when i was a kid my mother enrolled me in the catholic school on the other side of the neighborhood which didn’t make any sense to me because my mother wasn’t religious but she wore a gold cross but she told me that was her chain and my mother never took off her chain so i let it go and went to catholic school and i dont know if i have ever hated anything more between my hair do’s and my eyebrows i stuck out, my mother thumbed me into a pickle and every kid in class seemed to know something i didnt always winded with the whispers but raised the wall of the dead when it came to me i wondered if anyone of those kids even knew a dead person and if they knew about the day of the dead because there’s a lot more to it than just talk and they would know that if they weren’t white

on halloween my mother made me late for catholic school which in hindsight might’ve been my fault but i dont remember it that way but anyway when i finally made it to snack time none of the girls would make room for me because their moms spent their catholic money on expensive costumes and mine was from walmart which was fine because i liked walmart but snow white made way between batman and batboy which i thought seemed really redundant but that didn’t matter because i was purposefully dropping carrots on the floor so i could cry a little but not in front of the boys because they would think i was sillier than i looked

after that i decided to be angry one day this white kid Kevin  -    who’s mom was super catholic and who’s dad was also super catholic but not on Saturday nights but he had Sundays to repent so it didnt matter -     anyway Kevin told me i couldn’t be catholic so i pushed him off of the playhouse not that i wanted to be catholic i was just mad he said there was something i couldnt be in catholic school

when my teacher took us to the chapel for a visit i told her i didn’t like the way i felt inside the walls and she told me to get over it but that just made me mad      so instead of getting over it i cussed in the chapel and she made me sit down and told me i couldn’t finish the rest of the chapel visit and that i was going to get an F and then i had to explain to my mother that it was just a visit and why should i be graded for not liking something and that i didn’t even know if my teacher was a real nun or not so why did it matter and if she was a nun could she still be my teacher because it wasn’t Sunday school and i was pretty sure nuns only taught on Sundays   i knew that because my mother took me to Sunday school when i was in Camp Awana and i went but i didnt really like it so i asked to stop going

when my mother transferred me to public school i wasn’t exactly sure why but i think it was because of the pushing and the cussing or maybe it was the unaffordability that  raged on my side of the neighborhood and my mother thought catholic school would’ve been better but not good enough at cost butanyway one day my great granny Annie who was my grandpa’s mom who was religious but my grandpa was not and my mother was not my grandma might’ve been a little religious so they asked her to take my great granny Annie to the church on Sundays for service and she wanted to take me and my mother asked me to go so i did but i didnt like the wines or the crackers salted in the pews and i still didnt like the way i felt inside    the walls and then i saw Kevin you know the kid i pushed but i saw him and he volunteered to carry the basket around but i didnt have any money so he just gave me this look and i think that was his way of finding something to repent fori should’ve told Kevin that people at public school like me which would’ve been a lie because even though i had hair do’s and they had hair dos’ and even though we had the same skin and even though we were the same spanish and none of the kids were white it didn’t matter but Kevin didn’t need to know that but i should’ve told him and i should’ve told him that the dead didn’t care much for his walls and then i should’ve told him that i wasn’t going to put him up on my ofrenda even though i didnt know what that was but i was hoping if i didnt that i would just forget i ever went to catholic school