Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Yeah,” Sapphire said. “Are you, like, mad at us about something?”

  I swallowed.

  “No,” I finally said. “I mean, I don’t know. It’s not that I’m mad at anyone. I’m just . . . it’s just that I—I can’t . . .” I trailed off.

  Kenzie opened her salad container, grabbed a plastic fork from the silverware tray next to the register, and stabbed at some spinach leaves. “Can’t what?” she asked, her mouth full.

  The itching of Our Lady of Lourdes started up then, all of a sudden. It took all my self-control not to shove my hands down my shirt and scratch till it bled.

  “I can’t be friends with you guys anymore,” I heard myself say. As soon as I said it, the itching stopped.

  “Can’t be friends with us anymore?” Sapphire’s voice was incredulous. The pom-pom atop her winter hat trembled indignantly.

  “It’s nothing, like, personal,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve sort of changed.”

  Sapphire’s and Emily’s mouths hung open in dumb fury, but Kenzie just laughed.

  “Wendy, we’re your best friends. You don’t get to break up with us like we’re some stupid boy you don’t like anymore.”

  “Well, actually, I guess I do.”

  “It’s that thing with that loser and her violin, isn’t it?”

  “Her name is Alexis,” I said quietly.

  “Alexis. Fine. Whatever. Look, Wendy, what do you want me to do? My dad’s all jazzed up about Cherrywood Academy. I might end up at some loony bin in the middle of a cornfield next year, and if I do, it’s her fault. And you think I should just let her get away with that?”

  “Well, see, I don’t think it’s her fault.” The tattoo on my back itched encouragingly. “I think it’s your fault.”

  Kenzie stepped forward now, close enough that I could see her tiny, perfect, unclogged pores and smell her peachy scent.

  “Okay. If this is how you want to be, fine. But just remember, Wendy, when I met you, you and your family were the enemy of this entire fucking city. High school could have been literal hell for you. It would have been, except that we came and rescued you. We made you. You’ve got a pretty fucking short memory.”

  “That will be three dollars and sixty-five cents,” I said, meeting her eyes. “For the salad.”

  She took a step back, stunned that her threat seemed not to intimidate me.

  “You can shove your three sixty-five,” she snarled. She lifted a finger and pointed it in my face. “And never forget, when someone disrespects me, I always hit back harder.”

  Then, with a squeak of her Uggs, she turned around and headed out into the frigid street, Sapphire and Emily hurrying behind her.

  I stood there, still holding the metal spoon, frozen in place until I felt a warm hand on my shoulder that for a second I believed belonged to Our Lady of Lourdes herself.

  “You showed her,” Alice said, hugging me to her pillowy body. “I’m proud of you. And don’t worry about the three sixty-five, either.”

  “Here,” Maria added, holding out a tray of apricot-filled cookies. “Have a kolaczki.”

  For the rest of my shift, the cold kept the customers away, and I leaned on the counter, reading A Farewell to Arms. Normally, this would have resulted in a scolding: If there was one thing Alice and Maria couldn’t stand, it was a person not earning her keep. Just because there were no customers didn’t mean I couldn’t be stocking or prepping or hosing down pans. But this one time, they let me read in peace.

  After I got off work, I drove straight to Jayden’s. I’d been putting off finishing my tattoo because it already looked so awful I was afraid that adding color would only make it worse. But now Kenzie’s threat dangled darkly in my mind. Just because I’d acted tough didn’t mean I actually was. In fact, I was completely terrified. I always hit back harder. Maybe if I got this tattoo finished, paid Our Lady this final act of devotion, she could protect me now the way she once protected Aunt Kathy on a Homecoming night decades ago.

  Even with the heat blowing full blast in Red Rocket, I couldn’t stop shivering the whole way to Jayden’s garage. I found some street parking, slipped and slid down the frozen alley, and was still shivering when I knocked on the door and it slowly yawned open. Tino stood before me, his hat pulled low, his hands in his pockets.

  “Well, well, well,” he grinned.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to wipe my nose as discreetly as possible.

  Jayden was sitting in the middle of the velveteen couch, his legs crossed and his ankle resting on his knee, enveloped in a giant plume of smoke and enjoying the last puffs of a thin, tightly packed joint.

  “I was wondering if you were ever gonna come back,” Jayden said sleepily, his eyes never leaving the TV. Then, he started giggling uncontrollably. Tino rolled his eyes.

  “I swear, if that dude ever needs a CAT scan, all the doctors are gonna find in his head is a big swirling cloud of smoke.”

  “Hey. I heard that.” The joint sizzled as Jayden took another long, crackling hit.

  “So,” Tino said, ignoring his cousin, “did you start A Farewell to Arms yet?”

  “I just finished Book One,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And, I thought you said this was supposed to be a love story.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Not as far as I can tell. First, there’s that awful scene where a guy gets his legs blown off while eating a piece of cheese, and then I find out that Lieutenant Henry is just another typical player.”

  “A player?”

  I reached into my bag, pulled out the book, and pointed to the folded-over page. “See? You even underlined it.”

  He moved closer to see the page and was now standing so close to me I could feel his warm breath on my neck as he read the words over my shoulder.

  I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards.

  “I forgot about that part,” he said.

  “I mean, there’s that nice scene where he’s dreaming about taking her to the hotel in Milan and drinking wine with her and lying under a sheet because it’s so hot. But that’s only because he wants to sleep with her. Not because he loves her.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I crossed my arms.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  Jayden, who finally seemed to remember who I was and why I was there, stubbed out his joint on a paper plate and directed me to the office chair. He and Tino stepped into the alley while I quickly undressed, pressing my chest into the fabric so they wouldn’t see anything, all the while thinking how weird it was that Tino had seen my bare back, from neck to waist, and yet we had barely ever touched.

  The door creaked open and the two of them returned.

  “This is gonna look so great,” Jayden said, squeaking over to me in his little wheelie stool. His voice was slow and his eyes were red slits. I wondered whether it was the best idea to let a guy who was stoned out of his mind come at me with a needle, but I figured that at this point it was more important to have the tattoo finished than to have it perfect. I adjusted in my seat while he pulled on his headphones.

  When he lifted his needle and it bore into my skin, the pain was excruciating, white hot, unbearable, far worse than I had remembered. I buried my face in the headrest of the office chair, willing the tears to stay behind my eyes, but despite my efforts they dripped onto the concrete, blending in with the oil stains already soaked into the ground.

  “What’s up with you, girl?” Jayden sighed. The cloud of marijuana-chill had lifted from his voice, and he sounded aggravated. “Last time you sat for hours without so much as moving a muscle.”

  He was right. Something was up with me. Everything in my body rebelled against his hands. I squirmed and shuddered, grimaced and gasped, and curled my toes tightly in my winter boots. It was ridiculous, a voluntary torture, like sitting before a plate of poisoned food and
eating it anyway because you don’t want to seem impolite.

  “It hurts more than last time,” I said through gritted teeth. “Is it supposed to hurt this much?”

  “Go easy, man,” I heard Tino say.

  The needle continued its incessant waspy whine, and all the while it burned and burned. I clung to the arms of the office chair so tightly my fingernails burst through the pleather surface and plunged into the wooly stuffing beneath. I could feel the sweat pool beneath my palms and stand out along my hairline. The black waves seeped in at the edges of my vision and my mouth filled with saliva, but I knew that if I stood up to puke, I would pass out before I made it out of the garage. So I swallowed hard and squeezed my eyes shut and remembered my mom telling me that when she was a little girl and had to get a tooth drilled, the only thing that would help was lying in the dentist’s chair and repeating the Hail Mary again and again in her head until it was over.

  So that’s what I did. Hail, Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  Once, I jerked so suddenly that I knocked Jayden’s needle gun out of his hand and onto the sticky floor.

  “Sit still,” he snapped, swiping up the gun and wiping it on his shirt, “unless you want this to look like total shit!”

  “You don’t have to yell at her, Jay,” I heard Tino say.

  “Can’t you do something to calm her down?”

  “Hey.” I felt his hand on my bare arm. “Do you want to stop?”

  I shook my head into the headrest. “I can’t.”

  “Okay. What if I read to you? You think that might help?”

  “You can try,” I murmured.

  Tino found A Farewell to Arms in my bag and picked up from where I’d left off. Lieutenant Henry had been wounded, and he was recovering in a hospital in Milan. Tino began to read from the part where Catherine Barkley shows up at Lieutenant Henry’s hospital bed. He had to sit close to me, his knee brushing my elbow, so that I could hear his voice over the whining of the needle. When he began to read, I could feel his breath as it stirred my hair.

  She came in the room and over to the bed. “Hello, darling,” she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  “Hello,” I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me.

  As he read, the pain began to fade. I could still feel it, still was aware of the burning, but his voice was like cool water putting out the flames.

  God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with anyone. But God knows I had . . .

  Eventually, the needle clicked off and Tino put the book down. Jayden set the gun next to the dye cups and sponged some warm, soapy water across my back.

  “Well, it’s done,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie—you were moving around a lot. So, you know.”

  “Know what?”

  I turned my head a little to look at him, but I was still sort of nauseated and it felt best to keep my eyes trained on the floor.

  “Well, it’s a little crooked in places. That’s what happens when you jerk around like that.”

  “Let me see.”

  He picked up the hand mirror and held it up to my shoulder, while I flipped on my phone camera with shaking hands. When the picture came into focus, I saw an expanse of taut, shiny skin—as if it had been badly burned—and even though Jayden had wiped it clean with the soapy water, thin blooms of blood were already seeping out of my pores and dripping down my back. This, I guess, didn’t bother me too much: I knew from experience now that the blood and the swelling would be temporary. What did bother me was that there was something wrong with Our Lady’s face. And what bothered me even more was that I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Maybe it was her pupils, which were so large she looked like a meth-head having a serious tweak. Or maybe it was the eyes themselves: on the wall of the Saints Corridor they were turned upward to heaven in holy contemplation, but here, they gazed straight ahead, as if staring down an approaching train. Maybe it was her mouth, which hung open—a detail that, in the original painting, made it seem like she was whispering a prayer. But in Jayden’s version, she just looked like she was gathering up a scream over whatever terrible thing she was staring at with those empty aquamarine eyes.

  And the background color—the light shining from the grotto behind her wasn’t even close to the bold, vibrant pink I’d envisioned from the walls of the Saints Corridor, but a greasy, dead color, like pink slime or a slab of week-old salmon. I shuddered, feeling a sour taste travel up the back of my throat.

  “It’s different than what I thought,” I said faintly.

  Jayden pushed away from me on his wheelie chair.

  “Well, it’s the best I could do, with you squirming around like a kid with a poop stuck halfway out his butt.”

  “But her face . . .”

  “You’ve gotta let the color set. You’ve gotta let it heal. Then you’ll love it. Tell you what, I’ll knock twenty-five bucks off your final price. No one ever said I wasn’t reasonable.”

  I handed him the cash I owed him. It was the entirety of my most recent paycheck and the only money I had left.

  “You gotta remember, Wendy,” Jayden said, lighting a cigarette, “this is a real operation here. Clean. Professional.”

  “I know, I know.” I waved him away in defeat. “Tell my friends.”

  Tino helped me get dressed, squeezing his eyes shut like last time, to give me my privacy.

  “I’ll walk you to your car, okay?” He helped slip my cardigan around my shoulders. “This neighborhood isn’t the safest.”

  I pulled my coat gingerly around my shoulders and we stepped out into the cold. The alley was depressing, coated with a slick layer of gray slush. Somewhere close by, somebody was burning leaves.

  “Still think Lieutenant Henry’s a player?”

  “No,” I admitted. I wanted to say, Is that how love happens? Creeping up on you before you even know it’s there? Burning slowly but invisibly until all of a sudden, the fire catches? “He better not break her heart, though.”

  “He won’t. But she might break his.”

  He turned to me in the purple darkness. Our eyes met and his mouth opened slightly as I leaned toward him. I felt myself both bracing and melting, and my eyes fluttered closed, and the words he had read still hung in my mind like the trace of a firework after it’s burned out in the sky. Everything turned over inside of me.

  That’s when the garage door swung open.

  “You forgot your leftovers,” Jayden said, holding up a plastic bag with a yellow smiley face on it.

  “Oh,” I said, stepping backward. I could actually feel the magic being sucked from the air.

  “What’s that?” Tino nodded at the bag.

  “I—I almost forgot,” I stammered, taking the bag from Jayden and thrusting it into Tino’s hands. “Dumpling soup.”

  19

  I DROVE HOME SLUMPED FORWARD SO my shoulder wouldn’t graze against the car seat. My mind was empty, too overloaded with all that had just happened, and almost happened, and not happened, to process anything at all.

  My mom was working overnights all weekend, and for once, I was grateful. I knew that if she was at home right now, she would take one look at me and know that I had done something irrevocable to myself. The woman has a talent for sniffing out bad decisions. But the apartment was quiet except for the screaming wind that rattled the windows and blew fine sheets of snow across the parking lot. I tried to watch some TV, tried to play around on my phone, tried to read some more A Farewell to Arms, but my back felt scorched and raw, and by midnight I’d given up on the idea of trying to sleep. I got up, padded into the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water, and swallowed two of the pain pills my mom takes for the back she’s thrown out too many times to count
while lifting patients in the ER. I went back to bed and lay facedown in my pajamas until my body felt like it was floating, and the screaming wind began to sound like California waves, and I slipped under them, into a dark, heavy, dreamless sleep.

  I woke up in the full sunlight, my mouth gummy and foul tasting. I fumbled for my phone, cursing under my breath when I saw the time. It was 6:45 and I was supposed to be at work by seven. I’d never been late to work in my life and I wasn’t about to start now. I ran to the bathroom, tore off the T-shirt I’d slept in, and it wasn’t until I felt the dull ache and saw the bandages that I remembered my Our Lady of Lourdes tattoo. Her face was hidden, swaddled in the damp wrappings, which I had no time to change even though they were slimy with ointment and dried blood. Carefully, I pulled my Europa Deli polo over my head, gave my teeth a frantic brush, threw my hair up, and hurried off to the deli, head down, as sharp needles of snow began to fall, pelting my face and neck.

  When I got to work, Alice and Maria were in the back, mixing batter for a batch of fruit blintzes. An enormous pot bubbled with stewed apples: the smell of them, which would seep into my hair like a beautiful shampoo, was one of my favorite things about the job.

  “You’re late,” Alice said, stirring the apples with a long wooden spoon. “You’re never late.”

  “Alice, it’s seven oh five,” I said. “Can you give me a break?”

  “And you look like crap,” Maria helpfully added. “Didn’t you get no sleep last night?”

  “Not really.” My shoulder was on fire. It felt like it had a pulse. And my eyes felt like paperweights were sitting on their lids.

  “Are you sick? Depressed? Boy trouble? Those bitchy little friends of yours giving you grief again?” Alice put down her spoon, wiped her hands on her apron, and sat down on a pallet stacked with canned beets.

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep. No reason.”

  “Well, if all it is is nothing, then I suggest you start sautéing some mushrooms. You know Mrs. Ivanov will be here in twenty minutes wanting her cabbage rolls.”