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In the year after I turned 13, three incredible things happened to me. The first two sucked. I guess the third did, too, but you'll get that joke later.

The first thing was that I hit puberty. Like a brick wall.

One day I was a normal kid, a decent second-baseman in the school softball games, no problem bigger than sweating out whether I'd get a C- or a D+ in penmanship from Sister Mary Margaret. Sister Margaret had taught penmanship, and nothing but penmanship, for it seemed like a hundred years. Anyway, she'd taught my sister, who was six years older than me, and she looked old enough to have taught my mom and dad, too. Nothing I could do for Sister Margaret was as good as my sister had done, as the old nun was very open about telling me. Since my going to the summer Scout camp was dependent on keeping all my grades passing -- even though penmanship didn't count toward graduation -- I couldn't just ignore Sister Margaret's crotchetiness. It did seem that the harder I gripped the No. 2 Eberhard-Faber, the worse my loops got, but I was confident I could curl them enough to squeak out the C.

Then everything went nuts. All of a sudden I was missing easy grounders and throwing 12 feet over the head of Eddie, the first-baseman. I couldn't seem to control any muscle, most importantly the ones in my fingers. My handwriting looked like the chart of a drunk's stumble down a dark alley. And one gray, rainy morning I got up and looked in the mirror and some stranger was looking back. Some ugly kid with big red pimples all over his face. And it was me.

For the rest of my life, I have studiously avoided reading anything about adolescence, because I don't want to know just how late I was to the party. All I know was that I at last understood why our class softball team had sucked so mightily the year before. We weren't that great as eighth graders, either, but that was mostly because several key players skipped a lot of the weekend games to spend time with girls. I began to get a vague inkling why they thought that was a better way to spend their time, too.

You might think that having a klutz at second would contribute to our team's weakness as well, but that only lasted a couple of games. No, I didn't get any better, not for a year or two. But Coach Carlson yanked me from the starting lineup in favor of some guy with six hairs already sprouting on his upper lip and I spent the next two weekends riding the bench before I finally threw in my glove.

I don't blame the coach, because my screw-ups had clearly cost us the last game I started. At least that's what everyone else on the team pointed out to me, repeatedly.

In fact, my teammates, in the spirit of constructive criticism, conceived the nickname "Goony Bird" for me, as a way to gently remind me that my flailing arms and stumbling running were not up to their athletic standards. It was only years later, when I had no friends left who had known me when, that I was able to shorten that to "Bird" and convince my new friends that I'd been so tagged because my basketball ability reminded people of the Celtics great. I was able to put that over, I think, because I had finally grown into my arms and legs.

But I don't want you to think that I was some repulsive freak as a kid. Well, at least, not any more repulsive than any other boy who's suffered massive hormone overload. If I kept to a slow, steady pace I could actually put one foot in front of the other without tripping myself. And the photo I still have of me leading the Easter procession, cross held high overhead, white surplice and red cassock flapping in the spring breeze, shows a rather handsome youth. We won't mention how many boxes of Stridex it took to make that so.

I didn't get the top spot in the processional on looks alone. I wasn't even the tallest one in our group of altar boys. But Sister Margaret, who doubled as sacristan and Uberfuhrer of altar boys, wasn't about to let Peter Burke take first place. Pete was a few inches taller than me, and about 30 pounds heavier. All muscle. Including his brain, as it happened. Pete was the only kid I ever knew who had been sent to military school -- after fourth grade, a remarkably early exit -- and had made a comeback (two years later) at Ss. Swithin and Melchior's. Rumor had it his family had paid heavily to get him readmitted when even the goons at Wayne Academy couldn't beat sense into him, but I believe it could be entirely coincidental that his return to Ss. S&M was followed only two weeks later by groundbreaking for the new convent.

Whatever grease had been applied to slip Pete back into parochial school, it wasn't enough to get him any special favors from the nuns. He was plunked into the front of every classroom -- so the nuns could keep an eye on him -- and into the back of every procession, so the congregation wouldn't notice him.

The top spots were reserved for the best students. I was one of them. In fact, I was the top student, and that was the second incredible thing that happened to me that year.

I had always been a better-than-average student, never coming in any lower than 10th among the 50 or so kids in our year, but never rising any higher than fourth. Aside from Ken Rondini, a curiously neat kid with a strong resemblance to Alfalfa in the old "Our Gang" series (if Alfalfa had been mown down to scarcely more than four feet tall), who occasionally bobbed up as high as second place in grades and won every other spelling bee, the top spots in our class were always taken by girls: Betty, the goodie-goodie; Linda, the heavy-lidded immigrant who began wearing a bra in kindergarten; and Ann, one of those spectacularly unremarkable people, the kind who always hang around the edges of fame, accepted by the stars of life because they so clearly will never challenge for the top. Remember those expendable crewmen in "Star Trek?" Same kind of personality.

Anyway, in eighth grade the girls in the class suddenly sank in the rankings. It seemed almost as if they had decided being smart was no longer a good thing. Being a good feminist -- having had that philosophy beaten into me by my older sister, in fact -- I now realize that is exactly what happened, a horrible effect of our male-dominated culture's insistence that women must subsume their intellectual gifts or risk scaring away potential mates. Back then, I just thought the girls went all goofy.

Whatever the reason, I suddenly found myself contending with Rondini for the best grades. School seemed to turn into nothing more than a succession of spelling bees and math quizzes and geography drills, and time and again it came down to Rondini and me, mano a mano -- or at least as mano as a wisp like Rondini could get. He had always been the butt of much classroom humor, and as we were increasingly singled out in competition, whatever he had rubbed off on me. It stunk.

Worse yet, Rondini crumbled under the pressure. It showed up first in the spelling bees, where he began to insert irrelevant A's and inadvisable S's and once, memorably, let loose a very unfortunately timed P. The competition was over almost before it had begun, and by the Christmas holidays I stood alone, head and shoulders above the rest of my class. Of course, the worst thing about standing out in a crowd is that it makes aiming at you much, much easier. Everyone who hadn't made fun of me in fall because of my ineptitude on the diamond now piled on because I was too smart for my own good.

Unless you have ever been the smartest person in your group, you can't know just how awful that is. I say this with no false humility, because by the time I got to college women had changed their minds about the need for brains. They had also changed their minds about the length of their hemlines, and the combination of competition and distraction pulled me sharply back into the middle of the pack.

But grade school was a simpler and harsher time. I was typecast as the bumbling brainiac, and I hated it. In class I daydreamed of being just an ordinary kid. My daydreams were usually interrupted when one nun or another called on me to answer. Proving how dumb I was, I always answered and almost always answered correctly. This was not the way to sink into blissful mediocrity. I thought about purposefully getting answers wrong, but when my name was called my Pavlovian little brain insisted on spitting out the right ones.

The one answer I couldn't figure out was how to escape my role as the geek of the class. Then, one morning, the glimmer of an answer appeared.

It started when Eddie -- the first-baseman -- and I were serving 6 a.m. Mass. It was a cozy affair, three old ladies, one snoozing bum, Fr. Pascalitis and us, all alone in a church the size of a zeppelin hangar. You don't know what early morning is until you've spent one trying to prop your eyes open in a barn filled with the scent of decades-old incense while some guy's snores are turned into the drone of a Sopwith Camel by the echoing walls.

Not that Eddie and I worried too much about what would happen if we did take a nap. Fr. Pascalitis, who we suspected knew Latin so well because his parents had spoken it as a first language, could mumble his way from start to finish in the old rites without any assistance from us. That was good, because he spoke so quietly that we couldn't catch the few syllables we used as cues for our bell-ringing, and he moved his arms so little we couldn't watch for those telltale signs, either. Sometimes we just rang the bell to see if we could wake the bum, and Fr. Pascalitis didn't seem to notice.

His lack of concern might have had something to do with the way he safeguarded the bottle of sacramental wine he reserved for his special use. It seemed somewhat paler and smelled considerably more powerful than the stuff Sister Margaret would set out for the parish's other two priests. We used to say that Fr. Pascalitis had the only 80-proof Jesus-in-a-bottle in the world.

On the day I'm talking about, Eddie and I got to church around 5:30. Because it was Fr. P's week to do the 6 a.m., we didn't have to prepare the cruets of wine and water; he always took care of that himself. Come to think of it, that water had a bit of a punch to it as well. This was back in the days before the congregation got anything more than a wafer at Communion, though, so we never got a taste for ourselves.

Anyway, with time to kill, we occupied ourselves trying to write stuff on the 12-foot-high ceiling of the sacristy, using the smoke from the four-foot-long candle lighters. Ss. S&M had been around a long time; it was hard to find a spot that wasn't already covered by soot.

Comes Mass time and we trotted out with Fr. P, taking his usual shortcut across the front of the church rather than going all the way to the back and up the middle aisle. Things were going along smoothly and Eddie and I were playing tic-tac-toe by scratching our fingernails into the green plush of the handrails on our kneelers when we heard a clang and a few words that were shocking not only because they were English -- this was a year or two before the Latin Mass declined -- but also because we'd never heard anyone in a cassock (ourselves excluded) saying things like that, let alone in church. We looked up to see the white altar cloth rapidly turning red, and just about at that same moment a strong whiff of alcohol floated over us and made my eyes water.

Eddie and I just stared for a while. Fr. P had righted the cup and was going on with the Mass. We looked out at the congregation and the old ladies still had their heads bowed. If they'd heard anything, they must have thought it was just another one of those Vatican II innovations they'd heard about.

At Communion a minute or two later, Fr. P was swaying more than usual and almost missed the second old lady's mouth with the wafer before he punched it home. He ran through the rest of the ceremony even faster than usual and walked right back into the sacristy. Eddie looked at me and raised his eyebrows; we'd always at least trooped across the front of the church along the Communion rail. But it seemed odd to do that without the priest, so we just grabbed the cross from its holder and ducked into the sacristy ourselves. Fr. P was gone by the time we got there; we shucked our robes and walked over to school, killing time outside for a few minutes before the janitor opened up.

Comes lunchtime and we're out on the playground. Eddie's not even noticing me anymore, of course, because there are other kids now and he wouldn't want to be associated with the class geek. I'm used to this and I'm leaning against the rough bricks of the school, hoping some younger kid will be dumb enough to draw the attention of the big kids and keep them from picking on me. The key to not being noticed, of course, is not to look at anyone yourself, so I'm ostriching with my eyes pointed at my shoelaces and I don't know what's coming until my ear is being twisted so hard I see stars. Before I can react, I'm being pulled along and I see Eddie looming ahead, his eyes getting bigger and bigger. All the other kids drift away from him, but he's frozen in place and then I see a scrawny hand in a black sleeve reach past me and nab his ear, faster than a cobra taking down a mongoose.

The cackle that follows I immediately recognize as coming from Sister Mary Margaret, but I can't turn around to check because now she's double-timing us both back across the playground to where the other nuns are sitting on lawn chairs and reading from their prayer books. She stops us in front of Sister Juliet, our eighth-grade homeroom teacher.

Sister Juliet is the only nun in the school who looks to be under 50. It's hard to tell because her hair is all covered up by the headpiece (or at least it's supposed to be; with Sister Juliet there's usually a wisp of blond strands peeking out somewhere), but I'd guess now that she was in her early to mid-20s then. One thing about the nun's habits, the tight bands around their faces gave them automatic facelifts, so you couldn't go by wrinkles. But Sister Juliet's skin was still pink, not gray like most nuns, and she hadn't developed the thin-lipped scowl that was standard issue with the others.

Sister Juliet looks up, using one hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Before she can say anything, Sister Margaret is yapping. I'm thinking it's the candle smoke on the ceiling and wondering whether the old nun actually mapped out all the old charring, but no. "These two infidels," she says, yanking our ears for emphasis, "desecrated the holy altar of God this morning, Sister Juliet. That's the kind of thing this Vatican Council nonsense is leading us to. The blood of the lamb spilled all over my clean altar cloth, dripping onto the floor. Onto the floor!"

"Is that true, boys?" Sister Juliet is looking straight into my eyes.

"Well, it wasn't our fault," I start to say. And Eddie pipes up, "Fr. Pascalitis..." Whatever he was going to say ends in a strangled "Eerrp" as Sister Margaret gives him another tweak.

"Of course it's true," she shouts. "And they'll pay for their sins, these heathens. They are going to clean the floor on their hands and knees, getting every drop of our Saviour's blood off that marble and then scrubbing it to a polish. Even if it takes all day, they'll learn the wages of sin!"

"Not until after school," Sister Juliet says, quietly. She's looking past me now, I guess into Sister Margaret's eyes. "And we must not keep them out too late, of course. I think an hour would be enough, don't you? I believe Mother Superior would agree."

Sister Margaret just snorted, but she released our ears and we were able to go back into the school. A few years later I would figure out that Sister Juliet and a couple of the not-so-old older nuns, including the principal, who was also the superior of the convent, were allied against Sister Margaret and the rest of the hard-liners. Back then, though, it was unthinkable that nuns could disagree, so we figured it was just some kind of good cop-bad cop routine.

And the bad cop -- Sister Margaret, that is -- got us back at the end of the school day. Sister Juliet turned us over and watched as the older nun walked us toward the church, but as soon as the younger nun ducked back into the school building Sister Margaret had us by the lobes again. It was a cold, cold day, and even if any boiler could have kept that barn of a church warm, Sister Margaret was too stingy to fire it up in the middle of the afternoon just for the likes of us. Our fingers were quickly numbed and our knees ached from the hard floor and I swear there wasn't more than a drop or two of wine there in the first place -- let alone wondering whether it really had been consecrated before it spilled -- but Sister Margaret kept us at it well past an hour before Sister Juliet came in the side door of the church and said our parents were calling the convent about us and wasn't it time we were getting home? Sister Margaret had disappeared somewhere to wash the altar cloth, so Eddie and I gathered up our cleaning supplies and piled them in the sacristy and took off before she could get back.

Since no other kids were around by the time we escaped, Eddie was willing to walk home with me. Our conversation was devoted to our feelings about Sister Margaret, and "dried-up old penguin" was the nicest thing either of us said. We were just about a block from Eddie's house -- he lived kitty-corner and six doors up from me -- when I got the idea that I thought would not only produce the vengeance my heart craved but also the produce the regular-kid status my brain desired.

"Let's break the old bat's window," I said. I tended to mumble whenever I said bad things about nuns, though -- ingrained survival instinct from school -- so at first Eddie didn't know what I was talking about. "Let's break the old bastard into what?" he said.

We sorted that out and he agreed that broken glass would be a worthwhile punishment. (In the years since I have wondered just how we thought that would work; was Mother Superior going to make her glaze the replacement window in herself? All I can say is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.) Eddie, though, who had the street smarts I lacked, suggested we wait a week or two until someone else had gotten a chance to tick off Sister Margaret, so we wouldn't be the obvious suspects. We shook on the deal.

It was almost a month and getting close to the end of the school year before we had our chance. As fate would have it, Rondini was the one who rose up as a potential scapegoat, when Sister Margaret caught him shuffling through the papers on the lectern during a prayer service in church for some underprivileged country or another. It wasn't clear just what was so wrong with what he did, but Ken didn't help himself when he told Sister he had looked through the papers -- probably old sermons or something -- because he was bored waiting for his turn to read our prayer intentions. You could hear the entire class suck in its breath at once when he said that.

Exactly what Sister Margaret did to him I'll never know, but Eddie and I met after school (in his backyard, so no other kids could see us) and agreed that now was the time.

That evening was a Boy Scout meeting, and Eddie and I ducked out early during a firelight ceremony. (Well, actually two flashlights covered in red plastic and waved around a little; there was no way they'd let us have a real fire in the old school hall.) We gathered up some likely-looking stones from the gravel driveway of the rectory garage and, practicing our best Scout wilderness training, ran from bush to bush until we were in sight of the convent wall.

It was only then that we realized a major flaw in our plan. Being nuns, the good sisters kept their blinds and drapes tightly shut, especially at night. We could see lights pop on and off occasionally, but we had no way of knowing whose room was whose.

Eddie was all for picking one window at random and letting fly, but that was a step or two too far over the line between being an ordinary kid and being a JD for me. I knew it might cost me my only chance at mediocrity, but I talked Eddie out of it.

Two days later, Eddie passed me a note in class and we met in the boy's room. He had another idea. He wouldn't tell me exactly what it was, but we were each to tell our parents that after the next Scout meeting, in about a month, we would be sleeping over at the other kid's house.

That such a lame story worked for me isn't surprising; my reputation as a good boy was strongest at home, where even my sometimes resentful silences were interpreted as respect. That Eddie's parents swallowed the tale, not even bothering to check with my parents a few doors away, surprised me. Eddie was a typical eighth-grader -- which is to say, snotty, sneaky and disobedient. I can only guess that his parents thought no one would be dumb enough to tell a lie that could be caught so easily. Or else they didn't care, which, given the state of Eddie's clothes most days even when he'd just left the house, seems entirely possible.

This time we didn't even go to the Scout meeting. Eddie led me down an alley halfway between the church and our houses. There was a big, overgrown mulberry bush about 50 feet up the alley, and he ducked under its leaves while I stood guard outside. Two minutes later he was beside me again, dressed in even grungier clothes than usual, as he finished stuffing his Scout uniform into a paper bag. Then it was my turn. I wasn't thrilled about changing in the middle of an alley, and besides the bush was right next to a smelly garbage bin that was swarming with flies. But I knew I couldn't afford to skip out on my second chance at descending to Eddie's level, so I held my nose and changed -- which isn't easy to do at the same time, believe me. My mom had given me a duffel bag for my overnight stuff, and after I was done we snuck it and Eddie's paper bag into a gap in the fence near the bush's roots. Eddie grabbed some loose cardboard from a garbage bin a few doors down and covered up our stuff.

Eddie led us past the church and down another block, then up another alley. Being an ordinary kid was a lot dirtier than I had thought; we jumped a fence and hid in the weeds between two garages, and it smelled like the narrow space served as the bathroom when the neighborhood kids played ball. Truth is, we used it ourselves while we were waiting -- for the Scout meeting to end, Eddie told me. About an hour after dark, we finally heard some guys walking past the alley and recognized Billy Kegelman's voice. He always stayed to last 'cause his dad was the scoutmaster, so we knew if he was leaving it was safe. A few minutes later, we crept out of the alley and over to the convent.

The building ran from the main street the church was on almost all the way to the street behind, with wide lawns in front and behind. The side facing the church was well-lighted because the shrines of the Madonna and St. Joe were there, and the spotlights bounced off the white sculptures. On the other side, where we crept up, the convent was separated from the school by a fenced-in garden, about 50 feet across, with an asphalt drive between that and the side entrances of the school. This was no picket fence; it was a chain-link that went up at least 12 feet. No barbed wire on top, though. I think it was high because kids played pinner against the school walls at lunch sometimes and they didn't want balls bouncing in, but the story we kids told was that a few of the nuns were crazy and the fence was there to keep them from escaping.

There were some floodlights on the school side of the driveway, and we stuck close to the fence to stay out of their glow, me right behind Eddie. I still didn't know what we were doing, but I was scared and looking back and forth all the time expecting something terrible. All of a sudden I look behind me and when I look back Eddie's disappeared, and I almost pissed my pants. Then I hear a hiss and I'm afraid I did, but it's only Eddie and he's on the other side of the fence. There was a burrow about a foot deep at that point and I don't know whether it was from a dog or Eddie had been making preparations, although, given Eddie's IQ, I wouldn't figure him for the planning type.

That impression of Eddie's abilities was increased a few hours later. It must have been around 10 or 11; most of the lights in the convent were out. We'd been squatting on the ground and when Eddie started to move I couldn't get my legs working right away. By the time I caught up to him he was at the convent wall. In a whispered conversation I then found out that Eddie's entire plan for the evening consisted of getting into the convent through a basement window he'd noticed they left half-open most nights. After that, he said, we'd "wing it." I expressed some doubts as to the effectiveness of that, but Eddie ignored me and slunk along the wall until he'd found the open window. Shaking my head, I followed, going in on a wing and a prayer.

I guess if you're in a convent any old prayer will be answered, because we managed to get into the place without knocking anything over. It was pitch black and musty, though, and I had a feeling that I didn't want to know just how many spider webs we were going through as we felt our way around. I was the one who found the stairs, which at first I thought were shelves tipping over. Luckily I was by then way too scared even to squeak, and I just gasped waiting for the crash.

There was no particular logic in going up the stairs, but then we were way past logic at that stage anyway. If we were going to do anything to get back at Sister Margaret, we sure weren't going to accomplish it in the dark of the basement.

Having watched too many detective stories on TV, we knew enough to keep to the sides of the steps to avoid creaks. There was no light coming from under the door at the top, so we eased it open and crawled out onto a thin rug. Now we could make some things out in the dim light slipping through the drawn blinds. We were in the convent's kitchen, which was at the back. We slipped off our shoes and slid across the linoleum. At the far end was a set of stairs leading up. They formed one wall of a long hallway that went all the way to the front. As I was looking down the hall at a small table-lamp beside the front door, I saw something move. A little shiver ran over me, and it turned to a full shake when I realized it was the hand of a nun sitting by the front door, turning the page of a book.

Eddie had already started up the stairs, but I tugged at his shirt and he came back to me. I pointed down the hall and was about to whisper a suggestion that we get out when we heard steps. We both looked up the stairs but couldn't make out anything; by the time we looked back toward the front we could hear Sister Margaret's rasp. "I'll take over now, Sister Juliet," she said. "Mustn't miss your beauty sleep." It didn't sound like a nice thing to say. That was the first time I realized nuns didn't always stick together.

Sister Juliet went upstairs. Sister Margaret, to our dismay, didn't settle into the chair. She paced up and down by the front door for a minute or two. Eddie and I squeezed onto the stairs leading up, peeking around a banister one in awhile. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea," he whispered right in my ear, and I wanted to tell him that was a brilliant deduction. But just then I looked around and saw Sister Margaret heading our way and I pushed Eddie up the stairs just as water pipes somewhere in the building started pounding. I would have settled for a few seconds' grace from a toilet flush, but this must have been a faucet because the noise kept going long enough for us to get all the way up the stairs.

Well, almost all the way up the stairs. The pipes quieted with a final thump just as I was about to put one foot onto the second-floor landing. In the quiet that seemed to drape the whole building then, the creak of that last step when I lifted my other foot sounded like a siren. I froze -- not the smartest move, because I was off-balance and my foot slapped back onto the stair, loosing another high-pitched squeak. By now my heart was pounding and I couldn't think. Eddie was in the same state, but here's where our different natures showed themselves. For where my initial impulse in danger was to lie low, Eddie was a man of action. In this case, that action was to take off running down the hallway directly in front of us. I just crouched down and peeked out from behind my hands. I saw Eddie disappearing into the darkness. You might think I was weighing my alternatives, plotting out a foolproof escape. No way. But when I saw Eddie start to turn a corner I moved instinctively, slipping down a hallway to my left. A door there was ajar; I stepped inside and leaned against the wall.

Only then did it occur to me that I shouldn't have been able to see Eddie at all. The mystery of his visibility in the darkness was quickly solved when I heard steps moving closer and Sister Margaret's unmistakable voice beseeching a variety of saints to do very uncharitable things to this vile Satanic spawn she had captured, and on like that. She was almost screeching and I could hear doors opening all around me and nuns whispering back and forth. Looking back, it seems odd that they bothered whispering given that Sister Margaret was raising the devil at the top of her lungs, but I guess it was force of habit.