The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Read Online Free

Father Kavanagh pinched the cigarette to his lips and his cheeks caved in. The cigarette reddened and half an inch of ash grew there.
    “Yes, Father.”
    “And Mr. Doyle?”
    “Yes, Father,” I admitted.
    The steely haired priest nodded at us several times. He huffed out a cloud of smoke and unclasped the big envelope. “I’d like your opinion on this.”
    He slid out a sheaf of paper divided into bright comic-book panels. I’d colored them myself. I got the hot, giddy feeling of being in serious trouble, like just before a whipping.
    “Is this familiar, Mr. Scalisi?” Kavanagh passed it to Rusty, who accepted as if it were a loaded rattrap.
    We’d spent an entire weekend devising
Sodom
vs.
Gomorrah
74, a spoof of our torments at Blessed Heart. It had disappeared from Wade’s desk a few days before. We’d suspected Donny Flynn, Margie’s brother. The last page showed the priests defiling fat, nude Sisters of Mercy on the church altar while our comic-book selves watched in horror from the choir loft.
    We traded Death Row grimaces. Kavanagh’s face was vague with smoke. I swallowed a horrible urge to laugh. We’d be expelledfrom school in disgrace, we’d have to run away from home.
    Rusty, his face a struggle between shock and hilarity, slowly crumpled the pages in his fist while he stared out over the railing behind Kavanagh. The priest took it from him. “Oh no, don’t destroy it. One of your classmates thought enough of it to drop it in the rectory mail slot.” He smoothed out the crimps, ashes tumbling from his cigarette, and returned it to the envelope. Kavanagh’s name was scrawled on the outside.
    “What will your mothers think, I wonder? I believe it meets even the legal definition of obscene.”
    The hallway changed. The floor tilted like in a fun house, but instead of sliding I floated, unable to feel my body. The cafeteria chimed with forks and knives, trays rasped on tabletops, elfin voices enclosed us. Kavanagh’s collar, between black bands, was bone white, radiant. He put the last of the cigarette to his lips and it glowed fiercely. He dropped it to the floor and pressed his toe on it. He exhaled smoke for a long, long time, and it lingered, curling and billowing in tendrils that finally became a haze.
    Joey began clearing his throat, overdoing his usual nervous tics, snorting, grunting. Though not officially in the gang, he’d participated.
    “Did you boys learn this sort of thing from magazines? Rock songs?” asked Kavanagh.
    “No, Father,” Tim said, discarding a fine excuse. The nuns thought “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was brainwashing us to shoot heroin. Things like that.
    “Where then?”
    Everyone stood paralyzed for a few seconds.
    Then Rusty dropped his chin to his chest and said, “I guess we just picked it up off the street.”
    “You should’ve left it there.”
    I looked through the railing grid down into the cafeteria. The teachers were lining the children up, marching them outside.
    “I ought to be shocked,” said the Irish priest.
    Tim asked—and I wanted to fling him over the railing— “Would this be a mortal sin, Father?”
    Kavanagh’s mouth was hard, as if he had nipped something in his front teeth, then he relaxed into a faint cynical smile that I’d never seen before. “Venial,” he said, accompanied marvelously by smoke, though the cigarette had been dead a full minute. “In all probability, venial.”
    I had a moment’s scared affection for him, as I sometimes had for my own father.
    Metal doors crunched shut, and the last of the children’s voices ceased. The awful silence tightened my shoulders and back, made me want to yell, run. The lunch bell clangalanged just behind my head and I jerked like a live wire had touched me, ducking and throwing my hands up, and all the others jumped and even Kavanagh was halfway to protecting his face. The bell stopped and left me shaking. I was thankful I hadn’t cursed. The hallway narrowed with the