Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

“I LUV BOYS?” Jayden handed the phone back to her. “Seriously?”

  Kenzie sighed loudly. “Is everybody fucking stupid today? I just had to explain why it’s ironic to Wendy in the car, and I don’t feel like doing it again, okay?”

  “But why is it ironic?” Tino had put his book down and was looking at Kenzie. I saw the title: The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov. “Are you a lesbian?”

  “No, I am not a lesbian, dumbass,” she snapped. “Do I look like a lesbian to you?”

  “Sexual orientation isn’t, like, a skin color. You can’t know just by looking at someone whether they’re gay or not.”

  “Yeah, well, girls who look like me?” She flicked her hair and posed for him. “Not lesbians, okay?”

  Tino shrugged, half smiling. “Okay.”

  I was sort of astounded. He was maybe the first boy I’d ever seen who didn’t turn into a pile of mush in Kenzie’s presence. He seemed sort of amused by her more than anything else.

  “Okay,” Jayden said. “So where are we putting this ironic tattoo anyway?” Kenzie lifted up her shirt, showing off the narrow plank of her perfect abdomen, accented with a twinkling teardrop-shaped belly-button piercing.

  “Here.” She pointed to the small hollow beneath her rib cage.

  “The definition of irony is when what you say and what you mean are completely opposite,” said Tino, stretching out on the couch. “So you could describe the tattoo as campy, maybe. But it’s not ironic.”

  Kenzie stared at him for a long time.

  “Yeah, well, the definition of ghetto is you,” she finally declared.

  “Good one.”

  I stared down at my phone, fighting the sudden urge to laugh while Kenzie huffed over to the old office chair. She took off her leather jacket, draped it over the chair, and pulled her shirt over her head, lying back so that when she breathed, the two swells beneath her blue lace bra heaved up and down. After Jayden finished tracing the image onto her stomach, the needle buzzed to life. He leaned over and began boring into her skin with it, and I had to look away, unzipping my backpack and pulling out my homework.

  “What are you reading?”

  Tino had closed his book and was looking over at me expectantly. He was dressed in a fleece hoodie and track pants, and had sleepy brown eyes and skin the color of sun-warmed clay. His teeth were sort of crooked, but not in a bad way. He was, all in all, sort of disarmingly cute.

  “Oh,” I said, “just a book for my English class.”

  “What book?”

  “Othello.”

  “Nice.” He nodded approvingly.

  “Boring,” I said. “Have you read it?”

  “‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’” He sat up dramatically on the couch. “‘Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, it is the cause.’” He flopped back down, stretched one leg across the other and grinned at me. “Act five, scene two. You look surprised.”

  “A little,” I laughed.

  “Not so ghetto after all, am I?” He stood up, then, and lifted up his sweatshirt. Tattooed across one smooth pectoral muscle was Michael Jordan’s face. On the other was William Shakespeare’s.

  “Wow,” I said. “I guess you’re a fan.”

  “Basketball and literature are my passions. Hey, have you read any of the history plays?”

  “The history plays?”

  “Yeah. Henry the Fifth. Henry the Fourth. Richard the Third. The history plays.”

  “No. Where’d you learn so much about Shakespeare, anyway?”

  “I read some of his plays in school—I go to Lincoln. You know, that scary public school that all you ASH girls are freaking out about having to go to next year. But I read the rest on my own. I’m something of an autodidact.”

  I knew he was using that word to impress me, or to make me feel stupid for not knowing what it meant. I decided he was arrogant and that it was best to ignore him, although the image of his broad, tattooed chest was going to prove sort of difficult to stop thinking about. I purposefully turned to a new page and furrowed my brow in an attempt to look like I was engrossed in my Shakespeare. After a while, he got the hint. He picked up The Collected Stories of Anton Chekhov and turned to the page where he’d left off.

  “Hey, Wendy,” Kenzie demanded from the other side of the room above the dull buzzing sound of the needle, “Jayden doesn’t believe me. About your dad. Is he, or is he not Stephen Boychuck, aka Chicago’s most notorious police officer, aka the guy who shoved guns up people’s asses and Tasered people’s balls, aka the guy who’s in jail for, like, fifteen years?”

  I felt the blood rush to my face, remembering the moment when my arms were twisted behind my back, my scapular was ripped off my neck, and a girl whose father couldn’t walk or talk said Gut him like the pig he is.

  “Well?”

  “He’s Stephen Boychuck. Yeah.”

  “See?” She hit Jayden playfully on the arm. “I told you. You owe me five bucks.”

  I opened Othello, which had fallen closed in my lap, and paged absently, pretending to concentrate, but really just reading the same underlined line over and over again:

  Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.

  “Hey.” Tino’s voice was gentle. He’d moved down the couch and was sitting next to me. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I didn’t look up.

  “Why are you friends with that girl? She’s awful.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “She just humiliated you.”

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

  “But that’s so shitty!”

  “And you’re making it worse!” I moved away from him. “I don’t even know you. Just drop it, okay?”

  “Sorry.” He was quiet for a minute, while we both listened to the buzzing of the needle. “But seriously. I’m asking. Why are you friends with her? You don’t seem evil. So what do you two have in common?”

  I sighed, and tented my book on my lap. “Even if I wanted to explain it to you, you probably wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  “Wendy!” Kenzie’s voice, queenly and demanding, beckoned from the other side of the garage. “Come check it out!”

  Dutifully, I put away my homework and went over to the chair, where Jayden was wiping the fresh tattoo with a soapy cloth. Kenzie’s skin beneath the pink and blue ink was flaming and red, like someone had held an iron to it.

  “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

  “It’s exactly like the picture,” I said, which was neutral without being a compliment.

  She held her phone above her bare belly and began snapping pictures. When she was satisfied, she handed Jayden a wad of cash, then leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re a master, Jay. I love it.”

  “Do you L-O-V-E it or do you L-U-V it?” Tino asked.

  “Shut up, weirdo.” She turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  It was only late afternoon but already getting dark as we walked to the car. The leaves were still hanging on to the trees, and the small saplings planted along the parkway of Fullerton Avenue were a spindly riot of reds and oranges. They made the whole street look festive, despite its dreary façade of brick strip malls and auto body shops lined with stolen tires. A cold threat hung in the air, whispering at the long Chicago winter ahead.

  “What’s the story with that Tino loser?” Kenzie said when we got in the car. “I saw him pulling up his shirt like he thinks he’s got a hot body or something.”

  “He was showing me his tattoos,” I said. “He’s got one of Michael Jordan and one of William Shakespeare.”

  “William Shakespeare, like that old-ass writer?”

  “No, Kenz. William Shakespeare, the starting point guard on the Chicago Bulls.”

  “There’s a William Shakespeare
on the Bulls?”

  “No. I was just— Never mind.”

  While Kenzie proceeded to call Emily and Sapphire and babble on and on about her latest ink, I drove back to our neighborhood slowly, absently, thinking about Tino’s question and the conscious choices I’d made after David Schmidt’s graduation party that had led me to where I was today: totally popular and totally miserable.

  6

  A LITTLE OVER TWO YEARS EARLIER, on my first day of high school, I was sitting in my assigned seat in the front row of Sacramental Journeys class, and this girl strolled in a full five minutes after the bell rang. You knew by the way she walked that she wasn’t late because she was just another clueless freshman who’d gotten lost on the way to seventh period, but because being on time was not a priority that she valued. She was wearing a pair of black spike-heel ankle boots paired with a uniform skirt that had been tailored to butt-skimming shortness. She clacked into the room, the heels making her stand just over six feet tall, and every single girl in that room, myself included, took a look at the dimensions of those never-ending legs and felt like a sucker and an unforgiveable dork for following the handbook rules with skirts no more than one inch above the knee. She had black hair and black eyes lined in black eyeliner and she was carrying a purse on a fake gold chain, holding her books and her pencil case under her arm, and when Sister Mary-of-the-Snows took a long, disapproving look at her skirt before directing her to her seat, then turned back to the syllabus she was reading off of, I saw the girl reach into her pencil case, pull out her phone, and check her lipstick—a shade of fuchsia that would have looked ridiculous on me, but on her looked perfect. By the time Sister Mary-of-the-Snows looked up, the girl had already put her phone back in her pencil case, but she hadn’t been rushing or secretive about it: she either didn’t know or didn’t care that, in the space of three minutes, she’d broken nearly every classroom rule the old nun had listed on the syllabus.

  Kenzie Quintana was the type of girl who couldn’t be invisible if she tried—but don’t worry, she didn’t try. And I knew right then that if I was going to remake myself in the image I had in mind, I had to become her friend.

  It took me a while. Girls like Kenzie Quintana don’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the nobodies of the world. But that’s the thing: I wasn’t exactly a nobody anymore. I was a somebody, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. A couple days into the school year, Kenzie fell into step next to me as I walked down the hallway to Sacramental Journeys.

  “You’re the girl, right?” she said.

  “What girl?”

  “The girl with the dad who’s in jail.”

  “I’m sure there’s more than one of us,” I said.

  “At this place?” she laughed, waving an arm at the wall of saints curving over our heads on either side. “Please. Everybody here is a nun in training.”

  I didn’t say anything, but kept walking. I desperately wanted to talk to her. Just not about this.

  “So is it true he singed off some guy’s pubes with a curling iron?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Waterboarded?”

  “No.”

  “Chopped off fingers?”

  “No.”

  “Cattle prodded a guy in the balls?”

  I hesitated.

  “No.”

  She smiled at me. “I see how it is,” she said. “You still believe he’s a good guy just because he’s your dad. Don’t worry, you’ll figure out the truth sooner or later. Like me. I haven’t seen my mom since I was eleven. She ran off to the Florida Keys with a real estate developer named Luciano.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” She threw herself into her seat and adjusted her knee-high socks into place. “After she abandoned us, me, my sisters, and my dad moved in with my grandma. She’s crazy and senile and she doesn’t even speak English. I do whatever I want now.”

  I thought, now that we had commiserated over our messed-up lives, that we were on our way to becoming friends. But Kenzie didn’t acknowledge my existence again until October, when Sister Mary-of-the-Snows, bless her heart, paired us up for a project about sacramental rites, and Kenzie invited me over one Saturday to work on it.

  Whenever guests used to come over to our house, my mom always apologized for the “mess,” meaning, usually, a neat stack of mail on the little end table in the foyer that hadn’t been put away. When Kenzie’s grandma opened the door, wearing a stained velour tracksuit and one of those baseball hats with a big fake ponytail tumbling out the back, she didn’t apologize for anything—not the cat hair sifted in piles on the stairs, the tangle of shoes piled up in the hallway, the gallon of milk that someone had forgotten to put away dripping sweat on the kitchen table still covered with breakfast dishes. She just smiled at me, gestured up the stairs, and padded away in her pink fuzzy slippers.

  The bedroom Kenzie shared with her three younger sisters was a loft that took up the entire top floor of the bungalow where they lived. The room was an absolute disaster—mountains of clothes exploding from the closet; a jumble of bras hanging on the doorknob; hair dryers, belts, headbands, books, and magazines strewn across the matted, stained carpet; and a giant vanity table scattered with paper plates of mummified pizza crusts and every makeup product Cover Girl has produced in the last ten years. The walls were covered in tie-dyed blankets and boy-band posters, the kind you fold out of teenybopper magazines, and the unmade beds were piled with faded, mismatched sheets and pillows so old they were practically flat. I’d always been happy to have my own room, and content with my one brother, but standing here in the middle of this girl zone, I wanted a sister so badly that it ached.

  We didn’t make much headway on our project. For one thing, Kenzie’s ten-year-old sister, Gloria, had just mastered the art of fishtail braiding and wanted to practice on me over and over again. For another, Kenzie discovered that twelve-year-old Dalia had been “borrowing” her thong underwear, an argument that began with a screaming match and ended with Kenzie using her gym lock to padlock her underwear drawer shut. The TV was on, music was blaring, and seven-year-old Marissa was flying around the room, maniacally turning cartwheels. Not exactly optimal study conditions. We created our title page and changed the font around a few times until it looked pretty, but then Kenzie’s dad called up the stairs that he had ordered pizza, and the project was forgotten.

  We ended up finishing in the computer lab at lunchtime, an hour before it was due. It was total crap, and we got an F (the first and last F for me, the first of many Fs for Kenzie). That made us feel persecuted, and persecution can form an instant bond: our friendship was sealed.

  During the first semester of their freshman year, girls change lunch tables more often than they wash their uniform skirts. Up until my Sacramental Journeys project with Kenzie, I had been sitting with a couple bland, studious girls from my honors English seminar who, by some strange miracle, seemed not to have any clue who my father was. Alexis, I had noticed, sat alone. It made me feel horrible, watching her sit there bowed over her turkey sandwich, knowing that her mom had peeled the skin off the edges of the turkey and sliced the bread in a diagonal because that made it feel fancier than straight across. And I understood that she saw me, knowing that I drank my Dr Pepper with a straw because I’d heard it would prevent my teeth from getting stained, and that the only sandwich cheese I could stand to eat unmelted was provolone. Even though I had cut her out of my life, the intimate details of Alexis’s Alexis-ness remained with me, like an aftershock from the earthquake of what I’d done to her.

  One fall afternoon a couple days after our disastrous sacramental rites project, Kenzie stopped me on the way out of seventh period.

  “I saw you at lunch today,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I saw you, too.” Which was sort of stating the obvious, because our school population was so tiny that sometimes there’d only be twenty or thirty girls to a lunch period; everybody saw everybody all day lo
ng, which was the best part of ASH or the worst, depending on your perspective.

  “Who were those girls you were sitting with?”

  “Um, Mary Bridget Kearns and Lisette Crawford?”

  “Lisette who?”

  “Craw—”

  She waved a French-manicured hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter, and you should be eating lunch with people who do. Come sit with me and my friends tomorrow. You’ll have a lot more fun. Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  I didn’t even hesitate. It was what I’d been waiting for.

  The next day, as I put my lunch tray down at the table with Kenzie and Emily and Sapphire, I could feel Alexis watching me. Kenzie, who was slurping a Diet Coke and pawing through a giant bag of cheese puffs, held court at the table, talking about this fucking guy and that fucking bitch and did you ever notice that when Mr. Winters sits on his desk you can see the outline of his ball sack and God, I wish there were boys here and who cares if you didn’t read A Raisin in the Sun, there’s only, like, twenty different movie versions on Netflix and it’s not like you couldn’t bullshit your way through Ms. Lee’s tests anyway, while the rest of us laughed and agreed.

  When Alexis finally leaned down to her backpack and pulled out her headphones, I was relieved. Part of me wanted to ask her for forgiveness while the other part just wanted to punch her. Find some new friends! I imagined myself screaming. It’s not that hard! But then, a couple weeks later, when she finally gave up waiting for me to come back to her and found some, I felt irrationally jealous. Now it was Marlo Guthrie and Ola Kaminski’s turn to know about Alexis, about her diagonal-cut sandwiches and the way she listened to music with her eyes closed and pulled on her earlobes when she was nervous. Maybe she’d even take them to O’Hare Airport and tell them about her dream to play at the Vienna Philharmonic. Like I even care, I thought to myself, turning back to my new friends, all the while knowing that’s exactly what you say to yourself when you still care.

  7

  A COUPLE WEEKS AFTER THE I LUV BOYS tattoo, my mom had the night off for once, so we made plans to hang out on the couch and watch movies. But then word got out that Evan Munro’s cousin’s parents were out of town. I tried to say I didn’t really feel like partying, but my friends were having none of it.