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ag of Eucharist to make up for all the other times that I couldn’t.
In my mind, I wasn’t breaking the rules, because the rules didn’t make any sense. And I
got caught only because they broke their own rules. Another kid ratted me out in confession,
and the priest turned me in.
“No, no,” I protested. “You’ve broken the rules. That’s confidential information. The
priest isn’t supposed to repeat what you say in confession.”
They didn’t care. The school could break whatever rules it wanted. The principal laid into
me.
“What kind of a sick person would eat all of Jesus’s body and drink all of Jesus’s blood?”
“A hungry person.”
I got another hiding and a second trip to the psychologist for that one. The third visit to
the shrink, and the last straw, came in grade six. A kid was bullying me. He said he was going
to beat me up, and I brought one of my knives to school. I wasn’t going to use it; I just
wanted to have it. The school didn’t care. That was the last straw for them. I wasn’t expelled,
exactly. The principal sat me down and said, “Trevor, we can expel you. You need to think
hard about whether you really want to be at Maryvale next year.” I think he thought he was
giving me an ultimatum that would get me to shape up. But I felt like he was offering me an
out, and I took it. “No,” I told him, “I don’t want to be here.” And that was the end of Catholic
school.
Funnily enough, I didn’t get into trouble with my mom when it happened. There was no
ass-whooping waiting for me at home. She’d lost the bursary when she’d left her job at ICI,
and paying for private school was becoming a burden. But more than that, she thought the
school was overreacting. The truth is she probably took my side against Maryvale more often
than not. She agreed with me 100 percent about the Eucharist thing. “Let me get this
straight,” she told the principal. “You’re punishing a child because he wants Jesus’s body and
Jesus’s blood? Why shouldn’t he have those things? Of course he should have them.” When
they made me see a therapist for laughing while the principal hit me, she told the school that
was ridiculous, too.
“Ms. Noah, your son was laughing while we were hitting him.”
“Well, clearly you don’t know how to hit a kid. That’s your problem, not mine. Trevor’s
never laughed when I’ve hit him, I can tell you.”
That was the weird and kind of amazing thing about my mom. If she agreed with me that
a rule was stupid, she wouldn’t punish me for breaking it. Both she and the psychologists
agreed that the school was the one with the problem, not me. Catholic school is not the place
to be creative and independent.
Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it’s ruthlessly authoritarian, and its
authority rests on a bunch of rules that don’t make any sense. My mother grew up with these
rules and she questioned them. When they didn’t hold up, she simply went around them. The
only authority my mother recognized was God’s. God is love and the Bible is truth—
everything else was up for debate. She taught me to challenge authority and question the
system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her.
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