stage 3 it is common that students who start living in a new and different culture come to a point where they reject the host culture and withdraw into themselves during this period they make generalizations about the host culture and wonder how the people can live like they do your students may feel that their own culture s lifestyle and customs are far superior to those of the host country the nuns were worried about mirabella too to correct a failing you must first be aware of it as a failing and there was mirabella shucking her plaid jumper in full view of the visiting cardinal mirabella battling a raccoon under the dinner table while the rest of us took dainty bites of peas and borscht mirabella doing belly flops into compost you have to pull your weight around here we overheard sister josephine saying one night we paused below the vestry window and peered inside does mirabella try to earn skill points by shelling walnuts and polishing saint in the box no does mirabella even know how to say the word walnut has she learned how to say anything besides a sinful hraaaha as she commits frottage against the organ pipes no there was a long silence something must be done sister ignatius said firmly the other nuns nodded a sea of thin colorless lips and kettle black brows something must be done they intoned that ominously passive construction a something so awful that nobody wanted to assume responsibility for it i could have warned her if we were back home and mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow blind bears i would have warned her but the truth is that by stage 3 i wanted her gone mirabella s inability to adapt was taking a visible toll her teeth were ground down to nubbins her hair was falling out she hated the spongy long dead foods we were served and it showed her ribs were poking through her uniform her bright eyes had dulled to a sour whiskey color but you couldn t show mirabella the slightest kindness anymore she d never leave you alone you d have to sit across from her at meals shoving her away as she begged for your scraps i slept fitfully during that period unable to forget that mirabella was living under my bed gnawing on my loafers it was during stage 3 that we met our first purebred girls these were girls raised in captivity volunteers from st lucy s school for girls the apple cheeked fourth grade class came to tutor us in playing they had long golden braids or short severe bobs they had frilly duvet names like felicity and beulah and pert bunny noses and terrified smiles we grinned back at them with genuine ferocity it made us nervous to meet new humans there were so many things that we could do wrong and the rules here were different depending on which humans we were with dancing or no dancing checkers playing or no checkers playing pumping or no pumping the purebred girls played checkers with us these girl girls sure is dumb my sister lavash panted to me between games i win it again five to none she was right the purebred girls were making mistakes on purpose in order to give us an advantage king me i growled out of turn i say king me and felicity meekly complied beulah pretended not to mind when we got frustrated with the oblique fussy movement from square to square and shredded the board to ribbons i felt sorry for them i wondered what it would be like to be bred in captivity and always homesick for a dimly sensed forest the trees you ve never seen jeanette was learning how to dance on holy thursday she mastered a rudimentary form of the charleston brava the nuns clapped brava every friday the girls who had learned how to ride a bicycle celebrated by going on chaperoned trips into town the purebred girls sold seven hundred rolls of gift wrap paper and used the proceeds to buy us a yellow fleet of bicycles built for two we d ride the bicycles uphill a sanctioned pumping a grim faced nun pedaling behind each one of us congratulations the nuns would huff being human is like riding this bicycle once you ve learned how you ll never forget mirabella would run after the bicycles growling out our old names hwraa gwarr trrrrrrr we pedaled faster at this point we d had six weeks of lessons and still nobody could do the sausalito but jeanette the nuns decided we needed an inducement to dance they announced that we would celebrate our successful rehabilitations with a debutante ball there would be brothers ferried over from the home for man boys raised by wolves there would be a photographer from the gazette sophisticate there would be a three piece jazz band from west toowoomba and root beer in tiny plastic cups the brothers we d almost forgotten about them our invisible tails went limp i should have been excited instead i felt a low mad anger at the nuns they knew we weren t ready to dance with the brothers we weren t even ready to talk to them things had been so much simpler in the woods that night i waited until my sisters were asleep then i slunk into the closet and practiced the sausalito two step in secret a private mass of twitch and foam mouth shut shoes on feet mouth shut shoes on feet mouthshutmouthshut one night i came back early from the closet and stumbled on jeanette she was sitting in a patch of moonlight on the windowsill reading from one of her library books her cheeks looked dewy why you cry i asked her instinctively reaching over to lick jeanette s cheek and catching myself in the nick of time jeanette blew her nose into a nearby curtain she sniffled and pointed to a line in her book the lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky but none of the pack besides me could read yet and i wasn t ready to claim a common language with jeanette the following day jeanette golfed the nuns set up a miniature put put course in the garden sister maria dug four sand traps and got clyde the groundskeeper to make a windmill out of a lawnmower engine the eighteenth hole was what they called a doozy a minuscule crack in st lucy s marble dress jeanette got a hole in one on sundays the pretending felt almost as natural as nature the chapel was our favorite place long before we could understand what the priest was saying the music instructed us in how to feel the choir director aggressively perfumed mrs valuchi gold necklaces like pineapple rings around her neck taught us more than the nuns ever did she showed us how to pattern the old hunger into arias clouds moved behind the frosted oculus of the nave glass shadows that reminded me of my mother the mother i d think struggling to conjure up a picture a black shadow running behind the watery screen of pines we sang at the chapel annexed to the halfway house every morning we understood that this was the human s moon the place for howling beyond purpose not for mating not for hunting not for fighting not for anything but the sound itself and we d howl along with the choir hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass sotto voce the nuns would frown but you could tell that they were pleased 