“morally excellent
pure: in a state of sexual virginity”

There shines a certain virtuous sheen on the skins of those Catholic School girls behind the blue wrought iron gates. Mine disappeared as swiftly as the carpet burns on my lower back appeared. I am not virtuous in any form of the word, not in the word ‘celibate’, the word ‘godly’ or ‘cleanly’, not in the word ‘productive’. I exercise irregularly and eat peanut butter straight from the jar too often, therefore no virtue in thinness (for being thin is virtuous, in their new meaning of the word). I display no ‘pure and vestal modesty’; nor am I ‘a spinster or a virgin lady’.

The Catholic School girls behind the blue wrought iron gates where I study French lord their possession of the very thing I lack cruelly over me once a day without fail.

Their virtuosity is of the exhibitionist kind.

‘We’re have mass this morning,’ they say pityingly before clattering in an almost-convincing pretense of collective demure, leaving me with my unchristian thoughts and the seagulls, stranded five floors up.

The girls behind the blue wrought iron gates dangle virtuosity from the slender chains around their ivory necks, display it in the carefully composed ‘compare and contrast’ posters blue-tacked to the stairwell walls on each floor.

Compare: the clichéd image of the starving African child hiding in the folds of his starving African mother’s exotic drapery.
Contrast: the extreme close-up of the stretched smiles of ten African children sitting proudly behind desks grasping roughly carved wooden pencils.

Look how we helped! It’s gone away! the caption under the two pictures says, or something like it. The original starving African child is never seen amongst the ten exuberant school children.

The Christian Way, another exclaims. Follow us.

French is taught on the top floor, five flights up. I walk past fifty posters a week.

Their virtuosity is of the ironic kind; preaching ten commandments and attending mass every week in two-inch lycra skirts of the same blue as the wrought iron gates, and two-inch heels to lend a certain symmetry to the ’skirt - ten miles of leg - heel’ package.

Virtuous in breathlessly outraged, softly flushed gasps of -

‘oh-my…-that’s-disgusting-how-could-you-don’t-you-feel-GUILTY? Are-you-not-ASHAMED?
I-would-die!’

- and yet the Chaplain breathes heavily down necks, drools, practically. Carries across rivers in Lourdes gently weeping, swooning dolls with heels and shrink-wrapped thighs and the little cross they twiddle between fingers coyly, and they enjoy this.

‘He broke down.’ I am told, and they fashion lips into tight little ‘o’s of surprise.

‘He’s thinking of resigning. He called me over to the room behind the chapel, told me he loves me. “I love you,” he said, and he went red and corrected himself - “You. Are. Lovable.” I tried to leave, and he wouldn’t let me.’ They laugh, flick back hair, apply with surgeons’ precision liquid eyeliner to the corners of their eyes. It never smudges.

‘I’ve made him question his faith.’ they swagger. ‘I’m actually kind of flattered, you know?’

I know. God himself questions his own existence in the face of such virtue.