Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  The next afternoon, I carried my tray to the same empty table and sat down, spreading out my things like it was totally normal and not at all awkward. I had barely cracked open my Dr Pepper when Kenzie called out across the cafeteria: “Let me guess: more Spanish homework?”

  Alexis was sitting at her table a few rows behind me with Ola and Marlo and a couple other orchestra girls. Don’t go, Wendy, I could feel her thinking. Show me you can be better than them.

  Our Lady of Lourdes, I prayed, please let me be brave. Let me be good. Let me stand up to her. In the silence that followed while I waited for some kind of sign, Kenzie picked up her bag of cheese puffs and her Diet Coke. She shook out her hair, stood up, and walked toward me, her micro-mini uniform skirt swishing ominously. Sapphire and Emily gathered up their lunches and followed her.

  When she got to my table, Kenzie yanked out an empty chair, sat down across from me, and cracked open her pop.

  “Okay,” she said. “If there’s something wrong with that table, then we’ll come to you.”

  “Um,” I said. Then my tongue turned into paper. I’d used up the little courage I had on my long march across the cafeteria to this table for one and now I had none left. I suddenly understood what Sister Dorothy meant when she’d told us once that the right thing is always the hardest thing.

  For the rest of the lunch period, it was as if nothing had changed, at least outwardly. I heard all about Kenzie’s new boyfriend, an older guy named Gabe, who was a semiprofessional DJ and had his own apartment in Logan Square. I heard about the sick New Year’s party he’d had there, at which Emily had vomited all over his vintage record player and Sapphire had hooked up with an Italian exchange student named Alessio who wore decorative scarves and had never eaten a hot dog.

  “So, are you still grounded or what?” Kenzie finally asked.

  “Um, yeah,” I said, concentrating on the little air holes in my sandwich bread.

  “For how much longer?”

  “My mom didn’t really say. At least another couple weeks.”

  “God, your mom’s a bitch.”

  I winced. Tino was right: Kenzie really was evil. I felt like grabbing her pink bendy straw and poking her mascara-fringed eyes out with it. “Yeah,” I said instead. “She really is.”

  16

  IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, I tried to make myself as invisible as I possibly could. I picked up extra shifts at the deli, not just for the money but to keep myself unavailable on the weekends. I turned my phone off whenever I could, and let my voice mailbox fill up so that Kenzie couldn’t leave me any messages. But I couldn’t pretend to be grounded for the rest of my life, and eventually I ran out of excuses for avoiding my friends. When that happened, my pathetic rebellion ended, and things returned to the way they used to be: rolling through the hallways four across with my clique, sitting together at lunch, partying together on the weekends, pretending, acting, and secretly disappointing all the people I actually cared about—Alexis, my aunt Kathy, Tino, and most of all, myself.

  In March, Sister Dorothy made an announcement during homeroom that she would be canceling classes the following Monday to organize a shadow day at Lincoln. The idea was to give us all a window into what our new public school lives were going to be like. Everybody signed up except for Kenzie, whose dad had found out she was dating a twenty-three-year-old semi-professional DJ, and was now taking the day off work to drive her up to Cherrywood Academy: a Therapeutic Boarding School for Troubled Young Women just, as he said, “to check out our options.”

  My first taste of the new stresses of public school was choosing what to wear. Ever since kindergarten, my daily outfits had been chosen for me by the nice people at Schoolbelle’s Catholic Schoolwear Company, whose eye for fashion had always been a predictable blend of plaid, pleats, and Peter Pan collars. Now, standing before my open closet, I was paralyzed with freedom. The look I was going for was cute but not cutesy, trendy but not edgy, expensive-looking but not actually expensive, sexy but not slutty. In the end, I was so overwhelmed that I ignored Sapphire’s advice to go for something “timeless” like an elastic crop-top and high-waisted floral leggings, and showed up for my first day of public school in jeans and a plain black T-shirt.

  Sister Dorothy had instructed us to meet in the glass lobby of Lincoln at seven a.m. sharp, to give her time to assign us our shadow partners for the day. We trickled in one by one, trying to act casual, sizing up one another’s clothes. Because I’d spent most of high school with my head stuck up Kenzie’s ass, I’d never hung out with most of my classmates outside of school before, so it was weird seeing them dressed in normal street clothes. One look around made it clear that I wasn’t the only one who’d spent hours deciding what to wear; most of us had tried way too hard, and it showed. Veronica the Vegan was dressed in a long, shapeless hemp skirt and a crown of plastic flowers on her head; she looked like she’d made a wrong turn on her way to a folk music festival. Ola Kaminski, usually modest and sensible, had on a sweater so tight and a bra so padded she looked like she was carrying around two Nerf footballs beneath her shirt. Marlo Guthrie wore an inexplicable pair of riding breeches that gave her a bad case of camel toe. Only Sapphire and Emily looked confident in their tight jeans and high tops, except for the fact that they were wearing the exact same outfit. I was happy I’d gone the safe route, but as I looked around at the public school kids who were beginning to flood the entrance, whose fashion sense had been honed by years of this kind of freedom and who looked far more effortlessly cool than any of us, my confidence rapidly deflated. My hands, feeling fluttery and awkward, reached instinctively for the pockets of my ASH cardigan, but found nothing but the thin fabric of my T-shirt.

  “This doesn’t even feel like a school,” Emily said, her voice soft and almost reverential as she looked around the lobby with her darting, gossip-greedy eyes. “It’s like—like the movie set of a school.”

  I knew what she meant. As we milled around the sun-filled lobby in our specially chosen clothes, waiting for our guides to pick us up, we did our best not to seem amazed by Lincoln High. In addition to the total absence of religious icons, there was a set of bright green couches situated beneath the skylights. Couches! In a school! Where kids were actually allowed to sit! On one of them, a boy in ripped-up jeans was lounging, legs splayed, peering at his iPad, while a girl with long braids lay with her head on his lap, catching a little snooze before first period. Her head was on his lap. Mere inches from his package. And the yawning security guard—a real security guard, not just a nun with a walkie-talkie—at the front desk didn’t even seem to care. It was incredible.

  Sister Dorothy had handpicked a Lincoln girl for each of us to shadow, based on our extracurriculars, our class schedules, and our GPAs. But when I approached her for check-in, she informed me that my partner was out sick with the stomach flu.

  “So you’re going to have to double up with someone. I’m putting you with Alexis Nichols, since she’s also an honors student.” She peered at me over her reading glasses with those crafty old eyes. “Does that sound all right, Ms. Boychuck?”

  I had no doubt in my mind that Sister Dorothy had done this on purpose. It was as if she knew, by some strange form of nun telepathy, what had gone down between me and Alexis and Kenzie. I was willing to bet that my assigned partner didn’t even have the stomach flu. In fact, there probably was no assigned partner in the first place. But I knew better than to argue with a Sacred Heart nun.

  One by one, ASH girls were met at the security desk by their Lincoln counterparts and walked off together chattering to one another like nervous blind dates. I felt a weight lift off my shoulders as first Emily disappeared down a hallway with her guide, then Sapphire. When they’d turned the corner, and I saw that Sister Dorothy was still eyeing me over the rim of her glasses, I walked over and sat down next to Alexis on one of the green couches. As soon as she saw me coming, she pulled on her headphones and began to blast her classical music so loudly there was no
possible way she could ever hear me try to say hello.

  The bell rang for first period, but Alexis and I had still not been picked up. As we sat there in the now-empty lobby, I decided that I might as well make the best of the situation. I poked her and she glared at me, plucking a headphone from her left ear.

  “What?”

  “Do you know that listening to music that loud damages your stereocilia?”

  “My what?”

  “Your stereocilia. The little hairs in your inner ear that help with hearing.”

  Rolling her eyes, she snapped her headphone back into place. I poked her again.

  “What?”

  “I’m just trying to help you out.”

  “I’m not deaf.”

  “No, not yet. But you will be, if you don’t turn that crap down.”

  “This ‘crap’”—Alexis glared—“is Tchaikovsky.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve been listening to those headphones nonstop since at least fifth grade. You’re going to be deaf by the time you’re forty.”

  She sighed, lifted off the headphones, and placed them in her lap.

  “Happy?”

  I smiled. “Very. You’ll thank me when you’re older.”

  Alexis, shaking her head, reached into her backpack and pulled out a Moleskine notebook. When she opened it, I saw that it wasn’t lined like a regular school notebook but with musical bars. All over the page, written in light pencil, were notes and musical notations, as foreign and fascinating to me as hieroglyphics.

  “Do you write music?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.” She didn’t look up.

  “I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew you played. You’ve always played. But I didn’t know you wrote your own stuff.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me anymore, Wendy.” She positioned her left arm so that I couldn’t see what she was doing, and then lifted her pencil to the paper.

  “Listen,” I said, deciding that maybe the direct approach was best, “if you want to get through this day without it being totally awkward, you’re gonna have to talk to me.”

  Alexis threw her pencil into the margin of the notebook and snapped it shut. “I don’t think what you’re feeling is awkwardness, Wendy. It’s guilt.”

  Before I could respond, a tiny girl with red cowboy boots and an enormous bun of tight black curls came running breathlessly toward us. She was carrying an instrument case of pebbled black leather on her back.

  “Sorry, you guys! It’s my idiot carpool driver. Who stops at Starbucks when there’s five minutes before the first bell? Like, do you really need your mocha-frappa-whatever so bad that it’s worth a detention?” Her quick, bright eyes moved back and forth between us. “Which one of you is Alexis Nichols?”

  “That’s me,” Alexis said.

  The girl stuck out her hand. “I’m Edie. Your guide for today.”

  “You’re a cellist?”

  “I try to be,” Edie said, jabbing a thumb toward the heavy case on her back. “We’ll see if Juilliard agrees.”

  “Juilliard?” This was the closest I’d ever heard Alexis come to squealing with excitement. “Are you really auditioning for Juilliard?”

  “Who’s Juilliard?” I asked.

  “It’s only the best music school on the planet,” Edie said, looking at me like I was a complete ignoramus. “It’s like Harvard for musicians.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway,” Edie said as she began leading us down a hallway papered with advertisements for unfathomable extracurriculars like Poetry Slam Team, Break Dancing Society, Horror Movie Club, and Gay-Straight Alliance Network, “you basically have to audition to audition. My orchestra teacher helped me submit an audio recording for the prescreening. I find out at the end of the month whether they’ll invite me to New York. They only invite, like, one percent of people to even come and audition, so it’s a long shot.”

  “What did you play for your audio recording?” Alexis asked excitedly.

  “I went with Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo and the Saint-Saëns cello concerto, but only the second and third movements, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” Alexis glanced over at me. I could tell that she was enjoying the fact that I had no idea what the hell she and Edie were talking about, and I couldn’t say I blamed her. It was payback for all the conversations she’d surely overheard at our lunch table over the years, with Kenzie’s expert lectures about boys and blow jobs and booze.

  “What about you?” Edie said, turning back to look at me as her cowboy boots clunked across the slick linoleum. “Do you play?”

  “An instrument?” I asked.

  “No, varsity badminton,” Edie laughed. “Yes, an instrument.”

  “I mean, I took piano lessons for a little while,” I said. “I can play ‘Chopsticks’ and a couple Christmas carols.”

  “Oh.” Edie looked disappointed. “Well, you’re gonna be pretty bored today. I completed most of my state requirements as an underclassman. First period I have AP Lit, and fifth period is AP Bio, but other than that it’s pretty much music electives all day long.”

  “For real?” Alexis’s eyes were wide. “We only have one orchestra class at ASH. I’m stuck in there with freshmen who still play on training violins!”

  “Well, not today you’re not! I’m sure Mr. Fleming will let you play with us in Advanced Strings. Did you bring your violin?”

  “I don’t actually have my own violin right now,” she said, her eyes flitting in my direction. “I’m using a loaner from my teacher until I get a new one.”

  “Well, that’s no problem. We’ve got a couple practice ones in the band room you could borrow.”

  “I can’t wait to come here next year,” Alexis giggled and linked her arm through Edie’s elbow. “What did you say your last name was?” And the two of them headed off down the hallway together while I trailed behind, feeling like a moron, but also grudgingly admitting to myself that I was sort of happy for her.

  We walked into Edie’s AP Lit class, a large, modern space with windows that overlooked a soccer field and a Smart Board hanging in the front of the room. Before I could get over my amazement that the teacher taking attendance at the front of the room was wearing jeans, I noticed a dark-eyed boy in sweatpants and a zip-up track jacket.

  Tino.

  He didn’t see me at first; he was slumped over his desk and glaring into a paperback copy of Native Son. When he finally looked up and saw me, he seemed startled and then—but maybe I was just imagining this—happy. He tented the book on his desk, gave me a little wave, and smiled this smile that turned up only a corner of his mouth in a way that made my heart feel like a glass jar with a glowing firefly flitting around inside of it.

  The class was discussing Heart of Darkness, which I’d never read, so it was hard to find it interesting. In fact, the most interesting thing about the class was the back of Tino’s head, which I was able to stare at now that it was unobscured by a hat. I have to say, it was a very nice-looking head: proportionate, shapely ears, and neatly groomed hair that shone black in the fluorescent track lighting of the classroom. He didn’t participate in the discussion, but I could tell by the tense, still way he held his shoulders that he was listening to every word. I was studying him so closely that when the bell rang and he stood up and began to walk toward me, the shock I felt was the same you might feel if you’re admiring a statue in a museum and it suddenly comes to life.

  “So,” he said, pointing at my backpack. “You got a tub of dumpling soup in there or what?”

  “Sorry,” I laughed. “I didn’t know I was gonna see you today.”

  “But that’s the whole point, Wendy.” He leaned on the desk so his body was angled irresistibly toward mine. “You’re supposed to carry it around just in case you run into me.”

  “I don’t think that would be very sanitary considering we’re talking about a cream-based soup that requires refrigeration,” I shot back. “The last thing I want to do is give you fo
od poisoning.”

  “Well, in that case, I appreciate you looking out for me. I forgive you.”

  “You’re welcome.” God, I loved flirting with him.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I, unlike you, have been carrying something around in my bag just in case I were to run into you again. And luckily for you, it isn’t even perishable.”

  Just like that, my flirty persona abandoned me and I stood in front of him, tongue-tied, staring anxiously at his backpack.

  “You like to read, right?”

  I hesitated for a moment before remembering that Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily weren’t around, that I was standing in an AP Lit class in a high school filled with thousands of strangers. I could be as smart as I wanted to be and it didn’t matter.

  “I love to read.” It felt so good to just say it, like a dirty secret I was finally getting off my chest.

  “Good.” He rummaged around in his bag and pulled out a battered copy of a paperback novel.

  “You ever read Hemingway?”

  I shook my head. “I mean, I’ve heard of him, obviously.”

  “You’ve gotta try this. A Farewell to Arms. It’s some dark, dark shit. But it’s some beautiful, moving shit.”

  “Cool.” I took the book from him and flipped through the well-worn pages. Some of them were dog-eared, others threaded with neat underlining. “What’s it about?”