Sister Gertrude liked to talk about sin, especially on a hot day. For two weeks in their fourth-period religion class they had been learning about Hell, who lived in what level, and the particulars of their suffering. Today there would be a test, after a last-minute review. She’d drawn the familiar triangle on the board — the gentler upper regions of Hell being more exclusive than the lower regions because, as Sister Gertrude said, more people sin worse. It looked to Jemma just like the food pyramid, and she had confused the two in daydreams, so she almost answered once that fruits and grains were punished in the frozen bottom of Hell.
Sister Gertrude stood behind her desk, obscuring the top of the pyramid with her wimpled head. She scanned the quiet, dark room — she liked to draw the curtains and turn down the lights during fourth period, because she thought the darkness facilitated profitable spiritual reflection — and suddenly pointed at Martin Marty, two desks to Jemma’s left. “You, Martin,” she said. “A candy-fresser drives his scooter of a cliff because he is too busy unwrapping his taffy to watch where he is going. Where does he go?”
“To the second circle,” he said immediately. “Where all gluttons are punished.” Jemma had known that one, and wished she’d been asked.
“Very good,” said Sister Gertrude. She passed by Martin’s desk and deposited a cherry cough drop on it. She was always eating them, and did not consider them candy, though they had only the faintest hint of menthol in them, and they were the most pleasant reward she gave. “Rachel,” she said, “Another candy-fresser is denied her nasty gratification by her wise mother, who will not buy her the pound of chocolate she desires. The girl holds her breath in the middle of the supermarket checkout aisle, thinking to force her mother, but the wise lady ignores her stupid show. The angry, sullen creature holds her breath longer than ever before, even after she passes out, and she suffocates herself. Where will she find herself next?”
“Oh, that’s a hard one,” Rachel said, from three seats behind Jemma. “It wasn’t a suicide, was it? She didn’t mean to die. She’s doing some gluttony, isn’t she, but she’s angry, too, and the angriness is worse than the gluttoniness, so she should go to the place that hurts more. That’s, um, number five?”
“Excellent,” said Sister Gertrude. “Excellently reasoned.” She swept by the desk, depositing two cough drops. “Donald Peerman, how will she be punished there?”
“Oh, something really bad. Poked with hot pokers, right?”
“Wrong, it is a wet punishment, not a dry. Petra Forsyth?” Jemma’s attention started to drift as Sister Gertrude’s calls fell farther and farther away from her desk, and she thought not of hell, but of her sleeping mother — she wondered what she was dreaming about. She let her eyes fall almost closed so she could imagine it better. Her mother was dreaming of flying, just like Jemma did. Probably it was an ordinary dream, she was walking home up the hill, or walking down the street in town, when suddenly she realized that there was a much better way to get around, and took to the air, not in a leap like Superman, but in strokes, like she was swimming, pulling and kicking herself a little further up into the air with every stroke. Jemma followed her all over town. She was doing laps around the statehouse when Sister Gertrude called on her.
“Miss Claflin!” she said, rising up suddenly in front of her desk and leaning over so the delicate crucifix she wore on an extra-long chain swung at Jemma’s eye. “Please tell me where daydreamers are punished.”
“Oh,” Jemma said, fidgeting in her chair and thinking furiously, flying through the pyramidal Hell in a rapid sweep, looking around her desperately for the easily distracted girls with half-lidded eyes. “Not in the first circle, or the second. Um, not in number three, or number four, that’s for greedy people. Not in number five, where the angry people get wet, like you said. Uh, it must be lower. Boy, I wish it was higher, but it must be lower. Is it between five and six?”
“Is it? Is it? I thought you would know, being a practiced artist of the daydream. Do not try to distract us with answers to questions I have not asked, Miss Claflin. If you are ignorant then proclaim your ignorance. We have not, in fact, discussed the fate of incorrigible daydreamers, who waste their lives in idle speculation. It is a kind of sloth, but not punished with the worst kinds of sloth. Daydreamers remediate in Purgatory. That’s where you’ll go. Can’t you just see the newspaper article, children? Miss Jemma Claflin was hit by a bus this afternoon as she walked along, daydreaming of the loveliness of creampuffs. Stern angels escorted her immediately to Purgatory, where she will spend three quarters of eternity peeling and sewing the skin onto the same banana, and trying to organize her thoughts.”
“How long is three-quarters of eternity?” asked Rachel.
“Just as long as it sounds. Enough of review, though. Almost everyone is ready. Books away, pencils out!” Sister Gertrude erased the board with a damp sponge, eschewing the dry eraser so no trace of the pyramid would be left to tempt and assist incipient cheaters.
The test wasn’t so terrible. It was the usual format, matching, multiple choice, and fill in the blank. With a ruler Jemma carefully drew lines between sins in the left column and the appropriate place in Hell in the right column, eating five pounds of gummy bears connected with circle number three, not sharing your snack with somebody who forgot theirs connected to number four, and saying your prayers wrong connected with number six. She had no trouble with any of the multiple choice questions except the last one: Lying children are punished a) with hot licorice whips b) by being turned into snakes c) by having their tongues split every morning with a rusty knife d) tickling and boiling. No one was tickled in Hell, everybody knew that. Only gluttons were punished with food. She knew the right answer involved a forked tongue, but snakes had forked tongues, so b and c both seemed like the right answer to her. She stared and stared at the paper, waiting for one or the other to seem more right. In the end she chose b.
The last question was the hardest one. It was sort of a trick; Jemma didn’t like it. Bullies are punished in the seventh circle for _____ and _____ and ______. Jemma ran through all sorts of combinations in her head: a thousand years, then another thousand, then five hundred? She raised her hand and asked Sister Gertrude if there was a mistake with the question. She only shook her head. Five and five and five thousand years, she wondered. It was for always, but how to divide that up into three? Was this a religion test or a math test? Time was almost up when she finally got it. The tests were being handed toward the front as she scribbled in her answer, forever and forever and forever.
Jemma and her brother took a long detour on their way down to the beach. Their mother was awake and active when they got home. She’d blown up a pair of inner tubes for them to take down to the river, and was in the middle of preparations for dinner. She told them not to come home for at least two hours, because the cooking would require her absolute attention, and might be dangerous to little bystanders.
They rolled their tubes down the hill, but turned right instead of left at the Nottinghams, and went down a half mile into the woods beyond the fifth hole, wedging the tubes along the way in the branches of a live oak tree. There was a path that led down to a clearing and a pond, and the railroad tracks, which ran along the eastern border of the forest, but never crossed any road. Teenagers went down to the pond, sometimes, to drink or smoke or swim without their pants, younger kids almost never went down there. Lately, though, the teenagers had fled, driven away by the memory of friends, replaced by younger kids looking for gruesome mementos. Two boys had died down there early in the summer, Andy Nyman and Chris Dodd. They’d laid down in the train tracks to let the train pass over them. They were both quite tall, with big strong chins, and there was speculation that their noble chins were what had done them in, or that they’d lifted them too proudly. The cowcatcher caught Andy under the chin and took his head clean off, throwing it hundreds of yards into the bushes. Chris lost his head, eventually, but not as cleanly as his friend — his body was lifted and dropped again before the train, then crushed and mangled by the many wheels. Many parts of him had not ever been found, a couple toes, an eyeball, and the whole left hand. It was mostly for the hand that the children searched, because a rumor had grown up that it could, if ever found, grant wishes like the fabled monkey’s paw, five or less, as many as the number of fingers still attached.