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Show Acting Alone Page 127 Nuns kept so much weird stuff in their dining drawers. They had their aprons all folded up in here, sort of tacky blue- and white-striped, like old mattress ticking. There were no strings or straps on top of the aprons, just straight pins to hold up the bib, because strings and straps interfere with veils and stiff starchy nun collars. So all they had was a couple little straight pins poking up at you. The candy cans were to hold the hardtack candy and marshmallow eggs and something else weird-sounding and brown and icky called horehound drops that really pleased the older nuns a lot. Everybody got them some candy on Christmas and Easter and the feast of Saint Willibrord and the feast of Saint Paphnutius and the feast of Saint Suchandstuff and Saint Whoozit. The nuns were real careful about doling their candy out to themselves real slow and even over the year, and they spent a lot of time talking about their candy and trading off and deciding what kind they were going to eat, and when they were going to eat it. But Shannon's big sister's best friend, Simone Stylite, ate all her candy up in about two minutes. She lived off charity the rest of the year. Shannon never saw grownup people think and talk so much about candy. It made her sad, kind of, when she was in a nice mood. Not now. Now it made her think that everybody around here was weird and needed themselves a boyfriend. They all had their own paring knife in their drawer, one knife for each nun, because they grew a lot of fresh fruit here and would need a paring knife to eat it, except there was a lot of nuns with nothing to do but can fruit all day long and, besides, most of the older nuns really loved |
