Before locking all of the doors, I leave the altar spotlights lit because there isn’t much sun coming in from the stained glass windows, and I don’t want to slam my crotch into the edge of a pew again.

When I trained for this job, my sister taught me that it’s best to start at the bell tower, go around the church, and then end in the sacristy. Four years later, and I still do it this way.

My phone vibrates. It’s Margo. She says that there are few downed branches near the hospital and that people forget how to drive in the rain.

I text her that we should meet at her grandparents’ house. Normally, we hang in the basement, starting with AP flashcards, moving to video games, and then making out. But nothing beyond Frenching because her grandfather likes to linger by the door. Wanting privacy, we tried her tree house, the boiler room at school, but one proved too rickety, the other too damp.

A few weeks ago, she suggested the church. “It’s between our houses,” she said. “And you have the keys.”

I told her that we could try my house. My parents were too busy fighting to give a shit, but she said their screaming would kill the mood. Those green eyes. Those deep dimples. I said okay, and the next week, Margo came to the church after I finished cleaning up. I stole the keys to a confessional box, and for about ten minutes, we made out in peace.

Our bare chests were pressed together when we heard a few people praying the Sorrowful Mysteries. I had forgotten that an exterminator was fumigating the chapel at the convent across the street. We stood still while the voices prayed, and by the time they got to The Crucifixion, my knees were about to give out. After they left, I told Margo that we shouldn’t come here again, but she asked when I’d be on the schedule next. I’m in the sacristy when she replies that she’ll be here soon.

A bit of stomach acid is climbing my throat so I go to the sink to splash some water in my face, but I still feel like I’m going to puke. I walk over to the safe, grab a handful of communion wafers out of a Tupperware, and then eat them. They’re good for settling acid reflux.

Before putting the Tupperware back, I flip it upside down and look at a piece of graffiti I found a few months ago. It’s a dick with my sister’s initials on the balls. She drew twelve of them around the church when she was a sacristan, and I’ve only found nine. The most recent dick was etched into the paneling of a confessional box. I need to find the rest before college.

I take out a box of keys. On top is the key to the tabernacle, a gold box fixed into the wall behind the altar that secures consecrated communion wafers, the kind I can’t use as an antacid. The keys to confessionals are under it. As I’m looking, I find a key labeled “tower.” Without worrying about the details, I pocket it and then leave the sacristy.

While waiting for Margo, I walk around the church and find dents in candle stands, scratches on pews, tears in a tapestry of the Sacred Heart, bulbs of glue in Mary’s halo. When I get to the altar, I count thirty-nine cracks in the wooden cross above the tabernacle. I want to tell my sister, make her proud that I’m just like her, but I can’t, so I keep looking for flaws, looking for the rest of her dicks, but after a while, I head to a pew and wait.

When I hear a door open, I close my eyes and pretend to pray in case there are still roaches in the convent. But when she tosses her backpack next to me, I know. She takes off her hoodie, and I can hear water dripping onto the marble. In a pair of cutoffs and a black tee, she looks stunning, and even in the dim light, I can see her nipples poking against the fabric. I try not to stare.

Reaching into her backpack, Margo takes out a flask and offers it to me, but I put my hand up. After a sip, she says, “If anyone shows up, we should treat it like a challenge.” 

“We couldn’t do that with Pop?”

“No one here can do shit to us, but Pop can.” She starts toward the back, but I tell her I have somewhere else in mind.

“Good,” she says, “confessional boxes are so fucking cramped.”

I get up and head toward the tower with Margo following close behind, but she pauses at an electric candle box. People drop change in there so some dead loved one can intercede on their behalf. After what happened with my sister, I began bringing pennies to mass, but when I’d light one, all that’d happen was maroon plastic turning red. Margo pulls a penny from her backpack and drops it into one of the slots. A tiny clink, and then a red light.  “That no one interrupts us,” she says and then pulls out another penny. “And for Mum-Mum too.”

“It doesn’t really work,” I say.

Biting her lip, she says that I’m probably right but worth a try anyway.

When I open the door to the bell tower, a gust of wind blows through the threshold, carrying a few dry leaves with it. Inside, there’s all of these miniature statues on the floor. Sacred Hearts. Carpenters. Virgins.

“You can’t stand anywhere without being looked at,” I say.

“I hope there aren’t any of these at the top,” Margo says.

“I don’t think so. They’d rot.”

“They’re rotting down here.” She’s pointing at a Virgin with spots of mold on its blue cloak and pale face.  Margo steps around the statues and heads to the ladder, but a Carpenter and Virgin block it. She starts climbing anyway, and about halfway up, she kicks one. “It was already broken,” she says.

When I get to the statue, I try to align the cracks in its head with the ones in its neck, but it won’t stay. Looking at the decapitated head, I see that the nose is gone, the paint in its eyes has faded, and most of the veil has chipped away. Margo calls down to me from the top of the ladder. I toss the broken piece and start climbing. Leaves and twigs and bird shit cover the floor, and with the locks on most of the bell tower windows broken, the flaps shudder in the wind. Floodlights pointing at each window give the tower a yellow glow.

The stairs that lead to the bell chamber start on the wall facing the parking lot, and on the opposite wall, there’s an opening that leads to a space between the exterior roof of the church and the nave’s decorative ceiling. Maintenance workers often need to tinker with the heating and cooling system or spackle a crack in the ceiling or change a lightbulb, and with this in between space, they can do the work without setting up scaffolds in the pews. I look at the wall next to the opening and spot a dick carved into the plaster.

Ten.

We climb on the ledge and survey the in between space. It’s covered with old bird’s nests made of twigs and trash, and there’s a layer of leaves from the past few autumns.  Margo takes out a pack of Pall Malls and offers me a cigarette, but I put my hand up. All I can think of is that ad that shows how much it costs to smoke. All the air freshener, the teeth whitening stripes, the actual cigarettes, the cancer. I tell her all this, but Margo takes one out and lights up anyway. When her first drag fills my nostrils, I want one, but that man at the end of the ad in a hospital gown with tubes in his nose is telling me not to smoke in a raspy voice.

“Don’t you get worried?” I say.

“About what?”

“You know, cancer and all that.” Letting her cigarette dance on her lips, she says, “I figure I’ll quit sometime during college.”

I ask for one and examine it a while. My sister would tell me that if I’m going to smoke, it better be pot. More natural, she’d say. But she’s not here anymore, and Margo is. I put it between my lips, and leaning toward me, she lights it with a black Zippo. I inhale, and burning—burning—in my lungs. I swallow hard. My eyes water. My throat aches. She says that I can cough if I need to. I take the cigarette from my lips and hack a few times while she rubs circles on my back.

“Happens to everyone the first time,” she says.

My tongue, my throat, they’re so dry. I ask if she has water, but she shakes her head. “Hand me your flask,” I say after another coughing fit, not believing what’s coming out of my mouth. She smiles and hands it to me. More burning, but this is followed by a bit of coconut flavor. I take another sip, and everything is warm. As we sit there, passing the flask, smoking our Pall Malls, I decide that I really do love Margo. Smoking it past the logo, I feel it burning between my fingers, between my lips, and I want to tell her that she means everything to me, but I just flick my hot cigarette butt into the in between space and ask for another.

The television was never enough to keep my parents from screaming at each other, so most nights, my sister and I would wander the neighborhood, ending up in the woods behind the cemetery, and on nights it rained, we’d go inside the church, using a broken window, and play cards next to a portable lantern. We stopped going as we got older, spending our nights instead with our bedroom doors’ shut, with our ears plugged with headphones, but a week before she would have graduated high school, she came into my room and said that she wanted to go to the church that night. We both had keys then, but we still used the broken window to get in. As we played cards, she told me about her dicks and how I needed to find all twelve. They were her legacy, she kept saying.

I flick what’s left of my cigarette and take another sip from the flask.

We start walking around the in between space. It smells like Pall Malls and dry leaves down here. There are beams of wood to walk on to avoid stepping on the plaster of the decorative ceiling. Margo and I walk up to a circular stained glass window with pieces of its mosaic missing, allowing more wind inside. Margo wraps her arms around my shoulder and starts kissing my neck. My hand goes from her hip to her ribs, but Margo pulls back and says we should wait. We climb out of the in between space and head for the steps.

At the top, there’s a room with vented windows that have speakers and floodlights facing them, and in the corner, we find the bell with a dick spray-painted in pink on the bronze.

Eleven.

“A fucking PA system,” I say.

“Everything’s artificial,” Margo says.

I lay my dress shirt on the floor, and we sit on it. Margo takes out her iPod and hands me an earbud. She plays something from the album From Under the Cork Tree.

“You got this already?” I say.

“Yeah, Pop got it for me last time Mum-Mum went into surgery.” Margo takes out two cans of Bud and says Pop won’t notice they’re missing. A few songs in, and I want to rip her shirt off. I toss my empty into the corner and ask for a cigarette. A few drags, and then Margo starts standing up. I stand up too so our earbuds don’t fall out. My hands on her hips. Hers on my shoulder. We’re swaying to “Xo” when she puts her lips on mine. After the song, she tosses her iPod into her backpack.

Some of the wall falls when I push her against it. I try to hold my cigarette but toss it behind me instead. Pall Malls taste better in her mouth anyway. We’re piling our clothes onto my dress shirt, hoping to make a bed. With everything on the floor, we’re just standing there, exposed, and for the first time, we really get to see each other. She pushes me onto the pile of clothes. She stays on top, and I’m trying to move in sync, but if I keep pace, it’ll be over too soon. I focus on the sound of the storm blasting the tower, but it doesn’t work.

When it’s over, she rolls off and takes out two cans of Bud and her last cigarette. A few drags each, and then she flicks it into darkness.

When the cans are empty, we lie down, and Margo presses against me. Hips touching, legs intertwined, we look at the dense smoke above us. Stomach acid burning in my throat, I see my sister in the haze. Her arm leaning out of the tub, her wrist bleeding on the tile, and then, her body, pale and blue, but somehow, a slight smile. The stomach juice is near my tongue, I try to only think of Margo, her body against mine, but can’t. I sit up to keep it all down, and Margo asks what’s wrong, but I’m somewhere else.

Only a burning sensation in my nostrils brings me out of it. The cloud of smoke has grown darker. Margo yanks her clothes from under me, and once we get them on, we’re running down the stops, down the ladder, and out the door. Outside, we head for the cemetery.

Sirens approaching, but I keep running. 

Stomach acid climbing my throat, but I keep running.

Smoke trapped in my lungs, but I keep running.

The cemetery stops where the woods begin, and before entering the trail, I turn around. A tree wrapped in sparking wires has crashed into the sacristy, and smoke is pouring from every window in the tower.

“Come on,” Margo says.

We get to a clearing, and everything’s coming up. I stop running and put my hands over my head. I try to keep it all down, but all I can do is wait until I can’t control it any more. After wiping my sleeve across my mouth, I kick a rotten branch. It doesn’t crack so I kick it again but slip on my pile of sick and land on my ass. Looking into the pitch sky, I imagine the church as a pile of ash, filled with the masses, the homilies, the confessions, filled with my sister trying to give me a home without finding one for herself. Margo helps me up, and we keep running.

When we get to her tree house, I think about losing my sanctuary, about losing what was left of my sister, but I don’t say any of this. Instead, I tell Margo about the dicks, and we just start laughing, all the way from our bellies, like children.

Twelve.

I’ll never know where she hid it.

# # #

Nick Kowalski is a Philadelphia native and a first year M.F.A student at Arcadia University where he also works as a teaching assistant.

Photo credit: Terri Malone