“Well,” I finally said, “why didn’t you come in and say hi?”
“I was going to, but you were kinda busy. I was gonna buy some of that homemade dumpling soup they got. You ever had that soup?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“It’s superb.”
I laughed. “Well, it’s one of our bestsellers. The old Polish ladies line up in the mornings, after mass, to buy these big tubs of it.”
“What do they put in there? They got a secret ingredient or something?”
“I don’t do the cooking,” I explained. “I just work the deli counter. But the owners, Alice and Maria, they’ve got some recipes that have been passed down for, like, generations.”
“Man, I could go for some of that dumpling soup right now. It’s so much better than this crap.” He held up a wilted french fry.
“Well, you should have told me that. I get a fifty percent discount. I could’ve brought you some.”
“Dammit.” He shook his head. “But wait. How could I have asked you to bring me dumpling soup if I don’t have your number?”
Up until now, I’d been starting to relax, a new feeling for me when talking to a cute boy. But now I froze. I mean, was this him asking me for my number? Was I now supposed to offer it? Well, I was not going to do that. I’d been burned before.
“I guess I should just start carrying a tub of it around in my backpack, in case I run into you,” I said instead. I thought for a minute that I saw his face fall, but it was hard to tell in the dim red-and-green glow of the garage and his hat pulled down low.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “it may have been a shitty day at Target, but hey, now I’m sitting here having a nice conversation with a beautiful topless woman, so I guess things could be worse.”
Beautiful. Did he just call me beautiful?
“Can you try to relax, Wendy?” Jayden interrupted. “You’re, like, trembling all of a sudden.”
“Sorry.” If a person could die from blushing so hard that all the blood in their brain rushes to their face, I would definitely no longer be alive.
“So,” Tino said, spinning back and forth in his wheelie chair and knitting his fingers behind his neck, “he’s a real piece of shit, isn’t he?”
“What?” I looked at him, the giddiness of the previous moment immediately replaced by another, more familiar feeling. “I mean, you don’t even know him. Being a cop is one of the hardest jobs—”
“What? No!” He shook his head. “I’m not talking about your dad. You know, paranoia is a real medical condition, Wendy. I’m talking about Iago.”
“Iago?” I said dumbly.
“Yeah. Like, one of the worst characters in all of literature.”
“Oh.” The relief gushed out of me like a deflating balloon. “You’re talking about Othello. Sorry.”
“I mean, aside from being totally racist, he was just conniving and evil and awful. You know who he reminds me of, actually?” He turned his hat backward so that now I could finally see his eyes clearly. “That friend of yours.”
“She’s not my friend anymore.” Even as I said it, I realized that this was only true in my head. It was going to be a lot harder to make it true in real life. It was one thing to blow off Kenzie’s texts, to pretend I was grounded as an excuse for why I couldn’t hang out. But I knew that once we got back to school, I would have to face her and Emily and Sapphire head on. I would have to find the courage to walk away.
“So,” Tino said, “you finally saw the light?”
“I finally saw the light.”
“I’m glad.”
I smiled.
“Me too.”
By the end of the third hour, evening had fallen and the golden purity of the pain had given way to a yellow agony that didn’t clear my mind so much as muddle it. I couldn’t talk to Tino anymore. I just had to focus on the pain. He went over to the couch and read his book, while I began to concentrate on not passing out or barfing. The smell of Suzy’s Red Hots hung in the air, a pungent mix of au jus and fries, except now, instead of making me hungry, it was starting to make me nauseated.
“Almost done,” Jayden reassured me over the buzzing needle, as if he could feel the tension through my skin. Finally, when I was at the point of abandoning my pride and flat-out begging him to stop, the pressure eased, and the needle snapped into silence. Jayden called Tino over to check out his handiwork.
“Pretty dope, huh?” he said.
Tino didn’t say anything. I didn’t take that as a very good sign.
Jayden took a picture of my shoulder with my phone and brought it around to show me. All I saw was an expanse of pink, swollen skin. I couldn’t even get a good look at the tattoo itself because blood was seeping from my pores as quickly as he could blot it away.
“The blood and stuff is normal,” Jayden said. “This is a real operation. Clean. Professional. Tell your friends.”
I tried to answer him, but found that I couldn’t speak. Black spots were worming across my vision, like my eyes had become lava lamps, and I sat slumped in the chair with my face pressed against the damp stickiness of the headrest, waiting for the feeling to pass.
“Hey.” Tino’s voice was soft and close by. “Take it easy. Let me help you.” Jayden sauntered out to the alley for a cigarette while Tino took his place on the little wheelie stool. With as much gentleness as my mom’s nurse’s touch, he began patting the A+D Ointment onto my skin.
“I guess I’m just a wimp,” I murmured.
“Nah.” I felt his gentle fingers, the goodness of him, even through the aching of everything else. “The first one is always the hardest. My William Shakespeare nearly killed me.”
He reached to the floor and picked up my bra.
“Lift up your arms,” he instructed. “I’m not going to look, okay?”
“Okay.”
Somehow, he managed to loop the bra straps around my shoulders and hook them closed over the gauze while keeping his eyes squeezed shut the whole time. Then he helped me with my shirt. Finally he stuck out his hand. I put mine in his, and he pulled me to my feet.
“Does it look all right?” I asked. “Be honest.” His eyes, I noticed, were the color of brown velvet. Not flashily gorgeous, like the flinty copper of Darry’s, but softer, kinder. They seemed to absorb light, not reflect it, and they had a pattern of lighter brown threaded throughout, like honeycomb.
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” he said. “It’s not Jay’s best work ever, okay? But, I mean, it’s still hard to say. You’re going to have to let it heal before you can really get a sense of it. You’re going to have to see the final product.”
I followed him out into the alley on shaky legs.
“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t you let me walk you to your car?”
“Okay.”
I leaned on his shoulder as we picked our way through the slushy potholes in the alleys and back out onto Fullerton Avenue. We didn’t talk, but I didn’t feel the need to fill our silence with nervous chatter, the way I usually did.
“So,” he said when we arrived at Red Rocket.
“So,” I said.
We looked at each other.
“You’ve gotta come back in a couple weeks and get it finished, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. So I’ll probably see you then?”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Bye, Wendy.” He brushed his hand on the arm of my coat. I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t know how. He put his hands in his pockets and disappeared back down the alley.
When I got home, the apartment was dark. My mom was at work as usual. She’d left a plate of cold ham and baked beans under plastic wrap on the counter. Just below me, Sonny was blasting AC/DC, the album he listened to when he was getting himself pumped for a night on the town. I left the plate of ham untouched, locked myself in the bathroom, removed my shirt, and gingerly unpeeled the bloody, sticky gauze to examine the tattoo. I craned my
neck around and, when I saw it clearly in the mirror, I felt a rising panic in my gut.
The face of Our Lady of Lourdes was drawn with rough black lines, thicker in some places than others, like when I’m trying to take notes in class but my mind wanders and my pen, held in place for too long, bleeds blots of ink on my paper. Absent of color, its face looked more like that of a demon woman in serious need of an exorcism than the mother of Jesus appearing to a young French girl in a grotto. Its eyes were unnaturally large and round, pupil-less, and seeping little dots of blood through my aching pores. It watched me watch it, silent, dead-eyed, unholy.
I just barely made it to the toilet, painting the bowl with a yellowish mess of the potato pierogies I’d eaten for lunch. Then I lay on the cool tiles, splayed on my stomach, until the nausea passed. Slowly, I rewrapped the wound with gauze and changed into a loose sweatshirt that wouldn’t stick to my skin, then flopped onto my bed and opened my laptop, desperate to think about anything but the thing I’d tattooed across my shoulder. I fiddled around on social media for a little while before tapping into my email. That’s when I saw something that made me want to puke all over again.
A PRISONER FROM THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS HAS SENT YOU AN EMAIL. TO ACCEPT, CLICK THE LINK BELOW.
IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE CONTACTED BY INMATE STEPHEN BOYCHUCK, PLEASE CLICK HERE.
This was not shaping up to be a very good day.
My dad had sent me various cards and letters since his imprisonment, for Christmas and Valentine’s Day and my birthday. Whenever I saw my name printed in those small, neat capital letters and the Nebraska postmark, I threw the mail away unopened. So I don’t know why I opened the email now, even though my fingers had turned into gummy worms and my heart slammed in my chest. But I did, and there in front of me were words written by my father, the first words I was allowing him to speak to me in over two years.
Hi honey,
How’s my girl?
So, they have this new program where you can email for 5 cents a minute (better type quick, I guess, haha!). If you’re reading this, it means that you agreed to read my letter, and that makes me so happy. Mom says you’ve grown three inches, that you wear your hair down these days, that you’re even wearing mascara and rouge and all that other stuff I KNOW you don’t need because you’re perfect just the way you are (I know, I know, that might be the most “dad” thing anyone has ever typed).
Anyway. Things here are okay, I guess. The best word I can use to describe prison is BORING. When you kids were first born, people would tell us, with a new baby in the house the years are short but the days are long. That’s how prison feels. Except the years are long, too. And my babies aren’t here. So I guess it’s not the same at all.
One good thing, they have programs here to help us pass the time. I’ve started a painting class. I know what you’re thinking—the only thing I’ve ever painted is drywall. Remember when I tried to help you paint your dollhouse? And the job I did on the shutters? Yeesh. But still, I like it. It gives me something to do. And I’ve been reading, too. Probably more books than I’ve ever read in the rest of my life combined. I’m hoping that by the time I get out of here I’ll be smart, like my kids.
Well, anyway. Just thought I’d drop you a line. Remember the lyric from “Born to Run,” the one we named you for? Well, Wendy, I want you to know that I still love you with all the madness in my soul. And I’ll keep loving you, like the stubborn bastard I am, no matter how you feel about me. When it comes to your kids, love ain’t always a two-way street, you know? It goes and goes and goes, even if there’s no traffic coming in the other direction.
All my love,
Daddy
I closed my laptop, stood up, and paced around the apartment for a while. I wanted to call my mom, or Aunt Colleen, or Aunt Kathy. I wanted to call Alexis. I wanted to go out partying with Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily in something tight and skimpy, drinking beer until my stomach hurt and my head felt like a balloon. I wanted to grab Tino by the shoulders and kiss him until I forgot who I was.
But instead, I unwrapped the plate of ham and beans, warmed it up in the microwave, and ate my dinner alone at the kitchen table. When I was finished, I washed and dried my dishes, sat back in front of the laptop, and composed a very short reply to my father’s email.
Don’t ever contact me again. I won’t respond. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a father.
I hit send immediately, before I could change my mind.
During one of her many anti-war lectures, Sister Dorothy told us about the drone pilots whose job it is to attack targets in the Middle East from the safety of an American Air Force base. The way she described it was sort of like a video game where instead of seeing in real life the spray of blood, the torn-apart limbs, the screaming children and howling women and rubbled houses after an air strike, you watch your destruction onscreen, thousands of miles from the front lines. But, she said, the strange thing is, killing from afar doesn’t prevent those soldiers from getting PTSD, because they still have the knowledge of what they’ve done, without the honor of having risked their own lives to do it.
On a much smaller scale, sending a hateful email must feel a little like that. All you’re doing is sitting at a computer. All you’re doing is moving your mouse over the send button and clicking it. You don’t see the email zipping through the atmosphere. You don’t see the explosion in the recipient’s heart when they read what you’ve written. You believe that what you’re doing is necessary, even good, and yet after it’s done, even as soon as it’s done, the thought of that exploded heart begins to seep into your own heart, a cold, wet drip.
After I sent my dad that email, I felt great.
Five seconds later, I burst into tears.
15
AND SO CONTINUED THE LONELIEST CHRISTMAS break of my life. My mom was so busy working extra shifts at the hospital that I doubt she even noticed I spent pretty much the entire holiday either working or sitting on the couch. When I was at home, I spent most of my time examining my tattoo in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to get more and more hideous every time I looked at it. And that was the weird thing: even though just looking at it made me sick, I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was mesmerizingly horrible. Still, I felt it had its own dark power, and even after it was mostly healed I could still feel it pulsing, as if it had its own heartbeat.
I recognized that my belief in the power of my Our Lady of Lourdes tattoo might just be as superstitious and crazy as Aunt Kathy’s obsession with the ghost of Lady Clara. Still, when I walked into school on the Monday morning after Christmas break with her face hidden beneath my uniform blouse, I felt strong. I felt protected. As I gathered my books for my morning classes, the original Our Lady, painted above my locker, gazed down at me with that saintly half-smile, as if to say, Hey, I know your secret. And I’ve got your back.
I had made a promise to myself on New Year’s Eve, standing alone on our balcony wrapped in my thin peacoat and watching my downstairs neighbors blow off illegal fireworks in the parking lot behind our complex. High school might only make up five percent of my life, but for the next sixty-some years I had left, I was going to be better, starting right now.
How was I going to do it? My plan was pretty basic, actually. Every teenager knows that the cafeteria is the ground zero of social drama at any high school, the place where friendships bloom and die by the simple placement of a lunch tray. The first step for breaking free, I figured, was to stop sitting with Sapphire and Emily and Kenzie at lunch. It was simple, it was bold, and it was terrifying, not just because of how they would react, but because I didn’t have any other friends to fall back on. I’d done the math: In the eyes of 90.5 percent of my classmates, I was a bitchy, stuck-up stranger.
So much for popularity, huh?
When the fourth-period bell rang, I went down to my locker to get my lunch, lingering below the painting of Our Lady, praying for her to give me the strength to do this one small, hard thi
ng. I took a deep breath, walked into the cafeteria clutching my lunch bag in my fist, and, looking straight ahead, I found a table near the vending machines and sat down by myself. I pulled out my Dr Pepper and a leftover piece of strudel I’d brought from the deli and arranged it on my tray. Then I began pretending to work on my Spanish homework. I knew Alexis saw me. I could almost sense a tiny tunnel of hope opening in her heart that maybe I wasn’t a total and complete coward and consummate asswipe. Then I heard Kenzie’s voice, rich with confidence, peal across the vast linoleum plain of the half-empty cafeteria.
“Hey, Wendy! What are you, lost?”
I looked up at her. I could now feel not just Alexis, but the whole school watching me.
“I just have to catch up on some homework,” I mumbled.
“Homework? We just got back from break, dork! Get your ass over here. I have a new man and you need to hear about it.”
“I really have to get this Spanish project done,” I told her. I bit my lip, forcing myself to look her in the eye. She sucked some Diet Coke from her pink bendy straw, staring at me over the lid of the can.
“Your loss.” She shrugged finally, then turned back to her lunch table.
For the rest of the period, I ate my strudel, pretended to do my nonexistent homework, and listened to the conversations that hummed around me in the cafeteria. Girls talked about Christmas and New Year’s and boyfriends and sports and music and clothes and physics homework and Ms. Lee’s new pixie haircut. They traded sleeves of Oreos, bruised bananas, and ziplock bags full of Chex Mix. They worked on their math homework. They borrowed pencils and hair ties and ChapStick.
They were nice to one another.
I realized, as I sat there listening, that Academy of the Sacred Heart was full of kind, funny, genuine girls. Girls who would have accepted me no matter what my last name was. When I thought about how in five months this school would close forever and most of us would be swallowed up in the enormity of Lincoln High School and its labyrinthine hallways packed with 3,200 strangers, I felt tears spring to my eyes, mourning the losses of all the friends I’d never made. And when PE class came along, the last class of the day and the only one I shared with Kenzie, Emily, and Sapphire, I whispered to Sister Dorothy that I had period cramps and asked her if I could just have a study hall that day instead. She opened her mouth, prepared, most likely, to give me a lecture about how girls had been getting their periods since the beginning of time and if every woman felt the need to take the day off just because of a few cramps the world would cease to run. But when she saw the look on my face, the tears in my eyes, she relented and wrote me a pass to the library.
Neighborhood Girls Page 15
