The Girl in the Mirror (Part 2) (Englisch)
Datum: 17.02.2022,
Kategorien:
Schamsituation
... covered with a thin film of dusty snow. "Oh God . . . oh God . . ."
She walked stiffly through the parking lot toward the church steps, trying not to feel the cold, her face a conflicted mask of deadpan numbness and barely concealed misery, her feet making perfect little prints in the snow that lay on the icy path to the steps.
Up to the big wooden front doors she went.
She suddenly wished Rebecca was with her. Rebecca, her churchgoing friend. Rebecca was not Catholic but would understand and be supportive. Tami shut her eyes tight and tried to imagine Rebecca in her wire rimmed glasses and unstyled hair and lumberjack shirt, standing next to her, giving her encouragement.
The naked teenage girl opened one of the big wooden doors. Numbly, she walked in. The singing had just stopped and people were looking down at their missalettes to follow the priest's words.
The place was crowded, packed like at no other time of year, holly branches and wreaths and tinsel everywhere, a big party of holiday decorations. . . this registered only dimly in the naked girl's mind, as did the gasps, the half-expressed "what the --" from the ushers who she had now passed, the sudden total silence that fell over the church.
Tami walked a bit faster now. She had to be seen by Noyes's spy, wherever he was. When she was right in the middle of the church she looked up and saw Father Coubert, that old fart, who had once told her fifth grade cathechism class that non-Catholics don't go ...
... to heaven, who had told her brusquely during the last time she went to confession, in junior high school, that to have sexual feelings before marriage was a mortal sin -- Father Coubert standing behind the altar and looking at her from behind his thick glasses with an expression of surprise and outrage such as she had never seen before.
"M - miss Smithers!!" he finally choked out, his voice cracking with anger.
It was like a splash of cold water. Everything she saw and heard was now suddenly real.
The naked girl, now frightenend half out of her wits, looked around in a panic at the sea of astonished faces.
There was Mr. Gottman, her science teacher from high school.
There was her mother's friend Aunt Ginny.
There was Debby Poquette, her old friend from the cheerleading squad, with her grandmother.
There were the parents and sister of Maryanne Spinelli, her friend since grade school who was now in the Army.
It seemed like everybody who she knew from her childhood, who knew her as Tami Smithers, a nice good girl, now saw her as what she had turned into -- a shameless, naked slut.
Tami wanted to crouch and cover herself and run into one of the pews but knew that she was not allowed to do that. The spy was watching. Her fists clenched, her arms locked straight and waving wildly from the strain of not being able to cover herself --
She looked up at the crucifix and the expression of Jesus that she now knew so well. She dashed for the little kneeling ...