“It’s a love story,” he said. “In Italy during World War I. There’s this American guy, Lieutenant Henry. And he’s in love with this English nurse named Catherine Barkley. You sort of remind me of her. The way I imagine her looking. She’s got blond hair that she wears pinned up all the time, and that day I first saw you at Jayden’s, you were sitting there on the couch, reading Othello with your blond hair all pinned up, and it made me think of Catherine Barkley.” My fingers unconsciously fluttered up to my ponytail. I thought back to that day. I’d probably pinned my hair up at work because I’d forgotten my hairnet at home and Maria had made me, citing the incident when Mrs. Janek had found a long, yellow strand in her beet salad. It felt strange, knowing he’d been watching me. Good strange.
“There’s this one part,” he went on, “where Lieutenant Henry takes out Catherine’s hairpins one by one. And then her blond hair falls down around them, and when he kisses her he says it’s like being in a tent, or behind a waterfall.”
“Oh,” I said faintly, grabbing onto the edge of the desk. My knees seemed to have stopped working.
“Hey, Wendy,” Edie said impatiently from the doorway. “We’ve gotta get to class.”
“Coming,” I said, willing my knees back into action.
“Anyway, let me know what you think sometime, okay?”
“Thanks.” I smiled. “I will.” I tucked the book under my arm and followed Edie out of the classroom, stepping in time to the sound of my heartbeat as I dreamed of tents and waterfalls. No offense, Our Lady of Lourdes, I prayed, but I think I’m going to love public school.
Like Edie promised, most of her other classes were music electives. There was AP Music Theory, Honors Orchestra, and Film Scoring, and that was just before lunch. In the afternoon, after a spirited discussion in AP Bio about whether genetics play a role in shaping human behavior, there was Music Composition and finally, Advanced Strings. In this class, Mr. Fleming, the white-goateed teacher, gave Alexis one of the training violins from a cubby against the wall.
“Play me a couple lines of something,” he told her, “so I can figure out how to fit you in for today.”
“Okay,” Alexis said. As the other kids in the class chatted or played with their phones or tuned their instruments, I watched as she placed the violin under her chin, held the bow in one hand and then this sort of stillness came over her. She closed her eyes, opened her lips, and began to play. As soon as she did, the stillness that had come over her seemed to spread out until it had entered every person in the room. The kids who’d been chatting fell silent and the ones who’d been looking at their phones let them hang, midtext, forgotten in their laps, and the ones who’d been tuning their instruments froze, and Alexis’s violin became the only sound in the whole room, in the whole world.
I, too, became a part of the stillness. Just as Alexis could take that piece of wood and make it live, it seemed to touch her back in the same way. The Alexis Nichols I knew was shy and gangly, a quiet girl with a halting voice and plain, wispy hair. But the moment she moved her bow across the strings of that borrowed violin, everything about her changed. She was bold and brave, splashy and erotic. She curled over the instrument, threw her head back, thrust her hips off her seat as the bow moved faster, the notes higher, and then she collapsed back against the chair, tears squeezing from her closed eyes, as the notes grew longer, wailing, aching. I’d never heard music this way before. It was more than music. It was like she was distilling life itself into sound.
I knew nothing about classical music or violins. But she wasn’t asking me to know. She was only asking me to feel. And I did, I did, I did.
I sat alongside Edie and her classmates and Mr. Fleming, who all watched her wordlessly, their jaws hanging open. Some of them had tears standing in their eyes. When she finished we all applauded, and a faint color spread on Alexis’s cheeks, not of embarrassment, but of the quiet pride that comes when you possess the power to turn yourself inside out, so that just for a moment, you wear your soul on the outside.
At the end of the day, after Edie and Alexis exchanged phone numbers and promised to get together over the summer and share audio clips of their performances, I sat down next to Alexis as we waited for the bus to arrive to take us back to ASH.
“What was that you played today?” I asked.
“Oh, it was the first movement of Violin Concerto in D minor, by Jean Sibelius.”
“Well, whatever it was, it was incredible.”
“Thanks.”
“No. You don’t understand. It was, like, incredible.”
She smiled a little. “Well, it ought to be. Violin is pretty much my whole life. And when I’m not practicing, I’m listening.” She held up the headphones. “If I get into Juilliard, then a little damaged stereocilia is worth it, don’t you think?”
“Forget Juilliard,” I laughed. “I say you’re ready for the Vienna Philharmonic.”
She looked at me, a look of shared memory, of the days we’d spent dreaming up our wild futures on the benches of Terminal Five.
“I didn’t know you remembered that.”
“Of course I remember it.”
A silence hung between us.
“Look,” I finally said, “I’ve been wanting to say something to you. When Kenzie trashed your violin, I should have stopped her. I mean, I should have tried harder to stop her.” What I wanted to say was, I get it now. I get what music means to you. It’s how you speak to the world. When she killed your violin, it was no different than if she had cut out your tongue. But instead I only added, “So I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
Alexis didn’t say anything. She fiddled with the cord of her headphones.
“So, are you going to get a new one? Your birthday’s next month, right?”
“Are you kidding me?” She threw the headphones back to her lap. “Do you know how much a violin costs? The one that your ‘best friend’ smashed into a million pieces was almost three thousand dollars. Do you really think my parents have the money to buy me a new one?”
“Did you tell them what happened?”
“No way.” She shook her head. “I told them I accidentally left it on the bus.”
“But why? Weren’t they mad at you?”
“Oh, they were furious. But if I told them what Kenzie did, they would have freaked completely. You know my mom, how overprotective she is. She would have stormed down to Sister Dorothy’s office and made a scene. Kenzie would have gotten expelled for sure.”
“You protected her? Why bother, after what she did to you?”
“Wendy, you don’t get it, do you?” She looked at me, her eyes steady and clear. “The night she wrecked my violin, I told her I wasn’t afraid of her. But that was a lie. Everyone’s afraid of her. Including you. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be friends with her anymore.”
“I have been trying to break away from her,” I said, crossing my arms tightly across my chest. “From all of them. Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily and the whole thing. It’s just harder than you’d think.”
The bus finally pulled in front of the school and Alexis stood up.
“You know what I think?” she asked as she pulled her headphones over her ears and headed toward the door.
“What?”
“Try harder.”
17
FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK, I couldn’t sleep. Friday came, and with it rumors of a massive house party in Wildwood, but I didn’t much feel like partying. I stayed home and watched Teen Mom 2, then climbed into bed and opened up A Farewell to Arms. When I turned to the first chapter, a little slip of paper fluttered out from between the pages. I picked it up and my heart quickened. Tino had written his name in neat black letters, and beneath it, his phone number. Grinning like an idiot, I programmed the number into my phone, just in case I ever worked up the nerve to actually call him. Then I picked up the book and began to read. As far as I could tell, it was just a lot of descriptions about rocks and trees and rivers and troops. T
here were soldiers drinking and talking about things I didn’t understand. There was no mention of Catherine Barkley. I wanted to text Tino and ask, Does it get better? But of course I didn’t have the guts. I gave up at the end of the second chapter and went to sleep. I slept for ten hours, but in the morning when my alarm went off and I dragged myself out of bed to get ready for work, I still felt exhausted. When I got to the deli, I made myself a piece of warm buttered bread with plum jam, my favorite, but could barely eat two bites. My stomach was in knots. My head pounded. My legs shook. I knew what it was: My guilt about Alexis’s violin was starting to make me physically sick.
At the end of my shift, I climbed into Red Rocket, drove to the bank, and deposited my paycheck into my college savings account as I always did on payday. I got back into the car, turned on the ignition, and sat there for a minute staring at the flashing neon sign for the Vape Emporium next to the bank. It was a gray day and the sky was clogged with heavy, inert clouds, the kind that threaten rain but never deliver. The faces of the people walking down the street were washed out and exhausted, everybody dreaming of summer.
I turned off the ignition. With a determined sigh, I climbed back out of Red Rocket, retraced my steps across the parking lot, into the bank, and back up to the teller’s counter.
“Did you forget something, ma’am?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to make a withdrawal.” I filled out the withdrawal slip and slid it across the counter. The teller looked at the number, raised an eyebrow, and opened her drawer. She counted out the bills in hundreds and fifties, put them in an envelope, and handed it to me.
“Would you like our security guard to escort you out to your car?” she asked. “That’s a lot of money to be carrying around with you.”
“No, thanks,” I said, suddenly unable to control a smile. “I got this.”
I sat in front of Alexis’s house with the car running and the fog steaming up the front windshield. It had been a long time since I’d been to that yellow brick bungalow on Menard Avenue, but everything was exactly as I remembered: the sour cherry tree in the middle of the front lawn, whose inedible fruit we had once picked and smashed into a red paint that we smeared into our palms because we wanted to make a blood oath of eternal friendship but were too scared to cut ourselves and draw real blood. I remembered the line of ferns that waved in the wind beneath her front window. When we played cops and robbers—I was always the cop, so I could be like my dad, and she was always the robber because it was the only role left—the ferns were always the place she hid, and when I asked her once why she didn’t hide somewhere new she said, “Because I always want you to be able to find me.”
I was hoping for some sort of sign that would make me change my mind. After all, what I was about to do was stupid and foolish and completely illogical. But as I sat in Red Rocket in front of Alexis’s house, these flooding memories only made me more determined. At last, I took the envelope containing $3,304.75—my entire college savings—and in careful block lettering so she wouldn’t recognize the handwriting, I wrote: ALEXIS NICHOLS VIOLIN FUND across the flap. Then, leaving the car running, I pulled my hood around my face, hurried up the walkway to her front door, dropped it in her mail slot and drove away before anyone could see me.
18
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME THAT my tattoo started itching. It had begun to scab over in places, and one night, I dreamed that I had fallen on top of a termite nest and couldn’t get up. I woke from the dream thrashing, my fingers clawing at my back and shoulder. This lasted for several unbearable days. In school, I would sit in class shifting uncomfortably in my desk, sweating, suffering, willing the bell to ring so that in the commotion of packing up backpacks and switching classes no one would notice me sticking my hands down the collar of my school blouse to scratch frantically.
Then the whole thing started to molt like snakeskin. At night, lying in bed, I would tear at it with my fingernails, accumulating a disgusting pile of scabs and skin flakes in the folds of my sheets and in the wasteland of missing socks between my bed and the wall. The scabs were colored with the top layer of my tattoo, and they came off like puzzle pieces of the face and shawl and halo of Our Lady of Lourdes. I made sure to pick them up and throw them in the outside garbage cans, not just because they were gross, but because I knew that if my mom ever decided to clean my room, she might put the pieces together and think she was witnessing a religious miracle.
That same week, too, just when I thought we had nearly made it to spring, Chicago lapsed into a deep freeze. The wind howled, buffeting our third floor apartment. The dirty snow left over from January and February blew across the parking lot of our complex, sticking to the cars already filthy with salt, and when the new snow fell, it was so hardened by the cold that it rattled against our windows like tossed handfuls of sand.
At school, I tried to keep my head down. I arrived just before first period began and left as soon as eighth period ended. I did my homework but never raised my hand in class. I wore a thick white T-shirt under my school blouse so that when we changed for gym, no one would see the strange depiction of Our Lady of Lourdes that reigned over my right shoulder like some demonic holy queen.
Alexis had told me I needed to try harder, and she was right, but I was still too afraid to have a full-on confrontation with Kenzie and company. I knew that if I tried to stop eating lunch with them again, they would just follow me to my new table the way they’d done before. So instead, with the passive-aggressive bravery of a lifelong coward, I stopped eating lunch with my clique, abandoned the cafeteria completely, and took to eating in the school library. It was a drafty, echoing room with cracked tile flooring and shelves full of moldy, outdated textbooks, tucked away in an abandoned corner of the second-floor arts wing. Sister Catherine, the sleepy, ancient librarian who presided over the pointless circulation desk, spent her days in a squeaky chair sewing Biblical proverbs into decorative pillows or flicking through the card catalog with her thin, shaky fingers. Behind a maze of dusty shelves, I discovered a heavy wooden table where I could eat my lunch in obscure quiet, drenched in the cold sunlight that flooded through the high, arched windows and watching a pair of brown mice scurry in and out of a hole in the plaster floorboards.
I was lonely and bored and sad pretty much all the time. The only thing, really, that made me feel good was imagining Alexis finding the money I’d left her. When I went to bed at night, I lay beneath the covers, and instead of daydreaming about Tino or Stanford or the big bathtub in my old house, I’d imagine Alexis taking a break from her practicing to come downstairs for a glass of orange juice, her white headphones blasting Tchaikovsky, and accidentally kicking the envelope with her socked foot. It would skitter across the front hallway and she’d walk over to pick it up. When she saw her name on the envelope, her curiosity would get the best of her and she’d forget all about the orange juice. She’d bring the envelope back up to her room where she would sit on her bed, tear it open, and fan out the bills in wonder. She would count them in order, from the hundreds all the way down to the coins, with a building sense of disbelief and elation. She’d scrutinize the envelope for some clue as to where it came from, but lacking anything there, she’d fall back on her pink bedspread and burst out laughing, thanking Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost and broken objects, for working in such mysterious ways.
On the weekends, I looked forward to the cozy monotony of the Europa Deli. I didn’t have to think. I just had to scoop and stir and serve and ring up, and being there, amid the smell of frying onions and the conversations in Polish and Russian and Bulgarian and the constant roar of the sausage grinder, my heart felt calm and my worries about school and life felt far away. But then, one frigid Friday evening toward the end of the deep freeze, as I stood behind the counter arranging cabbage rolls in the display case, the front door chimes tinkled and Kenzie walked in.
She wore a fake fur coat and a slouchy knit hat with an enormous fuchsia pom-pom on top that matched her g
loves and lipstick. The cold air had made her cheeks pink and her eyes gleam. She looked beautiful.
“Hey.” She smiled.
“Hey.”
“I was in the neighborhood and figured I’d stop by to grab some dinner.”
A queasiness gathered in my stomach. I knew how much she hated this place. Why was she here?
“I thought you said the food here was disgusting,” I said.
“When did I say that?” she asked innocently.
In a moment, I had my phone out of my apron and found the Instagram post from last fall. I held it in front of her:
Beet soup or murder scene? #EuropaDeli #nasty #worstjobever
She glanced at it for a moment and laughed lightly. “Well, you do have other stuff here besides beet soup, don’t you? That pine nut spinach salad doesn’t look totally putrid. Give me a small one of that.”
“All right.” I took a plastic container from a stack on top of the counter and slid open the glass door. As I began to scoop the salad with a long metal spoon, the door chime tinkled again, and this time Sapphire and Emily, dressed in variations of Kenzie’s winter outfit, walked in. They stood behind her, their arms crossed, smirks painted across their faces as they watched me work. My mouth went dry.
“So,” Kenzie said, watching me from the other side of the glass, “we need to talk to you.”
“Right now?” I tried to make my voice sound as breezy as I could. “I’m sort of working at the moment.”
“This will only take a minute.”
I placed the salad on the scale, then took the printed sticker and sealed the package with it.
“Okay,” I said, pushing it across the counter. “What is it?”
“Something’s been up with you lately,” Kenzie said. “Like all of a sudden you’ve got a problem with us.”
“A problem?” I played dumb, stalling for time. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the not sitting with us at lunch. The not answering your phone. The disappearing act on the weekends. You’ve never even met my new boyfriend.”
Neighborhood Girls Page 17
