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Don’t go into a lot of detail. Don’t bother the priest with frivolous things. And don’t name others who sinned with you—this is not a court of law, but a personal reckoning with God.
    In addition to those protocols, I understood confession to involve a complex moral appraisal of our actions. Stealing food is surely sinful, but if I stole out of hunger my culpability was mitigated. Did I know the food wasn’t mine to take? Should I have known it belonged to someone else? On top of this was the matter of intentionality—a kind of eye-of-the-beholder clause I had a hard time wrapping my mind around. Of course I had never stolen a thing in my life, but it didn’t matter. Wading through the moral forest of my soul, I found myself hopelessly obsessed with the trees.
    I consulted my parents, whose advice for the big day was simple: be rigorous. Needing more practical pointers, I turned to Walter Lambert, a classmate with a knack for managing tricky situations. One day, Walter had tried showing me a way to make your arm numb by rubbing it with a ruler. We sat in the back of geography class scraping rulers up and down our arms, as though we were sharpening a knife without a leather strap. It hurt like hell; numbness would have been a gift. But Sister Imelda caught us before the experiment bore fruit. For whatever reason, she snatched up Walter and left me behind. When he returned, the numb part was between him and his chair. He never once wondered aloud why I’d been spared. I think he knew his culpability was greater than mine, and accepted his penance with contrition.
    â€œOne time I forgot to clean my room,” I told him. “Is that a sin?”
    Walter shrugged. “Put it in anyway,” he said. “There’s no downside. If it is a sin, you’ll be in more trouble leaving it off.” Now, that was a lesson in morals.
    After trading notes with Walter, I decided to confess everything on mymaster list. Together we rehearsed dozens of times, training for our first confessions like other kids drilled for spelling-bee finals.
    When the time came, our entire second grade class was summoned to form one long line in the school’s vast hallway, then snaked to the school multipurpose room. There, wheeled in only on special occasions, was the confessional booth—a blond-wood, two-doored source of foreboding mystery to us all. We studied the faces of each boy and girl when they left the tiny chamber. Some emerged giggling or pink with shame. Still others appeared triumphant, as though the experience had bestowed on them a terrific peace of mind. I was filled with awe.
    Walter’s turn came just before mine. He tucked himself behind the towering door with confidence, but I breathed uneasy with him in there. I knew his confession so well by now that I rolled through it in my head just as I knew he was doing with the priest. When I finished, I was surprised that the door didn’t swing open. For a long time he didn’t emerge. The nuns had told us that priests sometimes asked for more information. What hidden nuance could they have found in Walter’s confession, I wondered? What unsuspected sin lurked among his words?
    At last, he was released. When I passed him on my way in, his face gave no hint of his ordeal.
    The door was heavier than I expected; the whole confessional shuddered when it closed behind me. Inside the air was tight, yet somehow it also felt charged. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness as I groped for the right place to kneel. As I made the sign of the cross, my heart pounded so loudly I worried it would drown out my words. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began. “This is my first confession. I accuse myself of the following sins. I was mean to Caroline twice. I talked back to my parents once. On seven occasions I didn’t clean my room. Once I forgot my chores.”
    As I spoke I glanced up to the grate and