Midnight Mass (Camren)

CHAPTER 3

Papers rustled. My chair squeaked as I leaned back, trying to relax. My advisor, Professor Courtney Morales, lifted her mug and took a sip of decaffeinated coffee.

Finally she looked up. "This is strong work, Lauren. I'm very impressed."

I couldn't hide my relieved exhale, and she smiled a little, shifting in her chair with a small wince. She was in her early forties, black and beautiful with a gorgeous halo of obsidian, corkscrew curls—and also nine months pregnant. She tapped her fingers idly on the firm swell of her stomach as she looked down at the last fifty pages of my thesis.

I could see a few marks here and there—her penned-in notes and suggestions—but nothing insane. Could this mean that I wouldn't have any major revisions before my defense? Could I be...done?

Professor Morales flipped a few pages over, took another sip of fake coffee, and then looked up once more. "However, I think we need to revisit your conclusion."

I pushed down the initial swell of panic. The conclusion was twenty-seven pages and had taken me almost a month to write. "When you say 'revisit'..."

"It needs to be rewritten," she said bluntly. "This is an amazing work, Lauren. I've watched it grow from an idea with raw potential into a fully rounded and layered piece. But you're robbing yourself with this conclusion."

My mouth was dry. "How so?"

"You spend almost two hundred pages systemically examining the difference between notional belief and religious practice in the Catholic Church. You deconstruct established dogma and retranslate St. Anselm's credo ut intelligam as a pledge of commitment rather than a forced intellectual assent to said dogma. Yet, your conclusion is twenty-seven pages of passive circumvention."

I suppose I must have had a very dejected expression on my face, because she shook her head with a sigh. "I can't handle those sad green eyes, Lauren. I'm not saying it's poorly written; the prose, as always, is excellent and the logic is precise. On the surface, it's impeccable. But it's not what this work needs."

I was almost afraid to ask. "And what does it need?"

A call to action. You just spent a year exposing the weaknesses of the Catholic Church on a theological level, while simultaneously cataloging the things it does well. Synthesize those things into a coherent response. Into a vision for what the Church could be. Explicitly show us how your thoughts can be worked into practical action. And then I guarantee you'll have a paper that will blow the board away."

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So. I had ten days to rewrite from scratch something that had originally taken me thirty. I had a wife who was currently laughing her throaty laugh—a laugh that should belong to me, dammit—with Fucking Anton. And the coffee kiosk near the library closed early, so it was just me and a half-empty room-temperature bottle of Dr. Pepper in my dim library stall, tucked away back in the stacks.

I had books piled around me, papers and highlighters scattered on every available space, multicolored Post-It flags sticking out of every book like flat neon fingers. And a laptop, with a blank Word document open, the cursor blinking accusatorially at me.

A call to action...

It was easier said than done. When my paper had just been about the academic—the dry examination of history and theology—it had felt removed from real life. It had felt safe.

But writing about ways that the Catholic Church should change? To become healthier and more modern? That felt very, very unsafe.

I wanted Camila right now. I wanted her hands on my shoulders as she rubbed my anxiety away. I wanted to feel her solid, graceful faith in the divine and in me as we prayed together. I wanted to hide from this mess with her—fucking or drinking or cuddling or just listening to her amazingly articulate voice as she told me about her day.