Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb Read Free Book Online

shadow-fingers made a coaxing gesture: Come on, kid; let’s get the show on the road; cough it up . This one time, Simone told me she heard that Monsignor “liked his liquor, too.” But butter rum’s not liquor, because if it was, how come kids can buy butter rum Life Savers?
    I crossed myself and began. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. These are my—”
    A wheezy sigh interrupted me. “Speak up, boy. You’re mumbling.”
    Well, of course I was. I was about to own up to a doozy that morning—a sin to which I did not want my peers to be privy, particularly Geraldine Balchunas, our class’s biggest gossip who, as luck would have it, had stood at the front of the girls’ line whenI’d slinked toward Monsignor’s confessional seconds earlier. Behind Geraldine had stood my nemesis, Rosalie Twerski. Eavesdropping on other kids’ confessions, our class had been assured, was sinful, and there was a strategy by which we could avoid this particular transgression. We were to close our eyes, cover our ears with our hands, and hum quietly to ourselves. This was small comfort, however, in my hour of need. Of the thirty-four of us, the number who actually used this technique was zero.
    “It’s been two weeks since my last confession,” I began again. “These are my sins.” I admitted that, having forgotten to do my sentence-diagramming homework one night, I had copied someone else’s paper on the bus. That I had called my sister a retard twice. That swear words had come out of my mouth on six different occasions. “But not the really bad one, Monsignor. Just ‘h’ and ‘d’ and ‘s.’” I cleared my throat and mustered up my courage. “And…”
    Monsignor fished another Life Saver from hisroll and popped it in his mouth, crunching and waiting. “And what ?” he finally asked.
    “I…had impure thoughts.”
    “What was that last one? Speak up.”
    “I had these certain thoughts…. You know.”
    “No, I don’t know, unless you tell me. What kind of thoughts?”
    “Impure ones…. About my cousin.”
    “Your cousin ?”
    “Yeah. My cousin Annette. She’s famous.” I could practically see Geraldine and Rosalie out there, leaning forward, their hands cupped behind their big Dumbo ears.
    “And did you act on these thoughts?” Monsignor inquired.
    Had I? Was French-kissing a poster as bad as French-kissing a person? I told Monsignor I wasn’t sure.
    “What do you mean, you’re not sure? Either you acted upon them or you didn’t.”
    “I kissed her poster…. On the lips.” I edited out the tongue part.
    “Her poster? What do you—”
    “The one of her at the beach. In her bathing suit, listening to her transistor…. But anyways, Monsignor, I’m sure glad you gave up cigarettes. My father used to smoke, too. Chesterfields. But then he—”
    Monsignor cut me off and started telling me about how incest was a mortal sin, and how what I’d done made Jesus very, very, very sad. Had maybe even made Him weep, as He had the day He died on the cross for our sins. Then he gave me a whole, entire rosary to say for penance which, if I’d gotten Father Hanrahan, I probably would have had to say only a few “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s and maybe a “Glory Be.”
    “Now let’s hear you make a good Act of Contrition,” Monsignor said.
    Unsure if I was apologizing to God or the Monsignor, I rattled from rote how “heartily sorry for having offended Thee” I was. But I was thinking, asI recited the prayer, about how my impure thoughts were really more Pop’s fault than mine. He was the one who’d led me into temptation by taping Annette’s poster above the fryolator in the first place. And Chino’s fault, too. I wouldn’t have even known what French-kissing was if he hadn’t told me. In a way, they should be saying whole rosaries for penance, not me.
    Monsignor told me to imitate Jesus and gave me his blessing. Exiting the