"Oh," Gerard said happily, making Mikey turn his full attention to him. "I got an email from Nicole." 

"Yeah?" Mikey pulled himself up so he could see Gerard properly. "How's she doing?" 

"Good," Gerard said absently. "She made the Dean's List..." he trailed off, lost in concentration. 

"Who's Nicole?" Bob wanted to know. 

"One of Gee's kids from when he was a youth minister," Mikey told him, and Bob nodded. 

That wasn't exactly the whole story. It was true, but the full version had a lot more secret abortions and community scandal and Gerard getting screamed at for not telling Nicole's parents that she'd been abused by her uncle, even though he couldn't, because she'd told him in confession and that was like the most sacred thing ever. 

He hadn't even told Mikey, he'd just worried Mikey sick by calling him all the time and saying, "I can't talk about it," then doing frightened breathing down the phone. 

Mikey privately thought that the whole sanctity of confession thing was bullshit. Crime was crime, and if you knew something bad was happening you should be able to go to the police. The worst part was that when Nicole told Gerard she was pregnant, he was technically supposed to tell her that God wanted her to keep the baby. 

Except he didn't. And he went with her to the clinic, and everybody found out, and...Mikey was pretty sure it was the second worst week of Gerard's life, beaten only by the death of their grandmother for sheer unadulterated suck. The thing that made Mikey the maddest was the way all the awesome things Gerard had done for like, high school attendance, and getting kids to come to Mass instead of robbing the convenience store or whatever were just brushed aside, like they didn't matter because he told kids they ought to use condoms and didn't think that the Church's official position on abortion was a good enough reason to tell fifteen year-old girls to keep their incest rape babies. 

The upside of the story was that after it all came out, Nicole's parents moved her away and her uncle went to jail and now she was in college and doing great. But Mikey wasn't going to bust that out to Bob, certainly not in front of strangers. He hadn't even told Frank, and he kind of hoped he never had to, because he was pretty sure that Frank finding out Gerard was stripped of his youth ministry over his involvement with Nicole would trigger a Frank Hates the Church bitchfit to end all other bitchfits.