Jon's now-dainty fists remained clenched on the surface of the ancient, albeit resilient, teacher's desk. She ventured to guess that by the time she herself was old enough for this grade in thirty to forty years, this desk would still be in service here, judging by the furnishings of his own school, though the question lingered: if this desk was old-fashioned now, when the fuck was it new?
It wasn't a question she decided to contemplate. She was in a situation that, by the standards of any person alive, could be described as critically fucked up. Standing around and getting steamrolled by reality wouldn't do her any good. She needed to egress from this classroom so he'd time to think, to assess the consequences of his situation and come up with a way to address the damage that had been done. Egress, Assess, Address. Jon's wit certainly seemed to be functioning at its normal level, so maybe circumstances weren't as dire as they seemed to be.
In the meantime, though, the children in this classroom were still staring at her as if she'd just grown a third eye. Some kids were twitching, some were standing straight as a statue, and some of the girls were even weeping. Jon was dumbfounded; her teachers had blown their stack a few times when she was their age, and some of them even let a little profanity slip out, but it had never been met with anything except maybe generic awe and resentment. These children were acting as if she had just physically abused them. Maybe verbally abused them, but these kids were growing up in the sixties. Shouldn't that sort of abuse have been so prevalent that they'd have built up an immunity? Goodness, generational gaps were so fucking weird. Though maybe this was more of a cultural gap, since these were all Catholic schoolchildren. Well, at any rate, Jon wanted to get rid of them.
"Class dismissed," Jon said, looking up from the desk to look at her "students." Her voice felt bizarre to her, as though her old voice had been sealed up with concrete and a new voice had been drilled in somewhere directly above it. It was an odd metaphor, to be sure, but it was the best she could do to describe the experience.
However, the students didn't go anywhere. In fact, they practically ignored her, continuing their perplexed and horrified trance. This frustrated Jon, who wanted to be free of the responsibility of this horde of creepy children as quickly as possible. Of course, they probably had begun to suspect, with sufficiently good reason, that their teacher had suddenly gone completely insane.
"I said ye could leave!" Jon stated irritably. "Go! Do something else!"
Jon blinked. What had she just said? Was she speaking in an accent?
"Testing, one, two. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun," Jon recited, confirming her suspicions. "What the fuck? I have an Irish accent?"
The children simply gaped, ostensibly too horrified to comment on the ongoing freak show before them. Jon wouldn't have blamed them, had she cared, but keeping up the pretenses of the person whom she had become seemed pointless. It wasn't like she could be arrested for her conduct, could she? Just fired, probably, and this wasn't even a job she wanted. Jon was much more concerned with the fact that everything she said was coming out in a honeyed, rural, Irish brogue. She hadn't noticed it earlier, because she was preoccupied with the abrupt travel through time and form.
"Argh, I can't do this," Jon groaned. "If you won't leave the classroom, I will. Bye, now," she said, making her way to the classroom door. Her hand was in reach of the doorknob when the door swung open and another woman, a much older nun, was standing in the door. She had an elongated face and stringy, practically non-existent eyebrows. Her face was twisted into a scowl that looked like it had become quite a comfortable position for her over several years, and her green eyes glared searingly at Jon's new face.
"Sister Patrick," the nun asked in a soft and stern manner, with inflection as sharp as crystals, "what exactly is going on here? I heard glass breaking and profanities from all the way down the hall."
Jon almost turned her head to look behind her before it occurred to her that she was Sister Patrick. Or something like that; she didn't really understand how nuns' names worked. She'd seen the movie Sister Act; weren't all the nuns in that movie named Mary? Or it didn't matter. If this was her life now, Sister Patrick wasn't planning on being a nun for very much longer.
"Ahh, well, actually," Sister Patrick tapped her chin, trying to think of the best way to phrase what she wanted to say. "Y'see, I've had an epiphany just now, and, well, I'm not going to be a nun anymore. So, I'll just be on my way, and perhaps I'll see you around some time," she said, trying to squirm past the older nun to get through the doorway.
It turned out that was unnecessary; the old nun grabbed Sister Patrick by the crook of her arm and pulled her into the hallway, slamming the door behind her so that the children in the classroom couldn't see the spectacle that was about to take place. Grabbing the younger nun by the shoulders, she stared at the woman so fiercely that Sister Patrick understood what Karyn's father meant when he talked about withering under the gaze of a nun when he was in Catholic school.
"What do you mean?!" the old nun demanded to know.
"Well, what I said," Sister Patrick said, feeling wholly disoriented by the mandatory Irish accent and sweet dulcet she was speaking with. "I'm doing a legger. Y'know, severing my relationship with the church, and living a secular lifestyle from now on. I don't think being a Catholic is working out very well for me."
The old nun gaped. "Not working out very well "“ you took solemn vows!"
Sister Patrick nodded. Surprisingly, she wasn't that angry at this nun; in fact, she was sort of enjoying the opportunity to muck about with personages from the past. She didn't feel like anybody could do more harm to her than Sarah's wish already had, so it was almost a liberating sensation. "So I did, I suppose, but from what I understand, we're in a free country, to be sure. So I'm just going to walk out that door, yeah?" She mentally groaned at the way she was speaking. Not only was she talking with an accent, but she was even using Irish turns of phrase! She thought an accent was kind of hot on the right girl, but she, well Obviously that had been a distinction meant for other people, not her.
The old nun simply stared at Sister Patrick, seemingly at a complete loss for words. That suited the young nun's purposes just fine, and she began to move away from the older woman, striding past her as best she could in her heavy black nun's garb. She didn't know where she was going, but she presumed that she'd find an exit sign somewhere telling her how to get out of the building.
"What has come over you?" Asked the old nun with genuine dismay. "You've always had such strong convictions."
Sister Patrick shrugged, not bothering to glance back at the nun she presumed her body's previous owner knew well. "I got better."
