It’s not the first time you do it, but it is the first time you get caught. You hide the sparrow in the long front pocket of your sweatshirt. When you are in class, you have to wear the school’s uniform, but the nuns in the dormitory let you wear your normal clothes after three in the afternoon. At fourteen, you really don’t want to wear your uniform outside of school; a skirt and a vest are too impractical. The sweatshirt, by contrast, can be used to smuggle the sparrow you found on your daily walk. The bird was squawking back there, calling you from below the tree. You felt you had to take it: tiny, terrified, trembling. You wrapped it in a newspaper like a blanket, hid it in your pocket, and hoped that Sister Teresa wouldn’t notice. There was a reason to believe she wouldn’t. None of the sisters saw the mouse you nursed back to health two months ago. They didn’t find the frog living in a shoebox under your bed for a week.
You put the sparrow in the same shoebox and rush to get some water and steal sunflower seeds from the kitchen. Sister Teresa is waiting for you in your room when you get back: the sparrow was chirping too loud. They call your parents, and you are assigned kitchen duty for two weeks, but they won’t kick you out. Unless, of course, something like this happens again—then we won’t have a choice, Sister Teresa warns. Sister Veronica visits the next day, looking apologetic. She talks to you about how good intentions do not always lead to good actions. She leaves you with a book about Saint Francis of Assisi.
You no longer hate your parents for sending you to a Catholic school with a dormitory, but you are confident it is their fault when the sparrow dies.
The second time feels even more trivial. You spent the night burying a mouse in the garden belonging to the school. You put the mouse in a tea box filled with white clovers and buried it under the apple tree in the northwest corner of the garden. You cared for the mouse for three days, praying that it would get better, but it didn’t make it. You spent the afternoon screaming into your pillow and the night sobbing in the garden. You dug the grave with a spatula taken from the kitchen and cried silently until you heard the birds starting to sing.
The next day, you still have dirt under your fingernails, and your face is swollen, so Eve, who lives in a room next to yours, asks if you are okay. Yes, yes, of course, you just forgot about the geography homework for today (which is true) and she lets you copy hers. You make some mistakes so it won’t look like you copied it, but Sister Teresa notices it anyway. Copying homework is a forgivable sin, as long as you confess and swear never to do it again. To atone for your misbehavior, you have to write a paper about the ten plagues of Egypt. The one with the frogs doesn’t seem too bad.
It’s been over a year since they found the sparrow in your room and you got careless. You rescued a hedgehog last night—it felt too cold when you touched its belly. It could barely walk. You put the hedgehog in a shoebox with an old T-shirt, cat food, and water, and it starts to move. You care for it, as you have been caring for all the other animals left alone with no help from anyone they know. Too small to be abandoned, scared of every move but eager to survive. When you first arrived at the dormitory, that’s how you felt, so it is easy to be empathetic.
This time, it’s Eve from the room next to yours who catches you. You’ve been spending more time together, and it actually feels nice. You feel a sense of connection with another human being for the first time since you arrived. And you notice Eve watching you closely. She comes to your room one night, and there is no possibility of hiding the hedgehog quickly enough. She promises she won’t tell anyone. From now on, you care for the hedgehog together. Eve knocks at the door at midnight each night of that week. She names the hedgehog Frank and helps you build a better house. Shoebox is too small, how can Frank gain back his strength if he barely has space to walk, she points out. It feels weird to care for an animal together, but weird in a good way. You enjoy sharing a secret. After a week, Frank looks strong and healthy, but you’re not ready to stop sharing this secret with Eve, so you keep it in your room a bit longer than necessary. You want her to be there.
The fourth time is serious because you not only get caught, you also get expelled. Eve kept coming, even after you released Frank in a nearby park. She wasn’t knocking anymore, just sneaking in at midnight. You didn’t know why she kept visiting you until one night she kissed you. She looked hesitant and nervous. You flinched at first, but then you kissed her back, and no one was shy anymore. Everything was warm, sticky, exciting, and terrifying. Something inside you was just waking up and making space within your body. It’s almost as if there was another creature living in you, moving your organs around and gently putting pressure on your abdomen. Other girls from the dormitory have been sneaking out to meet boys, you both knew that because you weren’t sleeping either. One of you could have easily said that it’s just to practice for the real thing, but Eve didn’t, and neither did you.
Eve kept coming, night after night, bringing the warmth and the excitement, the stickiness and the pressure. Until now, it’s Sister Teresa and Sister Veronica at your door, Eve standing behind them. That night, you learn what a guilty person looks like. Sister Teresa saw Eve leaving your room one night and figured it out. Eve got to stay since she confessed. Yes, she says again, it’s your fault, you made her do the unspeakable. You lured her in. Eve can still be saved, but there is no hope for you. Sister Teresa looks angrier than usual, and Sister Veronica is almost crying. Suddenly, your hands feel cold, and it gets difficult to swallow. You let your feelings choke you, but you don’t let yourself cry—once you’d start, you would never stop. You have until dawn to pack your things and get out. Sister Teresa had already told your parents everything. Just before you leave, Sister Veronica gives you a few sandwiches and an apple. May the Lord bless you and protect you, she whispers. Your parents won’t pick you up, they won’t even talk to you; there are things that God won’t forgive, and your parents can’t either. You’re sixteen, old enough to figure it out.
You did figure it out. Your aunt took you in for a while, and you stayed in places that few people stay in. You spent months in other people’s summer houses, months in apartments with no running water, months in rooms that weren’t supposed to be rooms at all. You got caught once by the owner who suddenly, in early April, remembered that he had this property, but you pretended you were just looking for your cat that ran away; you pretended that there was no sleeping bag there, no clothes, no books, nothing. He believed you because no one wanted to deal with the consequences. You wondered if you might ever become one of those people who really care which lamp will look good in the living room and buy designer salt and pepper shakers.
After you left, all you wanted to do was fight, that’s when you felt at home. You remember how your friend took you to your first protest, and screaming was just like taking a deep breath. When you’re twenty, there are rituals to observe: if you do get caught, it will be less horrible. You meet with your friends an hour before the demonstration starts. That year, it happens so often that you operate on autopilot. Still, you take out the list and then check: water, granola bars and almonds, saline solution, tissues, meds, vinyl gloves, bandanas, hand sanitizer, power bank. All of you already have a lawyer’s phone number written on your forearms (and on your thighs, just in case). There are more people than usual: old women with tired eyes and young women whose anger spills right into the streets. There are even families with kids looking like they came to a picnic. You observe how people who come to fight for women’s rights seem different from those who protest the billionaires’ desire to burn down the planet. You spend a lot of time on the streets, and this sentence means something different than it did when you were a teenager.
You walk in holding hands, marching to the rhythm of the drums, and for a while, it’s okay. You’re glad to be with other people, which wasn’t always the case. You were lucky, but you know people who’ve faced time in prison after getting caught ordering pills for someone else. You’re still among friends when you meander through the pink smoke after someone sets off flares. It’s never a picnic, but sometimes it looks like a carnival. Before the pink smoke fully disappears, you can spot white helmets getting closer.
There are people dancing on the street and there are people getting sprayed with pepper gas in the face. Sometimes, these groups overlap. You try to run away, but the burning slows you down. The chanting stops; instead you hear the police sirens and the voice from the megaphone, so metallic that you can taste it on your tongue. In the chaos, you get separated. The police are telling everyone to go home, but when you’re able to look again, you see that kettling has already started, and you are on the wrong side of the square. The cordon has cut off what looked like the only escape route, and they keep saying to go home. Suddenly, everything feels hotter, and the panic of the people around you smells sour. You know you’re trapped already, so you take a second to breathe and look at the sky: see the clouds rushing through the dark sky, feel the wind on your face. When you look back down, you see people squeezing through a tiny hole in the chain-link fence. It seems impossible to get through it, but others do it, so you try it too. The cops can’t enter because it’s still technically a part of the campus, someone yells. You run across the yard, and it feels like flying. You got caught, but then you got away.
At a protest, when cornered, you are a frightened animal. Once you’re home, you do things that help you transform into a human being again. You start small: take a shower, make tea, smoke a cigarette, paint your nails. But sometimes, you get a different gift—a memory from your childhood. You realize the sparrow wasn’t the first: at twelve, your parents caught you stealing nail polish from the drug store and that’s how you ended up in the dormitory, under Sister Teresa’s watch.
Actually, at first, they didn’t catch you. You were with your mother in the drug store, feeling bored. You were doing what you usually do: counting how many teenagers are in the store with you (two), so if anything happens, you can form an alliance. Nobody was paying attention—you took the orange nail polish that your mother would never buy you and hid it in your pocket. Your heart was pounding, your hands were sweaty, but you walked behind your mother around the store and it was too late to do anything else, so after she paid for the shampoo and the toilet paper and the tampons, you just walked out, with the nail polish burning in your pocket.
You painted your nails, thinking your parents wouldn’t notice, but, of course, they did. Maybe you wanted them to notice. At first, you denied stealing the nail polish, but then you told your mother that everyone is doing it. You were just trying to join the game all your friends were playing. The game was to pretend you’re someone you’re not (a person who wears nail polish; a grown-up). Your parents made you enumerate the Ten Commandments and explain how you broke not one but three: you stole, lied, and disobeyed your mother and father. You heard them fighting at night, and the following evening, they sat you in the kitchen and told you that this was too much, just too much. Not only stealing the nail polish but also coming home late, how you once smelled of cigarettes (it was your friend smoking, you swear), and the clothes you want to wear. So next month, you were transferred to an all-girls Catholic school to get you straightened up. Funny how those things work out.
Getting caught usually smells like sweat, but today, it’s the chemical, pungent smell of nail polish. Technically, it’s number zero, but you count it as number seven because right now your body freezes the exact same way it froze when you were twelve.
At twenty-five, getting caught can be a blessing. You have been staying with David for the last six months. You met him at one of the protests, like his paintings, and his studio is big enough for two people, so you decide to give it a try. In his paintings, mice are seven feet tall, have human hands, and know how to play the piano.
He comes home, but you don’t hear him come in. You’re on the phone, in the kitchen, telling your friend that you don’t know what to do. You explain that you like him, but you don’t love him and probably never will. There was this fantasy of getting a boyfriend, a job with regular hours, and approval from the people you shouldn’t care about; it didn’t work. When you come out of the kitchen, David is fixing his bike, which he just fixed yesterday. He doesn’t say a word, but you see his face, and everything becomes clear. You wait for the wave of panic to overcome you, push you toward the sirens, and then drown you, but it comes only for a second and the sea calms before you take the next breath.
There is no need to make this any more difficult. You’ve been packing fast since you were fifteen.
You figure it out again, and then once more. You get a girlfriend, a dog, a job that bores you; break up, get a new job, a new girlfriend, you even buy a lamp. At thirty, you work at a local NGO, creating colorful campaigns for social media so rich people will care about animals on the verge of extinction. There are barely any sparrows left in your country, but there are still people denying the climate crisis. You get caught sending an angry email to one of the donors who decided to stop their donations. I freaked out, you admit. They fire you the next day.
Number ten. This time, you want to get caught. You end up in a bar with a box of things you took from your desk after they fired you. You see a woman entering the bar and watch her closely as she sits at one of the tables next to the door. You’ve met before—a friend of a friend who always seemed equally fascinating and intimidating. There is a smudge of sunscreen on her black shirt, right below the neckline, so you focus on that before you feel confident enough to look at her face. You don’t have the courage to walk up to her, not today, but you stare at her, praying to get caught. You stare at her long enough until she feels the weight of your gaze and catches you looking at her. You talk until the bar closes and exchange phone numbers. You won’t admit it, even to yourself, but she reminds you of Eve, and the same warmth radiates from her body.
She calls you a few days later. You walk together for hours until you end up near your old school. You didn’t do this on purpose, or at least you don’t think so, that’s what you tell her. The school looks just like you remembered it, only covered with ivy, dirtier, more unkempt. They closed it a few years after you got expelled; the church still owns the building, but the whole thing wasn’t bringing them enough money, you explain. You jump through the fence, helping her when it pierces her tights, and walk around the building, still anxious and doubtful, but you find the window that never closed, and it turns out nobody has fixed it for almost fifteen years.
Some kids must have gotten into the building before you: walls full of graffiti, beer cans rolling on the floor. You’re glad you took a real flashlight, and you’re glad it’s not your first time breaking into an abandoned building. She searches for your hand when the floor creaks beneath her step. The walk up to the dormitories seems too risky, the stairs leading to your rooms are falling apart, so you go to the garden instead. You find the apple tree under which you buried the mouse, despite all your attempts to keep it alive. You tell her about Sister Teresa and Sister Veronica, about getting caught. You start to cry when you describe to her the tea box coffin filled with white clover, but you might be crying about something else.
You think you’re about to get caught when you leave the property and climb through the fence, but it’s only some teenagers looking for trouble, not the kind of people you have to worry about. On the way home, after you say goodbye, you make lists of ten species that went extinct since you started your last job, ten animals you rescued as a kid, ten times you got caught.
***
Rumpus original art by Peter Witte
