In the heart of downtown Topeka, across from the State Capitol, stands Assumption Catholic Church.
It’s a Mission-and-Renaissance-Revival brick monolith from the 1920s that was built to survive tornadoes, scandals, and the weekly parade of restless kids shoved inside to worship a God they weren’t entirely sold on.
Next to it sits Assumption Grade School, a mid-century, no-frills
building where the hallways reek of industrial cleaner and the K-8
classrooms smell like pencil shavings and boredom.
Outside, an asphalt playground waits like a killing field where kids bleed for kickball glory and learn the hard way that falling on blacktop means a trip to the ER for stitches, casts, or a new pair of teeth.
Between the church, the school, and the homeless who drift in for free bologna sandwiches from the church’s rectory, the whole block feels like its own ecosystem: strange, isolated and self-policing.
I had been part of this ecosystem my entire scholastic life. Raised by it, disciplined by it and kept impossibly small inside it. My parents had wanted me to go to a school with educational and moral superiority, and because they were Catholic, Assumption was the obvious choice.
So, I’d been attending since kindergarten. And now, on the 19th day of August in the year of our Lord nineteen eighty-seven, I had officially reached the top of the food chain as a newly minted eighth grader. Having climbed the ranks over the past nine years with the same group of classmates that had come to feel like family I’d never chose.
Assumption operated like a tiny authoritarian state where dress codes were enforced, rules were obeyed and everyone knew their place in the hierarchy as well as everyone else’s.
The attractive and athletic kids ruled from the top of the pecking order. The quiet kids from broken homes lived at the bottom. The rest of us, present company included, floated somewhere between the blessed and the buried.
Throughout my time there, I’d been a complacent student with good grades and godly behavior, even serving as an altar boy from fourth to seventh grade. Occasionally I’d get in trouble for talking or joking too much in class. But other than that, I had remained a dutiful cog in the Catholic school machinery.
However, I had always carried with me a desire for something more that I lacked the courage to name. Which could explain the reason for my emotional tectonic plates shifting right before I entered eighth grade.
Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was the simmering restlessness of teenage hormones. Maybe it was the tyranny of the slow, suffocating sameness: same faces, same rules, same prayers I could recite in my sleep.
After almost a decade inside any system, you’re bound to break down or break out, and for me, the idea of escaping the mold, the monotony, the mundane filled me with a quiet hum under my skin, as if some part of me had decided it was done being small and was ready to take up space, even if I didn’t know how.
Assumption, like any authoritarian regime, revolved around one centralized figurehead: Sister Corita. She was the school’s principal and its living cult of personality.
Five feet tall, all steel and conviction, she ruled the school with a certainty that made even the bravest kids lower their eyes and think twice about stepping out of line.
Her authority wasn’t loud, it was absolute. And although she was a nun, she refused to wear a habit. Instead, she’d patrol Assumption in a long, navy blue skirt, white blouse and 70’s glasses so big you’d swear she was able to read your mind with them.
With her salt and peppered Mia Farrow pixie cut and watchful eyes, she looked less like a servant of God and more like his undercover enforcer. An agent sent to infiltrate pockets of student resistance and neutralize the threat before it had a chance to wreak havoc.
But what made her truly frightening wasn’t her commanding voice or her unchecked power but her precision. She knew everything about everyone. Who cheated, who lied, whose family was quietly falling apart at home.
Corita could bring a kid, and their parent, to tears with a single reprimand only to soften her tone just enough to pull them back from the edge. It was part good cop, part bad cop, all mind-fuck. The kind of emotional whiplash that left you unsure whether you were being punished, protected, or prepared for something larger.
She was judge, jury, executioner and occasionally the priest that reminded you redemption existed.
She was a force, a presence and a bulwark built to hold back any shifting current, especially the kind that had begun to churn inside of me.
But even the strongest dam can’t hold back what it doesn’t see coming. And what Assumption didn’t see coming this year was a girl named Stephanie Allen.
Dear, Reader
I write these stories because I have to.
Because some things only loosen when they’re put on the page.
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Either way, thanks for reading, I'm honored to have you on this journey with me.