Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Um, because our school is closing? And therefore homework is pointless from now on?” She leaned over me, dabbing her lip gloss into place in the small magnet mirror on the inside of my locker door.

  “Oh really? And what was your excuse before today?”

  “I’m philosophically opposed to homework. You know that.” She smacked her lips together, satisfied, and began vigorously finger-combing her impossibly shiny waist-length hair. “Young girls like us should spend our free time freely. We have the rest of our lives to shrivel away in a library reading”—she picked up the novel I was reading by its spine, with her thumb and forefinger, like it was a rotting banana peel—“Pride and Prejudice.”

  “You know,” I said, “you’d actually really like that book.”

  “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,’” she read. “Oh, I see. You think I’d like it just because it’s about a rich single guy? I have other interests, you know, Wendy.”

  “Name one.”

  “Well, poor single guys, for one. And rich married guys. And emotionally unavailable middle-class guys—”

  I snatched the book away and zipped up my bag. “Look, you can spend all the time you want being free, but I, for one, need to get a full ride to a college that is far away from this city, and in order to do that, I need an A average. The stuff with my dad completely wiped out my college savings, in case you forgot.”

  “You and your ‘dad stuff’,” she sighed, slinging her empty bag over her shoulder. “You think I have any college savings? Or, for that matter, an A average? Do I look worried to you?”

  “It’s easier not to worry,” I retorted, “when you’ve never cared about going to college in the first place. But what exactly do you plan on doing for the rest of your life?”

  “Me? I don’t know. Model. Act. Bartend. Move to New York and play the guitar in smoky little clubs.”

  “You don’t even know how to play the guitar, Kenz.”

  “Well, I’ll have plenty of time to learn, won’t I? Since I won’t be wasting my time in college.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “But you love me.” She leaned over then and planted a wet, sticky-glossy kiss on the tip of my nose.

  Out in the school parking lot, I climbed into Red Rocket, the heap of rusted metal my Aunt Colleen had bequeathed to me on my sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t wild about the fact that Kenzie had nicknamed my car after a dog’s penis, even if it did feel like sort of an apt description. I took the wire hanger from the glove compartment and jiggered open the passenger side door, whose handle had long since fallen off. Kenzie hopped into shotgun, put on her sunglasses, kicked off her shoes, and dangled her bare feet out the rolled-down window, the better to show off the shooting star tattoo across her right ankle. Kenzie has four tattoos: the shooting star, a small heart on the soft swell of the top of her right breast, the American flag on the inside of one wrist, and the Chicago flag on the inside of the other. For two years now, she’s been trying to convince me to get one with her, but every time I think I’ve worked up the nerve, I can’t bring myself to do it. The idea of permanence scares me, you know? Like, what do I love now that I’ll still love in ten or twenty years? For Kenzie, it’s different. To her, nothing is permanent. With her makeup-smudged eyes, her straight black hair ombred into bleached tips, her electric-pink-painted lips, and her wool scrap of a uniform skirt, Kenzie is like a poster girl for the Now. People, ideas, clothes, art, music, love: according to her, none of it lasts, all of it is replaceable, and this includes everything from hair color to body art to Catholic high schools with a century-old tradition of academic excellence in a single-sex setting.

  I revved the ignition, and finally, reluctantly, Red Rocket came to life, spraying gouts of foul-smelling smoke from its exhaust pipe.

  “You have got to get a new car,” Kenzie sniffed, waving the smoke away and scanning the parking lot for Saint Mike’s boys, who sometimes wander over here from their school across the street.

  “You’re right,” I said. “With all the piles of cash I’m making as a part-time ham slicer, I don’t know why I haven’t treated myself to a new Mercedes yet.”

  “You and that boring-ass job,” she sighed.

  “I like working at the deli,” I said.

  “I know. That’s what I find so tragic. So, what do you think about the big announcement? Your mom is going to freak out. She went here, didn’t she?”

  “Yep.” I nodded. “I’m, like, a third generation ASH girl. I can’t believe it. I mean, it’s kind of sad. Don’t you think?” Kind of sad. This was such an understatement that it was almost a lie. I loved Academy of the Sacred Heart. When Sister Dorothy had made the announcement, I immediately felt hot tears pricking the backs of my eyes. But I had blinked them away, because I knew that if my friends saw, they would laugh.

  Now Kenzie shoved her sunglasses up, pushing back her dark bangs. “You expect me to be sad about Academy of the Acrid Fart? Wendy, haven’t you ever noticed that ASH is the school that time left behind? Did you know that Lincoln has an open-campus lunch? And a pool that’s not covered with mold spores? And iPads? Not to mention, of course, boys go there? Living, breathing, XY-chromosome males? The day they take a wrecking ball to this place, I’m throwing a party. I’ll even invite you, if you’re lucky.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Can we still go to the Saint Mike’s game tonight?” she demanded now. “Or are you too emotionally distraught?”

  “No,” I laughed, steering Red Rocket toward the school gate in a belching haze of gray smoke. “I’m fine.”

  “Good. Because I promised Evan I’d go and I need you to be there to explain what’s going on to me. Why the hell does football have to be so complicated anyway?”

  “Why don’t you ask Evan that?”

  “I did, once! And his explanation was so boring I had to give him a hand job just to shut him up.”

  She gave the radio a tremendous slap and it burst into life. Then she plugged her phone into the adaptor and turned the music all the way up, effectively ending the conversation. Which was cool with me, because I didn’t feel like arguing with her or pretending like I didn’t care that my whole world had just been turned upside down for the second time since I started high school. What I felt like doing was relishing this Friday afternoon and its lingering summer weather. As we pulled out of the parking lot of our dying school and into the blue September afternoon, the two of us fell silent, alone with the music and our weekend thoughts, content to trade our worries about the rest of high school for the much more manageable worries about the next forty-eight hours.

  2

  WHEN I ARRIVED HOME FROM SCHOOL, I found my mom and my Aunt Colleen basking in the sun on our apartment balcony, their eyes shaded by the fake Chanel sunglasses my brother had sent them from his shore leave in Dubai. A half-empty bottle of 7-Eleven chardonnay sat on the glass table next to a mostly empty pack of Virginia Slims Luxury Lights. When they saw me coming through the sliding doors, they both leaped up.

  “It’s not true, is it?” Aunt Col said, attacking me with one of her breasty, perfume-y hugs. “It can’t be true!”

  “It can,” I said, my words muffled by her cleavage.

  My mom pulled on her cigarette and exhaled with a sigh. “As if you haven’t already been through enough. What are we going to do?”

  “Well, she’ll have to go to Lincoln, I guess,” said Aunt Col. The two of them exchanged a look. They do that a lot—have silent conversations with their eyes. My mom and Col are eleven months apart and could pass for twins. Same dark-brown-almost-black, wavy-just-short-of-curly hair, same squinty blue eyes, same bump in the middle of their noses. Aunt Col lives a block down from us, and she might as well be my second mom, especially because she and Uncle Jimbo were never able to have kids of their own so Stevie Junior and me are the sole targets of her mate
rnal smothering.

  “You guys say that,” I said, leaning against the railing and looking down at the parking lot below, “as if it’s the worst thing in the world.”

  “Well, it certainly isn’t ideal, now, is it?”

  Both my mother and Aunt Col have this perception that public high schools are places where a bunch of kids dressed in skimpy outfits spend the day buying drugs and being atheists. It’s like they’ve totally forgotten that their own Catholic-school experiences were steeped in misery. When she was a kid, my mom’s punishment for slouching in theology class was to spend the rest of the day kneeling next to her desk on grains of dry rice. And Aunt Col is only right-handed because her first-grade teacher, who believed that left-handedness was a sign of the devil, had taped the fingers on her left hand together every day until she learned to write legibly with her Christian hand. And yet, the two of them both act like those were their glory days. I guess that kind of brainwashing never really goes away.

  Aunt Col was now gazing into her wineglass, searching for something positive to say about the situation. “Well,” she finally said, “Lincoln does have that new fine arts complex, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said my mom, “but is that the measure of a good school? A goddamn pottery studio? What about moral education?” I put my head down and stifled a laugh. Given what’s happened in our family over the last two years, I don’t think the Boychucks are the most qualified people to be making decisions about moral education.

  “Bernie, times have changed,” Aunt Col responded. “People don’t respect old-fashioned Catholic values the way they used to.” She leaned over to flick her cigarette butt onto the asphalt below, and they sat for a while, sipping their wine sullenly.

  “My daughter going to a coed public high school.” My mom shook her head finally and poured the last of the chardonnay into her glass. “Can you imagine what Ma would say about that if she were alive?”

  “Can you imagine what Ma would say if she found out ASH was closing?”

  They were silent again, ruminating on this possibility. My grandma had been the president of ASH’s class of 1958, and, until she got sick, chairwoman of the annual alumnae fundraiser. Just outside the journalism room, there’s a big black-and-white yearbook photo of her and two of her friends hanging on the wall, with these amazing gravity-defying bouffants. At seventeen, Grandma was beautiful, which is hard to square with my final memory of her: skeletal, sour-smelling, two inches of white at the roots of her black hair, staring at all of us from sunken, milky eyes and wheezing through that horrible throat machine thing with uncomprehending, unspeakable rage. Throat cancer: and here were two of her daughters—who are both, by the way, nurses—smoking. It amazes me how stupid adults can be sometimes.

  I left my mom and Aunt Colleen to their cocktail hour and spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on my bed, scrolling through my various social media accounts and halfheartedly plodding my way through Pride and Prejudice. When the cicadas began to buzz outside my open bedroom window, I finally got up and went to take a shower.

  Not to sound like a total princess, but every time I get ready to go out in our tiny, moldy apartment bathroom, with its vertical coffin of a shower, all I can think about is my old house. I know that thinking about that kind of stuff is both pointless and dangerous, but I can’t help it. I’ve gotten used to nearly everything about our new life, but God, it would just be so nice to have a shower with good water pressure and a bathtub where you could spread around some scented bath salts and just hang out for a while. And maybe a hallway that doesn’t always smell like cat piss. And hey, if we’re dreaming big here, how about some air-conditioning and a front room carpet that doesn’t have a gigantic mysterious black stain in the shape of Australia? Not that I ever appreciated this kind of stuff when we actually had a house. I grew up thinking that big houses with dishwashers and bathtubs and a big oak tree in the backyard were, like, constitutional rights. It’s only now that we’ve lost everything that I realize how lucky I was.

  After my shower, I pulled a towel around myself and cracked the window to release the fog of steam. In the parking lot below, my downstairs neighbor, Sonny, was chivalrously opening the door to his Jeep for a bleached blonde in one of those bandage dresses generally worn by women half her age. If their date went well, chances are I would hear about it later that night, when pornographic sounds began emanating from his bedroom, which was situated, tragically, directly under mine. Gagging at the possibility, I put on shorts, a tank top, and my espadrille wedges. As I globbed my eyelashes with mascara, I could hear the music drifting from the open windows of Emily’s Ford Focus before it had even pulled around the corner. I slicked my tongue over my teeth and smiled fiercely in the mirror. I stuck my phone in my pocket, called good-bye to my mom and Aunt Col, and headed down the stairs and out into the purpling night. Before I climbed into Emily’s car, I took a deep breath, steeling myself for the onslaught of deafening club music and peach body splash that awaited me.

  When I opened the car door, Kenzie immediately whipped around in her seat to give me that big, glittering smile that had already paralyzed the hearts of so many Saint Mike’s boys.

  “You look hot,” she said approvingly, arching a penciled eyebrow. “I have a feeling about tonight. A good one.”

  “Your hair looks adorable,” Sapphire said with a pout, shoving over to make room for me. “Mine looks disgusting. I wish I had your hair.”

  “No,” I said, reciting my lines. “My hair looks disgusting. Your hair is gorgeous.”

  She began teasing the crown of her hair with her fingers, using the mirror on the back of her iPhone case to make adjustments. Sapphire’s beautiful, thick curls were her greatest vanity, so in the strange, inverted world of popularity, it meant that she had to spend as much time as possible ridiculing them.

  “I love your top,” Emily shouted over the music as she eyed me from the rearview mirror.

  “This?” I snapped the shoulder strap dismissively. “This stupid thing was like three bucks.” Which, of course, was a lie. The top was from the Young Contemporary section at Bloomingdale’s, a gift from my rich aunt Kathy, and it was my favorite piece of clothing.

  But this is the ritual of my friends: we pick each other over like preening monkeys, exchanging compliments and insulting ourselves with machine-gun quickness. I’m not sure why we do it, exactly, but I suspect it’s a combination of envy and insecurity. Whatever the reason, the nice things my friends say to me have long since ceased to mean anything. I remember once, at the end of sophomore year, when Ms. Lee handed back my Grapes of Wrath research paper, she told me that I had a fresh way of looking at things, and that I was one of the best writers she’d come across in eight years of teaching. To this day, I still smile to myself whenever I remember that compliment, because I could tell that Ms. Lee had actually meant it, and because it wasn’t about my outfit.

  The thing is, even though it’s been two years now, I’m still not quite used to being popular. I hadn’t counted on how exhausting it would be, how much pretending it involved. Being an honors student, I learned early on, is an embarrassment that I have to downplay, which is why I’ve started reading novels the way other kids my age probably watch porn: sweaty-handed and in secret, hoping that no one will walk in on me. I also have to pretend I’m attracted to a revolving cast of douchebags and meatheads, because the quiet, bookish boys I usually like don’t attend parties in the woods that flow with foamy kegs of lukewarm beer and are populated mainly by barfing football players. Evan Munro, for example, is Kenzie’s boy of the moment, and we’re all expected to swoon over him because, I guess, he’s the star quarterback at Saint Mike’s with Division 3 colleges scouting him and he’s built like a brick shithouse. It doesn’t matter that I once watched him sit in a chair at a party, drunkenly squeezing at a huge zit on his shoulder with two pudgy fingers until it ruptured and he wiped a streak of bloody pus onto the wallpaper, concluding this activity with an earth-shatter
ing belch.

  Our complimenting ritual now complete, Emily floored it, and we were off, speeding past the Dairy Hut, where families lined up in the warm night for what would probably be one of the last cones of the season, and turning down Avondale Avenue along the train tracks. Someone had put fresh flowers at the memorial crosses that marked the place where Tiffany Maldonado and Sandy DiSanto were killed in the crash that, if you believe such things, had made Our Lady of Lourdes cry.

  We slowed past the night-darkened windows of Academy of the Sacred Heart and pulled into the parking lot of Saint Michael’s High School for Boys, threading our way past tailgating parents who were gathered around portable grills drinking beer from coffee mugs, and found one of the last open spaces near the chain-link fence butting up against the soccer fields. When we got out of the car and headed for the ticket line, which was already snaking out from the stadium and into the parking lot, Kenzie stopped short.

  “Wait a second,” she said, closing her eyes and sniffing the air. “Do you smell that?”

  “Smell what?” Sapphire took a panicked whiff of her own armpit.

  “Testosterone.” Kenzie’s eyes darted around the hordes of boys standing around in groups, drinking them in from head to toe as shamelessly as any catcalling construction worker. “God, how I’ve missed that smell. We’ve been locked up in that estrogen cave for a week!”

  “I don’t know how you’re even going to handle public school next year.” Emily laughed. “You’re going to be going around humping desks or something.” In response to that, Kenzie wiggled her eyebrows at us, jumped into a basketball player’s defensive stance, arms and legs spread wide, and began thrusting her hips in Emily’s direction, slowly inching toward her with her pelvis in the lead. Emily, thrilled to be receiving such attention from the queen bee, squealed with delight, until suddenly Kenzie stopped midthrust. “Oh my God,” she said, grabbing both Emily and me by the arm. “That’s Christian.”