Girlfriends Girlfriends If only you will love me as much as I love you, I forgive you all you have done and will do. Saint Teresa to María de San José How a Friend Crush Might Change Your Life Forever The nun is in her cell. She knows she should be praying for her sisters, considering Christ''s suffering at the cross, or writing a repentance letter for her confessor, but all she can think about is Teresa. No one forgets the sudden onset of a friend crush--not even a sixteenth-century nun dealing with a massive retaliation executed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This is not the first Resurrection Sunday that María de San José has spent locked up in the prison of the Portuguese convent she founded herself six years ago. The thought of yet another Holy Week estranged from her sisters and deprived of all exterior communication is a miserable one, but luckily she still has a scrap of paper and some drying ink. She needs a morale boost: "He [God] is overjoyed, / and so I find contentment, / even if I''m cornered / in this sad confinement." It''s a rather poor sonnet, she knows, but for now, it''s enough to keep her entertained and prevent the bitterness of her unjust imprisonment (imposed by certain friars of her own religious order) from consuming her.

On her desk lies the letter she wrote two days ago, filled with rage: Letter Written by a Poor and Imprisoned Discalced Nun to Console Herself and Her Sisters and Daughters Who Are Afflicted by Seeing Her Thus . She takes pride in the title--dramatic, self-congratulatory, and promising. Though she cannot share it with her companions just yet, she hopes that one day it will be published and serve as a lesson for generations of Carmelite nuns to come. As she rereads the letter, each word transports her back to the beginning of it all. During her two years of isolation, María has spent many sleepless nights reliving the memory of that first moment when she witnessed Teresa in the midst of a mystical rapture. For a girl born in 1548, the enchanted choreography of an ecstatic body can''t have been any less mesmerizing than the well-rehearsed moves of Dua Lipa today. The languid gesture, the faraway gaze, the parted lips, the hands contracting to the rhythm of the spiritual rapture: a repertoire of masterful expressions that every aspiring mystic knew how to replicate and that María analyzed with the devout attention of a newly converted fan. What she didn''t know was that she would one day become best friends with the great star of mysticism.

When they first encountered each other, Saint Teresa had not yet become a saint, and María de San José was going by another name. In 1562, María was simply María de Salazar, a fourteen-year-old student enjoying a pampered adolescence at the opulent palace of a distant, wealthy relative named Luisa de la Cerda. Vainer than most, María preferred hobbies like maintaining the starched rustle of her dresses and the impeccable whiteness of their lace. That night, however, she didn''t mind putting all that puffed-up pomp aside and dragging her skirt along the ground, hurting her knees just to peer through the keyhole of Teresa''s room. Much like someone elbowing their way to the barricade of a crowded festival, she fought to position herself well among the throng of curious courtiers, all kneeling and struggling to catch a fleeting, sparkling glimpse of the palace''s most popular and intriguing inhabitant: Teresa de Jesús. Teresa was a forty-seven-year-old Carmelite nun. After two decades of living in anonymity, her mystical charisma, stubbornness, and revolutionary ideas began to set her apart from the countless other religious women scattered around sixteenth-century Castile. Teresa is that friend you look at with bemusement when she decides to leave everything behind and invest all her energy in a self-managed collective housing project--but in the end, against all odds, she succeeds.

Teresa had made the decision to found a new religious order, the Discalced Carmelites, enemy to conspicuous religiosity and ostentatious displays of wealth. For forty years, mental prayer, austerity, and intimacy--as opposed to the two hundred nuns who lived in the convent where Teresa had professed when she was twenty, the Discalced Carmelite houses would never have more than thirteen nuns--would be the cornerstones of Teresa''s ambitious dream. Rumors were beginning to circulate that she was more than just a nun--she was a saint in the making. Many centuries would pass before Teresa became a global icon, with statues of her adorning churches across the world, but her reputation for holiness already preceded her enough for the noblewoman Luisa--hoping to alleviate the sticky tedium of her recent widowhood--to become enamored with the idea of having this spiritual celebrity stay at the palace for a few months. While Teresa shared whispered consolations with the widow, a swarm of dazzled teenagers followed her around every corner. They peered through curtains and tapestries to spy on Teresa''s gripping conversations, her prayer exercises, and the gruesome spectacle of violent self-flagellations performed by someone who was, at her earthly core, a frail lady pushing fifty. It was impossible not to look. The entire palace was in an uproar, but María had a hunch that although these unusual displays were captivating everybody, they were meant more for her benefit than for anyone else''s.

María was never Teresa''s least toxic friend, but she would end up being the most loyal. From the confines of the convent prison where she now found herself, and with that yearning for the carefree and exhilarating days of youth that haunts you as soon as you hit your thirties, María could not stop thinking about those spying escapades of her girlhood that had forever altered the course of her life. Years earlier, in her 1585 Book of Recreations , she had already tried putting the sudden rapture of her friend crush into words: "I was then thirteen or fourteen years old, she was in the house, on that occasion, about six months or so. Now, Sister, I wish another tongue than my own to tell of the transformation wrought in us all by her holy conversation and her practice of prayer and mortification." Before it was too late, she wanted to leave a testimony of the first time she saw Teresa that would capture the bewitching, relentless character that everyone had recognized in the future saint. Although she feigned humility behind a vague "us all," what María truly wanted was to feel like an exception by revealing the unique whirlwind of emotion that had, for more than twenty years, formed the backbone of her relationship with the most esteemed woman in sixteenth-century Spain. Had María been able to foresee all the future torments into which her loyalty to Teresa would drag her--including slander, the ordeal of founding new convents, and her current seclusion--she wouldn''t have changed a thing. And neither would we.

Our first meeting also took place among ornate draperies and molded ceilings. Lacking the corridors and chambers of a Renaissance palace, we settled for the lobby of a once grand 1920s hotel, long since fallen into decline. To reach the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, one must cross a bleak square, cursed by a poor government decision in the 1980s to live out its days as an open-air bus station. Now, the bravest students from Brown and RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), the two wealthiest universities in Rhode Island, wait for their buses, making great effort not to touch anything, all the while thinking about how insightfully they will discuss the opioid crisis once they are safely on the other side of the city. One March night in 2016, overcome by an unnerving sense of newness, we both crossed that square with a light step, determined to impress each other. Every budding friendship is in part a courtship. In Instruction of Novices , her manual for novice nuns, María de San José provides very precise guidelines about the protocol two religious women should follow when meeting for the first time: "Between equals, they will make a slight bow to each other, giving way to one another." Luckily, we had a cocktail menu to help ward off the initial threat of Carmelite stiffness.

The chandelier, dusty carpet, and plastic flowers in the Biltmore''s lobby lent a sense of unease that the $16 dry martinis could not quite shake off. Rumor had it that Emma Watson had lived in one of the Biltmore suites during her years as a student at Brown and, for some strange reason, imagining the actor of our childhood riding the elevator that unsuccessfully tried to evoke the city''s bygone splendor gave us a much-needed sense of coziness. Officially, it was our first-time meeting; in reality, without any way to spy on each other through the crack in a door, we had both succumbed weeks earlier to the embarrassing ritual of stalking each other through Instagram. Instead of mystical theatrics or mortifications, we found the illusion of intimacy that kept us equally captivated as we tried to decipher in each other''s gestures the key to our own incomprehensible life decisions. At just twenty-six years old, we had already spent too much time in academic seclusion, dedicated to meticulously dissecting the intricacies of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the politics of sanctity, and the sensory fervor of Renaissance demonological treatises. This trove of knowledge might eventually help us win some prizes on quiz shows or even score some points on a Tinder date with someone with a fetish for scholarly minds, but it proved largely incompatible with a happy twenties. Without any intention of steering our lives toward more rewarding paths, that night at the Biltmore bar we made a toast to our unusual, shared decision to cloister our.