back home in Rochester, so I’m tan and I have two rugged-looking scabs on my jaw where a coworker’s electric sander grazed me.
    The actor nods at a row house up ahead. “I need to stop in here and say hi to someone.”
    The sun is shining and making my jaw scabs tingle. “I’ll wait outside,” I say.
    â€œShe’ll probably give us beer.”
    â€œI’ll come in with you.”
    We go into the row house, which is tall, but so squished and narrow across that it looks lifted from a Roald Dahl story. The girl-who-will-probably-give-us-beer is sitting on her couch, looking through a box of mix tapes and laughing to herself about something. She’s barefoot in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, with waist-long straight and bright red hair. Her head is down, studying a tape cover. I can’t see her face. Not having acknowledged us yet, she goes on laughing and the laugh is a low, brimming murmur that makes it sound like something is cooking and warming inside her.
    The actor says, “Dave, this is Mara Kincannon.”
    â€œHi,” I say.
    The girl looks up, smiling. She has pale, clear skin and her blasting green eyes knock my breath back down to my stomach. When her glance finds mine, her smile falters. The air between us gets goose bumps.
    â€œHey,” she says softly.
    The actor watches us staring at each other. “Uh-oh,” he says.
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    THE HOUSE I grew up in was literally packed full of girls. Almost every weekend my two elder sisters had girlfriends sleep over, often for huge slumber parties. The guests were usually dancers, my sisters’ fellow students from pointe, jazz, or tap. In our living room they’d push their pink and purple sleeping bags and all our furniture against walls and then choreograph and perform routines until three in the morning. In the years when I was five to seven or so, I was stuffed into leotards and thrown into these performances. I was given cameos while “Hey, Big Spender” or “Crocodile Rock” played on the stereo. If I made the girls happy, I would be group hugged. If I screwed up, I’d be banished to my bedroom, where I would grab my notebook and write disgruntled haikus:
    You guys are unfair.
    I am a good jazz dancer.
    Let me back downstairs.
    If Olympic gymnastics were on TV, our living room became a hushed church, with the girls and I in pajamas watching the screen breathlessly. The night in 1976 when Nadia Comaneci scored the Olympics’ first perfect ten on the uneven bars in Montreal, my sisters and company wept for joy. Misty-eyed, I yelled to my father, “She nailed the landing, Daddy, oh, she nailed it!”
    The Miss America pageant was a high holiday. The year I was ten, there must’ve been two dozen girls sleeping over on pageant night. They were twelve and thirteen years old now, and bitterly critical during the swimsuit competition:
    â€œGemma, check out Miss Oregon’s suit. It looks like