At the start of her junior year in the late summer of 1971, sixteen-year-old Vivian Hannity had been attending Catholic schools for her entire life. Yet she found that her belief in her own religion was waning. It wasn’t exactly that she was becoming an atheist. It was more like the rigid dogmas of the Church simply made no sense to her anymore. She could not resolve the contradictions between what the Church was trying t...

On Thursday, Vivian Hannity eagerly awaited the arrival of her friend Cathy Morrow. Vivian knew they were going to participate in an unofficial tradition: the wearing of “naughty girl” panties under their Catholic school uniforms. Cathy had gone and purchased new underwear for both of them. No one could remember when this practice had started, but it seemed to be a way for many of the girls a way to express their represse...

The girls were only on their third time with their new “bad girl” underwear when the nuns caught them. There was a rumor going around the school that the nuns had some kind of extrasensory perception that gave their teachers something beyond random guesswork to discover which girls were being naughty on a certain day. Probably it was something more prosaic than that. After years of experience looking for that kind of thin...