Excuses - Camilla Basham

“Um, I don't know if you'd want to come over, I um...well, there doing some work on our house and it's kind of a mess, how about we have a sleepover at your house." It took me all year to ask Rochelle, the most popular girl in class for a play date and I was petrified. I stood silently in my pleated navy skirt and starched white sailor top twisting my ponytails as I waited for her response.

“Rachel said you never want anyone to go to your house, she says she heard a rumor that something's wrong with your family. Is that true?”

Boy, was it true, though I never fully understood until that year. There I was in 5th grade at St. Maria Goretti, standing under a banner that read, "Jesus died for you, what will you do for him today?" I answered silently in my mind, "I'll be humiliated, is that good enough for him?"

“I don't know what you mean by something wrong with them. They are just my family.”

“My mom said people go to your house to die. So why would I want to go to your house in the first place?”

“My mom takes care of people that are sick, that's all. There's nothing creepy about it.”, I lied. In fact being lulled to bed by the sound of a death rattle of one sort or another every night for as long as I could remember was creepy all right. But, I had gotten so use to it that is seemed perfectly normal to me, and it soon dawned on me that this fact alone made me strange.

“Never mind, I just remembered that I have something planned for that night anyway.”, I lied. I grabbed my backpack and sprinted back to Mrs. Higgins classroom.

I loved Mrs. Higgins. Out of all the teachers at Goretti: the clubbed footed, one-eyed math teaching nun, the closeted homosexual history-teaching priest, and the sweaty science teaching pedophile, Mrs. Higgins was a diamond in the rough.

I bolted into her classroom thinking it would be empty, but she was sitting behind her desk grading papers.

“Camilla, it's recess, why aren't you out playing?” I looked back at the hallway sign once again, HE must be proud of me. I was racking up on the humiliation for him today.

“I, um, wanted to look up some words I just thought of.”

She tilted her head and said, “You're going to spend recess looking up words in the dictionary again?”

“Yes, ma'am.” I answered and took a seat at my old wooden desk. I didn't want her to feel pity for me, though I imagined it would have been hard for her not too.

For most at Goretti, the dictionary was nothing more than a means of punishment. When caught in an unchristian like act, one had to kneel in front of class on grains of rice, while facing the crucifix and holding a bible in each out stretched hand, never allowing it to fall below shoulder level, for as long as the teacher deemed necessary.

For me, it was an escape.

I smiled at Mrs. Higgins. I wanted to tell her not to feel sorry for me, yet that seemed like it would have been strange coming from someone my age, so I remained silent and opened the page to take up where I left off the day before....

Excruciating, exculpate, excursion, excuse...