We tore through the
austere rooms, overturning dresser drawers, pawing through the neat piles of the Stage 3 girls' starched underwear, smashing lightbulbs with our bare fists.
"The girls at our facility are backwoods," Sister Josephine whispered to Sister Maria de la Guardia with a
beatific smile. "You must be patient with them."
They had been
ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had
ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children.
a simplified language allowing communication between groups
We spoke a slab-tongued
pidgin in the cave, inflected with frequent howls. Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual.
joyful and proud especially because of triumph or success
Our diminished pack threw back our heads in a celebratory howl—an
exultant and terrible noise, even without a chorus of wolf brothers in the background.
We supplemented these holes by digging some of our own. We
interred sticks, and our itchy new jumpers, and the bones of the friendly, unfortunate squirrels.
We had never wanted to run away so badly in our lives; but who did we have to run back to? Only the curled black grimace of the mother. Only the father, holding his
tawny head between his paws.
The main commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated perfectly. Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An
abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please.
potentially existing but not presently evident or realized
As soon as we realized that someone higher up in the food chain was watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight. Mouth shut, I repeated, shoes on feet. But if Mirabella had this
latent instinct, the nuns couldn't figure out how to activate it.
She'd go bounding around, gleefully spraying on their
gilded statue of St. Lucy, mad-scratching at the virulent fleas that survived all of their powders and baths.
She was still
loping around on all fours (which the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous—we could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to locomote like that!), her fists blue-white from the strain.
characteristic of informal spoken language or conversation
Jeanette spiffed her penny loafers until her very shoes seemed to gloat. (Linguists have since traced the
colloquial origins of "goody two-shoes" back to our facilities.)
We spent a lot of time daydreaming during this period. Even Jeanette. Sometimes I'd see her looking out at the woods in a vacant way. If you interrupted her in the midst of one of these
reveries, she would lunge at you with an elder-sister ferocity, momentarily forgetting her human catechism.
an elementary book summarizing the principles of a religion
We spent a lot of time daydreaming during this period. Even Jeanette. Sometimes I'd see her looking out at the woods in a vacant way. If you interrupted her in the midst of one of these reveries, she would lunge at you with an elder-sister ferocity, momentarily forgetting her human
catechism.
utter monotonously and repetitively and rhythmically
"Something must be done," Sister Ignatius said firmly. The other nuns nodded, a sea of thin, colorless lips and kettle-black brows. "Something must be done," they
intoned.
The choir director—aggressively perfumed Mrs. Valuchi, gold necklaces like pineapple rings around her neck—taught us more than the nuns ever did. She showed us how to pattern the old hunger into
arias.
the articulation of speech with regards to intelligibility
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I grunted from underneath her. “I didn’t want your help. Now you have ruined the Sausalito! You have ruined the ball!” I said more loudly, hoping the nuns would hear how much my
enunciation had improved.