“Who cares if you like girls?”

“It’s not right, man and woman, that is what the bible says.”

“Who cares what the bible says? It’s stupid.”

“It is not stupid Ethel.”

“Says I should be in heaven or hell doesn’t it? Hmm.. so why am I here?”

“Because you refuse to let go of your attachments to this would.”

“If God were real, he could just scoop me up and put me wherever he wanted.”

“God does not work that way.”

“Oh, is this the part where you say he works in mysterious ways.”

Ethel waved her hands and made spooky sounds.

“No, we have freedom of choice. You choose to stay. He will not force you to move on. It is a choice you need to make. He is like a good parent. He supports you in your decisions good or bad and lifts you up when you fall down and are trying hard to get back up but cannot.”

“Oh my God, you’re so brainwashed.”

“I am not, I have seen the truth.”

Ethel threw her ghostly ball and hit Maria straight in the face. Causing her nose to bleed.

“Truth my left shoe. You wouldn’t know the real truth if it hit you on the nose just like that.”

Maria took a deep breath and held her hand on her nose. She closed her eyes trying to keep her calm.

“You can be a terrible child sometimes.”

“Yup.”

Ethel kept bouncing her ball on the ghostly form of the sidewalk, skipping as she did so. Maria walked into the convent’s front door. One of the sisters noticed her bleeding nose.

“Maria, what happened? Did someone at school do that?”

“No ma’am, it was just a stray ball a child was throwing around.”

“Let me get you some ice.”

“I will be fine ma’am.”

“Okay if you need help, let one of the sisters know please. We are here for you.”

Maria nodded and made her way to her bathroom. Once out of the sun the bruises and her broken nose healed rapidly. She washed her face cleaning up the blood and looked in the mirror. Looking at her side profile.

No one would want me, I am zombie girl. And barely look like a girl.

She looked at the blue tinge on her lips and on her fingernails. She had always been this way. Her uncle had said once she had rosy cheeks, but when she turned into a vampire, she started looking like this. She closed her eyes and rinsed her face again.

Perhaps I am this way because I was prideful of my rosy cheeks in life? Perhaps it is just that I am more cursed than other vampires.

She looked up and closed her eyes.

Thank you, God. You made me part of their world, but you remind me of my dark desires every moment of the day so I can be watchful for them. If I were not so, then it would be easy to forget I am not normal, and someone could get hurt.

Maria made the sign of the cross and dried her face and hands. She went to the kitchen to help with the work of cooking the evening meal. The sisters were laughing as they chopped the vegetables for supper. Maria had felt the warmth of this place instantly. There was so much love in these halls. It was easy to forget she was a cold dead thing for a few minutes here and there. Sister Teresa handed her a peeler and a bowl of potatoes. Maria began scrapping the skin from them. She did so silently basking in the warmth of the sister’s mirth and conversation.

Every night she would go to evening prayers and would pray for a good night’s sleep, and every night she would lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling and sleep would never come. Eventually she would creep out into the night, she would resist for a week at a time but eventually she would have to drink blood and she would do so. She did it with the least amount of harm possible. When she wasn’t drinking blood, she would help ghosts pass on to the next life and return to her bed before dawn and she would help prepare breakfast, pretending she had just had a good night’s sleep. It had turned into a long string of months with no sign of sleep. She would speak to her doctor at her daytime appointments. Say she is having trouble sleeping. Her doctor would check her reaction times, and reflexes, would take a blood sample and always it came back that she was perfectly healthy. Maria didn’t feel any creeping insanity, but would someone who is going crazy actually realize it?

Since Enid had shown up it had been so much worse. On nights where she would stubbornly lay in bed all she could think about was Enid. She would see flashes of her, younger and older, pregnant. Charging into battle lightning streaming from her hands, or a silver sword held high. She bore a striking resemblance to depictions of Saint Sarah and at first, she had assumed it was that, but she couldn’t account for it all. Enid hadn’t assisted. She’d been a mystery since day one. Every so often she would say something in a language Maria couldn’t name but she understood perfectly so far there had been ten different languages, none of which she could find anywhere on the internet. She began to think she had imagined it but then something else would come up.

But then today happened. She was sitting in religion, and a dreaded group project had come up. She was widely considered zombie girl at the school, and no one ever wanted to be on her team or group with her. Today’s class had been no different but then when Sister Tammy asked if anyone would group with her, Enid put up her hand. Maria had been paralyzed with fear. Enid who brought up such strong feelings in her that she could not stop thinking about her was sitting beside her before she knew it. Then she spoke in yet another language, one Maria instantly understood but didn’t recognize and showed her a tablet full of strange formulas, the language was completely foreign, but Maria had understood every single word and symbol. Other students had noticed it and Enid had put it away quickly, but she wasn’t crazy. Enid knew things about her she didn’t remember.

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She had heard Enid later describing the tablet as broken and from China. She had seen Chinese; Those characters were not Chinese. Everywhere she looked she could see Enid there, in the corner of her eye. Then when she focused, she was gone. She was so familiar. Yet so alien to her. She knew Enid was safe. Knew it in the very fiber of her being that Enid would die for her. She had more faith in Enid then she did God. The thought scared her, and she wanted nothing more than to push the red-haired girl away as far and as fast as possible. She was awakening things in Maria that called into question her faith in God.

I barely know her, but I feel like I would do anything she asked for the very fact the words left her lips. Is this what love is?

*****

Maria shivered as she stood outside with no coat. In daylight she was just as vulnerable to extreme heat and cold as any human. She would be cursing herself if she wasn’t so upset about the string of insult she’d just unleashed on Enid. In spite of all her attempts to be her better self to have the strength do deal with this odd same sex attraction she lashed out in anger and not kindness. She felt hands pushing her towards the school.

“You need to go inside you’re vulnerable you silly vampire!”

“I cannot go back inside. After what I said to her.”

“You’re going to freeze to death then you’ll go to heaven and I won’t have you here go inside!”

Mariana resisted the Ethel’s forceful shoves to the best of her ability, all the while shivering.

“Stop Ethel!”

The door opened and Enid walked out and grabbed her arm, yanking her inside. Enid wasn’t a large girl but she used her strength and weight well. The touch of her warm hand on Maria’s arm was electric. Ethel tried to kick Enid in the shins. Her feet passed through her.

“Homewrecker!”

“Stop it, Ethel.”

Enid pulled Maria into the girl’s bathroom. The conversation was a blur in Maria’s mind. By the time she managed to get herself out of the spiral of self-loathing and embarrassment she’d ridden the bus all the way home to the convent. She went straight to her room and curled up in a ball on her bed. Enid had laughed so hard at her when she had told her she couldn’t be interested in her like she was in Maria. The laughter had cut into Maria like a knife. But at the same time, she remembered that laughter, she remembered it brought joy to her. She remembered laughing with Enid. Like an echo she saw flashes of Enid laughing, she was wearing armor in one flash, in another a dress, in another she was standing across from Maria gutting a fish. She wore a dress in that one as well. She heard a voice in Latin chastising the pair saying this was punishment, and there should be no laughter involved.

She clenched her eyes shut trying to push these strange memories from her mind. But it didn’t work. She went to the chapel, and she prayed the rosery over and over again, trying to center herself and get rid of the unwanted thoughts. But they would not leave her be. Why would Enid be so cruel? Maria felt a hand on her shoulder as she finished a pass on her rosery.

“We missed you at supper.”

Maria looked up. It was the mother superior for the convent. She sat in the pew and patted the seat beside her.

“Mother Superior I am sorry.”

“No need to apologize for praying the rosery my dear. I was loath to interrupt but you’ve been here for hours. I was worried about you. You know the doctor has said you need to eat all your meals.”

“I will not miss supper again ma’am.”

Maria looked at the floor intently not daring to meet the mother superior’s gaze.

“Oh, Maria, dear. Missing one supper will hardly hurt you. Sister Tammy said you weren’t feeling well when you left the school. That you had abandoned your partner in a project in the library. Missed a class. You didn’t tell anyone where you were going. That is very unlike you.”

“I am not sick. I was not sick ma’am. I said some very mean things to my partner. Things she did not deserve. I was scared and then I told her that I did not feel the same way about her and that I could not because that sort of thing is wrong. And she laughed at me. She laughed so hard.”

The mother superior took Maria’s hands in hers.

“Oh child. Why did you think she liked you like that? Are you feeling attracted to her?”

“I keep seeing her, everywhere. When she is near me, I feel safe. Like she would do anything for me. And I fear that if she asked me, I would do anything for her, even things I would not normally do.”

The mother superior nodded and rubbed Maria’s hands gently.

“Were you praying about this?”

“I was trying to get her out of my mind. I keep seeing her. She is younger. She is pregnant. She is helping me give birth. Holding my hand. I see her before a giant black being that is so evil. She flies at him and stabs him the heart. Then I see her before the gates of hell with me laying on the ground behind her paralyzed she is holding a silver sword and she is yelling at the legions of hell that she will destroy every last one of them before she lets them harm me. She is a glorious angel, her silver wings are broken, she is broken but she stands her ground. God stands behind her holding her up when she begins to fall but even with him on her side, she dies protecting me. Such thoughts are not right. But they are so real, I can smell them, hear them, feel them.”

The mother superior nodded she looked to the crucifix at the head of the chapel. Then back down to Maria.

“I do not understand much about such things, child, but I know something about you. You are a miracle. You are a beacon of faith. You have a light in you that the sisters have noticed. I must say, that it has made some of us a bit jealous. Especially some of us who have spent decades married to God.”

Maria giggled softly, the beginnings of a smile touching the corners of her bluish lips.

“Maria, be patient with yourself, and with her. Perhaps she is confused too. Imagine her alone, trying to figure out why she is drawn to you. Maybe she laughed because she is nervous because she thinks maybe she is attracted to you. The important thing is not to act on those feelings, if that is what they are, and if they are the feelings, you are having perhaps your calling is to be chaste. You should not be ashamed of being attracted to other women, but you should understand that giving into those urges that is where the sin comes in.”

Maria nodded.

“We both know that sometimes God puts us in places where we can do the most good. They are not always places we want to be, but its where we need to be. Whether we can be our best person and do the good he wants of us, that’s up to us. So, ask yourself, how can you be your best self in this situation? And that is the best course through these rough waters. That is what God requests of you, be your best self.”

“Mother Superior, do you know who Saint Sarah of Savia is?”

“Of course, a warrior saint. She slew a demon, cured a village of the plague, and she was transubstantiated into Heaven. Translated several dead sea scrolls for the Vatican. She was assassinated and died protecting her children. She also built a cathedral.”

“Enid, the girl, she looks exactly like the painting of Saint Sarah in the art book. And the sword in the painting, that is the one I see her holding. Right down to the scar on her palm, just like mine.”

Maria held up her palm. The mother superior held the side of Maria’s hand inspecting the scar.

“How did you get this?”

“I… I do not remember, I have always had it.”

She nodded.

“Maybe your subconscious is mixing up the pictures you’ve seen of Saint Sarah with this young woman then?”

“I could be.”

“Well mystery solved. Perhaps you should pray for Saint Sarah’s intersession in this matter?”

Maria nodded.

“But before you do, go get something to eat child.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

*****

The mother superior entered the convent’s library and opened the book of saints. She paged to the entry for Saint Sarah of Savia. Sister Tammy approached behind her.

“Mother superior did you have a chance to speak to Maria?”

“I did. She is doing better now.”

“Then- “

Sister Tammy stopped mid-sentence and looked down at the picture of Saint Sarah. Unlike typical portraits of the period this one was a more realistic painting. Detailed. Her hand went to her mouth then she made the sign of the cross. The mother superior turned to look at Sister Tammy.

“What is the matter?”

Sister Tammy brought out her tablet and browsed to the school newspaper. She showed the Mother Superior a picture of Enid standing between Heather and Julie, celebrating the winning of the city soccer championship. She held it beside the realist painting of Saint Sarah and the pair looked at each other. The mother superior crossed herself as well.

“Amazing. I thought Maria was exaggerating. She could be her twin.”