Small Change

excerpt

I watched in horror as her skirt darkened and one fat drop after another fell to the wood floor and trickled lazily into a pool between my desk and hers. I prayed to the Virgin Mary. Please don’t let anyone see. But I was not overly hopeful.
Sister Miranda enjoyed patrolling the aisles during our enforced siestas, and, before long, the toe of her high-topped black nun’s boot came smack down into the middle of the puddle and it splashed a little, and she recoiled as though she had stepped on a viper and just like that something clicked in her head and she smiled and began to talk in a voice that sounded a lot like Father Brackendorf would sound if he’d suddenly put on forty pounds. It was a long speech about growing up and self control and the rebellious nature of all flesh.
Rita kept hugging her arms and peeing softly through her clothes.
Blackie’s face got redder and redder. Then it relaxed into the face of a nasty child.
“Rita peed her pa-aants. Rita peed her pa-aants,” she chanted. Joey and Skinhead popped up from their desks. Then some of the less adventurous kids began to test the sleep and silence rule too. Soon the whole class picked up the beat, saying those words over and over, louder and louder, breaking into little bursts of nearly hysterical laughter. Sister Miranda conducted the uproar, waving the yardstick around and slashing it through the air like a machete on the word “paants.”
Rita was beside herself. She cried, then she screamed, and kicked at the desk, but the more tormented she became, the more everybody chanted and laughed.
That’s when I climbed up on the desk and pulled the yardstick out of Blackie’s pudgy fist and shouted right in her face, my useless glasses bobbling on my nose.
“Jesus will get you for this. He doesn’t want us to laugh at this poor girl. It’s all your fault, you fat waddle head. God made us have to pee and you have to let us.”
Well, Rita cried even harder, and Blackie Miranda laughed like someone had tickled her ribs, and the whole class roared, and pounded their desks, and started a new chant: “Georgie lo-oves Rita, Georgie lo-oves Rita,” and the voice with which I should have roared against their unchristian behaviour stuck in my throat because what they said was true, and my face burned and Sister Miranda wouldn’t let her go…

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763157