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When it was time, we walked through the festival, now buzzing with people, with women in sundresses and strappy sandals, with small kids who held balloons that floated like the Holy Ghost above their heads. At the high striker, Regina, one of the newest girls, swung the rubber mallet. She went by Reggie, and despite her thick frame and legs set a shoulder's width apart, the puck didn't rise even halfway to the bell. After each attempt, she'd tuck the mallet between her legs, and she'd wipe her sausage hands on her uniform skirt. Next to Reggie, cheering with strained facial expressions, stood her sidekick, Noreen, mute as always. She had a green apron tied around her waist, and she was supposed to be selling raffle tickets, but considering The Guineveres had never heard her speak, we didn't know how this would be possible. Some of the older girls—the ones who were almost eighteen—had spread out in front of the bandstand, kicking off their shoes and leaning back on their elbows. A few of them had only a matter of weeks before their birthdays, and then they'd be sent away, off into the world, forever free. We envied them their ages.
"Any cute boys?" Gwen asked as she scanned the crowd. Her lips were still stained pink from the cotton candy we'd eaten earlier when we worked the concessions booth. She had pressed strands of fluff to her mouth and let it melt there.
"None that I see," Win said.
"Maybe they're turning them away at the gate," Ginny said.
"Lead us not into temptation," I added.
Oblivious to all but our own purpose, The Guineveres walked through the crowd transfixed, like Moses must have felt when he parted the Red Sea, leading his people to the Promised Land.
The convent itself towered behind the festival tents. Its gray stone had grown lightly mossed, and to see to the topmost cross affixed to the highest spire, we had to crane our necks back, giving us the feeling of staring straight up into the heavens. And as we stood there, doing just that, our necks exposed, the backs of our heads resting on our shoulders, we felt the weight of the convent, the sheer enormity of it. Its windows were eyes staring down on us, unblinking. Unsympathetic, too.
We climbed the steps to the main archway, and from there we saw that the Sisters were beginning to corral the old folks toward the parade's staging area. We made our way inside, down the long corridor that, though it had plenty of windows, was shrouded in shade. Regardless of the time of year, the hallway felt chilled, the way dirt does if you dig down far enough. The size of the convent taught us how space related to time. It took us several long minutes to cross through to the Sick Ward. Nobody was in the main room, except Mrs. Martin, who sat at one of the front tables, a deck of cards stacked in front of her, two hands neatly dealt. She didn't look up as we walked past.
We arrived at the back door to the courtyard just in time to catch a glimpse of Sister Fran holding her clipboard. She walked on the tips of her toes, bouncing as she exited through the open gate in the direction of the festival crowd. We could hear the squeal of her whistle, short staccato beats, and though she was yelling something, it sounded to us like the garbled warble of a bird. Gwen shoved my back, and I stumbled forward a bit.
"Go," she said. "Move."
I sensed the urgency, and I can say that up until that point, I hadn't been scared. But now, faced with the reality of the situation, my limbs felt mired in quicksand. It'd been three long years since I'd stepped foot off the convent's grounds. What did I know about the world?
"Vere," Win said. "Go!" Her voice was not unkind, and so I stumbled forward, and, despite my fear, my legs carried me the rest of the way.
A tall stone wall stretched the perimeter of the courtyard, enclosing it. We could see above the wall to the striped tops of the festival tents that billowed in and out in the breeze like they were breathing. Because the Sisters believed that functionality preceded beauty in all areas of their lives, and because they did not tolerate waste of any sort, they had filled their old black shoes with soil and lined them along the base of the wall in tiers, using them as planters. From these rows of leather lace-ups sprang purple geraniums that were pretty enough, except for how creepy it looked. The toes were scuffed, angled out from one another in pairs. Moss had grown in the shoes' worn crevices or along their busted seams, and every so often the head of a geranium popped through a weak spot in the leather, eaten by decay. These shoes gave us the distinct impression that the previous owners, whoever they were, wherever they were—alive or dead—were guarding the courtyard like invisible sentinels. Even out of doors, these shoes reminded us, we could not escape the omnipresence of the Sisters in our lives.
Excerpted from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Domet. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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