The Divine Economy of Salvation by Priscila Uppal Read Free Book Online Page A

friends, those at school and those in their neighbourhoods, and the knowledge that they were missed at home, for it didn’t cost parents any extra to keep their kids at the school for weekends. Tuition, plus room and board was a blanket price. It cost more money for parents to take their children home, for the travel, the outings they might have, and for the extra food. The girls were aware of this. When their parents came to pick them up, they knew they were wanted.

“I SPENT MY WHOLE allowance already,” said Rachel. “But we could go window-shop until tomorrow. My dad’s gonna take us to see a movie.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Caroline, the tall girl with a French-Canadian accent, wavered, swinging her dark ponytail from side to side around her shoulders while she dried her hands. “Maybe we should just stay in. It’s no fun if we can’t even get Cokes and sit by the fountain. They’ll ask us to leave.”
    â€œWe could have our meeting tonight then,” said Francine, a girl with almost orange hair and with freckles on her cheeks, nose, and forearms.
    I ascertained that the two girls who were with Rachel relied on Rachel’s money, or at least couldn’t keep up with her escapades without it, as neither offered to pay her own way. These two girls leaned against the wall of the washroom as Rachel put on a layer of pink lipstick, smacking her lips in the mirror, betraying annoyance. I knew who they were because I’d jotted down their names in class. Rachel commanded attention, an incredibly pretty girl with curlyblonde hair cut at her shoulders and light-green eyes. The other girls in the class deferred to her when she spoke, and no one snickered when she stood to answer a question and got it wrong. Even the nuns were a bit less strict. On my second day of class, Sister Marguerite did not ask her to write the answer to a geography question she had missed three times on the blackboard, because Rachel claimed she hadn’t understood the question properly. The classroom went silent. No one except Rachel would have dared turn the blame around on one of the nuns.
    Rachel, Caroline, and Francine had a club. I’d heard about their club while they were talking about it in class: The Sisterhood. Their classmates were envious, even a little scared of them, I gathered as I watched from my desk or cafeteria seat, eavesdropping for information about who hung out together, who was well-liked and who was shunned. As Sister Marguerite wrote with chalk, her black back merging with the blackboard, I copied her handwriting in my notebook but kept my attention on the girls.
    I saw Rachel the day after my arrival. I came in through our classroom door and stood near the radiator, waiting to see which seat was free. She strolled in, her bookbag held underneath her arm, her blonde hair catching the autumn light coming in through a small window at the far end. Her green eyes flickered. She waved to Caroline, whose dark hair was tied back into a neat braid, hanging down to her tailbone. Caroline’s cheekbones were high and pronounced, her skin abnormally pale. She had harder facial features than most of the girls her age, strong lines and a rectangular jaw, dark bushy eyebrows. She resembled a horse and, compared to her,Rachel was reminiscent of a wild bird. Rachel sat beside her and sifted through the contents of her bookbag, removing her cardigan and shaking it out like a feather pillow. I could tell she was the kind of girl who cared little for things that didn’t affect her directly, and the glint in her eye alluded to a continual search for amusement. Caroline appeared more serious and was the tallest girl in the room, almost six feet. She held herself without slouching, which made her height doubly pronounced. The seats around them were quickly taken up, and I was left to sit at the other end of the classroom, Sister Marguerite directing me to an empty desk with a