Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “So Wendy,” he said, smiling at me, “how’s school?”

  I shrugged, hunching my shoulders to pick at a shred of dried skin on my thumbnail.

  “Grades good?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Wendy’s in all honors classes this year,” my mom piped in, her voice as full of fake sugar as the perfume she’d doused herself with earlier that morning. “She even signed up for a couple AP classes at Lincoln next year!”

  “AP, huh?” my dad boomed proudly. “Those are those college classes, aren’t they?”

  “College?” I looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time since we’d arrived.

  “Yeah—they give you credits, don’t they? I think I remember Stevie taking one of those at Saint Mike’s.”

  “You think I’m still going to college?” My voice was hard, flinty—I almost didn’t recognize it as mine.

  “Well, sure, hon,” my dad said, blinking. “I’ve always dreamed that for you.”

  “With what money? The money’s all gone now. We used it on you. On this.” I waved a disgusted hand at our surroundings, at the cinder-block walls and prowling guards and vending machines.

  My dad looked down at his big hands, stretched them so the knuckles cracked hollowly.

  “You have every right to be pissed off as hell,” he said. “I won’t sit here and say you don’t.”

  I caught the hangnail between my teeth and yanked, tasting the blood as it welled. I stared past him, out the window at the prairie sun. He looked at me for a moment longer, his gaze a painful pressure, until my mom, desperate to keep the peace, drew him back into conversation with some petty news about the neighborhood. Soon enough, though, one of the guards announced a five-minute warning, and as I started to get up, relieved that our visit was almost over, my dad leaned down to pull a rolled-up piece of paper from his pant leg.

  “Wendy, I don’t know if you’ll even want this, but I brought a present for you just in case,” he said, pushing the paper across the Formica table. I looked down, considering whether I should open it. This wasn’t like all the cards he mailed that I just threw away. He was here, sitting across from me, and I could feel his eyes, the tense coil of his muscles, wanting and needing me to accept his gift. I picked it up.

  “There’s this art class they give once a week,” he said quickly as I began to unroll the paper. “I know it’s probably a crap version of the original, but, you know, I’m still learning. How to work with the watercolors and whatnot.”

  In the painting I held before me, a yellow-haired girl sat on the back of a pontoon boat, her face raised to the sun, one leg folded beneath her and the other stretched out, the toes reaching for the water. I only knew that the girl was me because I was familiar with the original photograph, taken up in Crooked Lake when I was ten or eleven. It used to hang in a frame in our basement TV room. “Sad thing is,” he continued, “I did about twenty of these, and this was the best of the bunch.” His voice was doubting, humble, almost shy, and I had to look up to make sure it was really my dad who was speaking.

  As far as I knew, Sergeant Stephen Boychuck had never been an artistic man, and his prison painting class had not brought out any secret talents. If he had submitted this painting in Sister Attracta’s Art I class, he probably would have gotten a C or a C-. My face, which was blurry and marked with water spots, was composed of generic, amateur features that could have belonged to anyone. The bathing suit was painted in sloppy strokes of red and green stripes, the legs disproportionately long. The sun was a lopsided ball in the center of the sky above me, and the waves of the lake were painted in sharp ninety-degree angles, like teeth. There were spots here and there of heavy paint, where he’d tried to cover up his mistakes.

  The thing was, though, if the painting had been beautiful, I might not ever have been able to forgive him. But the way that he was looking at me now, anxious and full of hope, while I examined the thick paper and tried to come up with something nice to say . . . I guess I had what Sister Dorothy might call a moment of grace. It made me think about how maybe the art class had become something he looked forward to all week—the bright spot in the endless march of mealtimes and showers and roll call and rec time in the concrete square that stood under the harsh glow of the treeless Nebraska sun. What was it like, a prison art class? I pictured a bunch of thugs with easels, sitting in a cinder-block room like this one, taught by some do-gooder art teacher with brassy hair and breezy tunics, the kind of lady Dad would rip on mercilessly in his real life, his Chicago life. She would stroll around the easels with her hands behind her back, commenting, correcting, and when she reached my dad, she would ask him what he was painting and he would tell her it was his daughter, basking in the sun on the family pontoon up in Crooked Lake, Wisconsin.

  “I’m painting my old life,” he would say. Then he would return to his composition, his thick fingers around the paintbrush, clumsily, lovingly, trying to bring the old life back.

  “It’s really good,” I lied. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Wendy,” he said, his voice catching, “I’m sorry for everything I put you through. I’m sorry for what I did to those people. I’m just—I’m so sorry.”

  Apology was as foreign to him as Nebraska, as clumsy on his lips as a paintbrush in his hands. Even though I knew he meant what he said, he still stumbled over his words.

  A buzzer sounded then, and the visiting hour was over. When he reached across the table and tried to hug me, I meant to push him away, to show him that he deserved the collective hatred of our city, that the widening ripples of pain he’d inflicted could never be undone. But instead, I was struck by a feeling that was both fierce and uncomplicated. He was my dad, and I loved him. That was all. Even if he deserved my hatred, I was still going to love him anyway.

  I hugged him back, burying my head in his thick, familiar chest, and my mom reached over and sandwiched me between them, and we didn’t let go of one another until the guard yelled “That’s enough, inmate!”—which was probably for the best because if the guard hadn’t stepped in, we’d probably still be there now, clinging to one another while the skies over Nebraska went dark. I understood now that forgiveness was like letting go of a deep, long-held breath, or like stepping out into the city on the coldest day of the year. It didn’t make you feel better. It just made you feel alive.

  29

  I RETURNED TO SCHOOL ON A STUNNING morning that stirred the curtains of my open window with warm, breezy light and woke me slowly and peacefully, the way humans were meant to wake up, before school bells and alarm clocks came in and destroyed everything. I got up, stretched, and flicked open the curtains. It was so nice out that even the parking lot behind our complex looked kind of pretty, and as I ran my fingers along the scaly scars of Our Lady of Lourdes along my shoulder, I wondered if Alexis’s soul or spirit or whatever you wanted to call it was enjoying this day somehow, too. But these kinds of thoughts were too heavy for six thirty a.m. I closed the curtains again and got ready for school.

  When I stepped through the scrolling iron gates of Academy of the Sacred Heart, I saw Ola and Marlo siting underneath the giant beech tree on the front lawn and went and joined them. They had their books out in front of them, but they weren’t studying. They were just enjoying the breeze, the mix of sun and shade, the way you always do after a long winter, but I knew that they were thinking about Alexis, too. I’d often seen the three of them sitting beneath the tree at the beginning of the school year and well into the fall, when the leaves were edged in red, and even after that, when they began to fall and dry into dust on the grass.

  As I sat, I watched Kenzie and Emily and Sapphire walk together into school. When I saw them, I didn’t feel any anger. All that pettiness was gone now, after Alexis. We’d all agreed, our whole school, to be kinder to one another. It was something unspoken, but palpable. Kenzie gave me a nod, but her eyes were shaded by a large pair of cat-eye sunglasses. She was the only girl in our class who hadn’t gone to Alexis
’s wake or funeral. People whispered about how awful this was, that even in death, she couldn’t bring herself to be nice to Alexis. But I didn’t read it that way. I thought Kenzie was doing it as a sign of respect. How could she take part in the ritual of saying good-bye when the only times she’d acknowledged Alexis were to torment her? You could say a lot of things about Kenzie. But you could never say that she was a hypocrite.

  The Saints Corridor is especially beautiful on sunny mornings like this one, when the light from the main entrance filters down the hall, glinting off the millions of swirls of paint color all the way down to the auditorium, so you feel like you’re walking down the cylinder of a kaleidoscope. But when Ola, Marlo, and I had gathered up our stuff and walked into school for chapel that morning, the first thing I noticed when we turned past the main doors to head to our lockers was the strange way the quality of light had changed. There was no more kaleidoscope: Everything was white and one-dimensional, and it took me a moment to figure out why. I stood there, sort of perplexed, uncomprehending, until the movement of a man at the other end of the empty hallway snapped me back into reality. I couldn’t see his features, only his profile against the light, and the rhythmic movement of his paintbrush.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “What have they done?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Marlo’s voice was bright—the overachiever in her loved being the first to share news. “They sold the building to a developer. They’re converting it into luxury condos. ‘Vintage elegance in the heart of the city.’ Can you believe it? That there are going to be people who pay big money to actually live at Academy of the Sacred Heart?”

  “Well, those are some pretty dumb people,” Ola laughed. “Considering that it’s not vintage, it’s not elegant, and it’s not in the heart of the city.”

  They continued to joke back and forth, but I was no longer listening. I looked to my left, where Saint Rita, Patron Saint of Impossible Causes, had been gazing down at us for three long years. She was gone. I whirled to my right. Saint Rose of Lima: gone. Saint Catherine of Alexandria’s red robes, faded from all the hands that had touched them for good luck before semester exams: gone. Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Our Lady of Knock; Saint Appolonia, Saint Agatha, and Saint Anne: all gone, all replaced with a clean coating of white. The painting crews must have arrived the night before, while we were all sitting in our bedrooms obliviously doing our homework, and just like that, over a century of stories and superstitions and saints had all been washed away.

  “It seems kind of heartless to do this now,” I heard Ola say, grazing her fingers along the wall of still-damp white. “Couldn’t they have at least waited until we were gone?”

  She looked at me, but I didn’t answer. I had already started to walk toward the man and his paint roller at the far end of the hallway, slowly at first, and then faster.

  “Stop.” The word bubbled up from a place deep inside of me, and I broke into a run. “Stop!” And then I was on top of him, pouncing, an animal, knocking the paint roller right out of his hand so that it clattered on the ground and left a white smear across the linoleum floor. I began to hit him with my open hands, wildly, limply, until I tripped on his drop cloth, pulling him to the ground and feeling a gush of cold wetness as a can of white paint spilled all down my school uniform. The painter struggled to his feet, cursing, but my rage had deserted me as quickly as it had come. All I could do now was lie on the floor in a widening pool of paint, curled into a ball and sobbing.

  “Wendy! Wendy!” Ola’s voice was somewhere above me. “Wendy, what’s wrong?”

  “Should we get a teacher?”

  “Should we call your mom?”

  I heard them discussing what to do with me, but it was too late. It didn’t matter. Before I had managed to knock him over, the painter had almost finished smothering Our Lady of Lourdes in white paint. Her sad blue eyes were all that was left.

  Ola knelt down and looked in my face. It was hard to see her, or even to breathe, because paint was clumping my eyelashes together in white spikes and coming apart in long white threads every time I opened my mouth to gather breath for another sob.

  “It’s all right,” she said gently. “Whatever it is, it’s all right.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s not.” I scrambled to my feet, turned away, and ran, my paint-soaked shoes squeaking across the linoleum. I didn’t even know where I was going, but I had only gotten as far as the blank space where Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, had once stood, when I crashed into a wall of gray wool. I stumbled backward and saw that Sister Dorothy was blocking my path.

  She reached out and put a steadying arm around my waist, smearing her habit with white paint in the process.

  “Girls, go to chapel,” she commanded Ola and Marlo. “Wendy, you come with me.”

  I didn’t protest, but sagged against her as she half walked, half dragged me to her office. Mrs. Lang, the receptionist, stood up, shocked, when we walked through the door. The paint had already started to dry in a thick, hard shell, encasing my hair and face so that I was sure I resembled a statue dug up from the ruins of Pompeii, frozen forever in a moment of horror.

  Once we were inside Sister Dorothy’s office, she closed the door softly behind her, opened a drawer in her desk, and took out a comb and a travel-size bottle of shampoo. She led me into a small white-tiled bathroom connected to her office that held a toilet and a tiny sink. She turned on the water, testing the warmth with the underside of her wrist, then dragged one of the spare chairs from her office into the bathroom and placed it in front of the sink.

  “Sit down,” she ordered.

  I did as I was told. She leaned my head back and began rinsing my hair in the warm water. She poured some shampoo into her palm—it was pasty and odorless, exactly the kind of no-frills beauty product you’d expect from a nun—and scrubbed my hair from scalp to ends with her strong, gentle fingers. When she’d rinsed all the paint off, she rubbed my hair with a towel and combed it through, taking her time, until it was clean and untangled.

  “Okay,” she said. It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d begun to wash my hair. “You can sit up now.”

  I sat in the chair with the towel around my shoulders, my hair dripping, and she disappeared back into her office, returning a minute later with a clean, folded school blouse and uniform skirt.

  “The skirt might be a bit big on you,” she said. “But it will do for the rest of the day.” She handed me a plastic grocery bag. “You can put your dirty clothes in here.”

  She went back into her office again, closing the bathroom door behind her. Because I really didn’t have any other choice, I stepped out of my paint-spattered uniform, balled it up into the grocery bag, and put on the spare one that Sister Dorothy had given me. Once I was dressed, I opened the door. Sister Dorothy was sitting in her big chair, and on her desk was a cold can of Dr Pepper. She pushed it toward me and motioned for me to sit down.

  “Here,” she said. “Have some of your precious sugar water. Then we’ll talk.”

  I wanted to ask her how she knew that Dr Pepper was my drink, but I realized it was a stupid question: Sister Dorothy knew everything.

  “Thanks,” I said quietly. I picked up the can and took a long sip.

  “So,” she said at last, studying me across the desk, “what was that all about?”

  I looked at the floor. “I don’t know.”

  “Alexis Nichols used to be your best friend, didn’t she?”

  “Used to,” I mumbled. “Not since eighth grade.”

  “Well, you must be upset about her death.”

  “I know what you’re gonna say.” I held up my hand. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  “I wasn’t sure what I was going to say next,” Sister Dorothy said. “Could you enlighten me?”

  I sighed. “You were going to tell me that everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan. You were going to try to teach me a lesson.”

&n
bsp; “What lesson was I going to try and teach you?” She sounded genuinely curious. It pissed me off.

  “That I should never wear headphones at night. Or that I shouldn’t walk by the train tracks by myself. You were going to try to explain it to me. Just like you did when Sandy DiSanto and Tiffany Maldonado died.”

  “Ah.” Sister Dorothy sat back in her chair. “I see. Well, I admit that when Tiffany and Sandy died, I didn’t handle it the right way. I know that now. I was still pretty new to teaching, and I thought my girls expected answers from me. Now I know that they only expected support. And love.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t believe God takes the lives of children to teach the rest of us a lesson.”

  “Well, then why?” I could feel the tears coming again. “Why did she have to die?”

  “I don’t know, Wendy.”

  “Maybe it’s because God doesn’t care. Or maybe it’s that God isn’t real. Just a big phony fantasy. A superstition. A fucking ghost.”

  “Maybe.” Sister Dorothy shrugged. If my cursing and blasphemy had shocked her, she sure didn’t show it.

  “I hear that you went to visit your father,” she said, folding her hands on her desk. “How did you come to that decision?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Yeah, I visited him. So?”

  “So, I think that was very courageous of you. Choosing forgiveness. Choosing love.”

  “Whatever.” I sipped my Dr Pepper and stared out the window at the sun shining through the branches of the beech tree on the front lawn.