Excerpt from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Once we got to pavement, the ride felt smoother; the wheels purred beneath us. The crowd now clapped in rhythm with the band. Sister Fran clapped along with them, her broad smile revealing her teeth that were small and pointy like a cat's.

The float in front of us had no wheels, and so it was carried by handlebars at both ends. From behind, it looked like a giant misshapen mushroom, but it was supposed to be a saint. The float kept tilting from side to side, swaying so it seemed as though Saint Whoever was dancing, but once Sister Fran marched up beside the Sisters carrying it, the dancing stopped and the float straightened.

Tucked inside our Hand of Benediction, we felt dizzy with excitement. The world looked overmagnified somehow. Though we'd often fantasized about leaving the convent, conjuring up great scenes of escape—with tied bedsheets thrown out the Bunk Room window and Sister Fran in hot pursuit, her whistle bouncing up and down on her chest as she ran after us—in the end, we simply believed our parents would come back for us. That they'd show up one day, wet-faced, frantic with apology. We even figured we'd forgive them. They were our parents, after all, and though they let us down, we wanted to love them. That's how love works. It conquers all. Back then, the solution seemed pretty simple.

Sister Monica's breath grew labored as she strained to pull us up the incline of the long drive. Her face glistened. She kept stopping to wipe her palms on her skirt and to get a better grip. Just as we began to crest the top of the drive, Sister Fran walked toward us again with a look of stern indignation on her face. Holy Constipation.

"Here," Sister Fran said, grabbing the handle; then her voice changed. "Dear heavens," she said. "It's like hauling the Rock of Gibraltar."

We all froze, our muscles stiffening. Anxiety overcame our cramped hiding space in the form of warmth, as though blood simultaneously rushed to our faces, which kicked on like little space heaters.

But the float kept moving forward, upward, toward the top of the hill, to where, just a little beyond, sat the church and our salvation. Our Mount Sinai. Our Promised Land. Sister Fran and Sister Monica each gripped the float's handle with one hand, waving to the crowd with the other. Sweat soaked the backs of their thin white blouses. Their smiles looked more like winces.

Onlookers lined the parade route, their gazes aimed toward the top of the hill, where Sister Tabitha now stood announcing the floats in the same scratchy voice that had called out the names of the turtles at Turtle Downs. She held the megaphone to her lips and lifted her head to the sky, so she resembled a bugle player in a marching band made of one.

"The S-s-sacred Heart," she said, "by Lottie Barzetti, Sh-Sh-Shirley Mitchell, and Nan Waggler." We could hear the crowd clapping slowly, either tired or unenthused. We couldn't blame them. Who, after all, really enjoys parades after the first ten minutes, The Guineveres had wondered while building our float in the courtyard, twisting paper around wire. Certainly not us. We found it all so embarrassing somehow.

"S-s-s-saint Philomena, patron s-s-saint of youth," Sister Tabitha said through her megaphone another minute later, as the brown hump of a float in front of us cleared the top of the hill. The crowd's clapping grew louder, and we knew we were almost there. Our breathing became shallow; our heads buzzed; our fingers were wet with sweat and anticipation. We'd never felt closer to freedom.

"A Hand of Benediction: A Blessing to You," Sister Tabitha hollered, and she read our names off, one by one. We winced when we heard them, spoken so publicly. We could tell by the volume of the clapping and the angle of the float that we'd reached the top of the drive. If we could have seen behind us, we'd have waved good-bye to the old gray building shrinking in the distance. We'd have waved good-bye to years of loneliness, of guilt because we never felt we could live up to the expectations of perfection demanded of us by the Sisters. They say good-byes are always hard, but not for us. Not on that day.

Excerpted from The Guineveres by Sarah Domet. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Domet. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.