by Tara Clancy
“Nobody,” she said. And I’d left it alone. But this time I couldn’t.
“Those boys, from last week—they were seniors?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You never said you…I mean, how’d you meet them anyway?”
“School.”
“Yeah, I got that part…So did you? I mean, you hooked up with both of—”
“That’s none of your fucking business.”
“Okay. Fine. But—”
“But what!? You wanna sit around talking about first-, second-base bullshit, all huddled up in the cafeteria, giggling, like some teen girls on TV shit?”
“No. But I also don’t want to get my ass kicked, so maybe you should tell—”
“I’ll handle it tomorrow—trust me.”
“Okay. I guess, I also just want to know if…you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Leave it.”
I have no idea when or how, but Alli managed to do something to make those girls leave us alone forever after. And, as she clearly wanted, I never brought any of it up again. Even so, for me, there would always be this unresolved internal debate: on the one hand, I loved that Alli alone seemed to burst the stereotype of teen girls sharing every detail of their budding sex lives with one another, of needing to get approval on whether they should or shouldn’t do this or that, or of talking about sex incessantly because they thought it made them look cool. She just went out and did whatever she did with whomever she pleased, and she neither bragged about it, nor was ashamed. At times, I told myself, She’s just more mature than everyone else. She’s a badass. She can handle it. At other times, the fact that it seemed to me that she had more sexual experience at fourteen than most people do at thirty straight-out worried me sick. In retrospect, I should have said as much, but when it came down to it, some part of me lacked the nerve to question her. Besides, initiating any further conversation about sex put me in danger of having my own feelings on the subject examined, and, though I really didn’t know what they were just yet, I knew I didn’t want them analyzed.
Halfway into our freshman year, Alli and I were spending so much time together that her little crew of girl clones from the neighborhood hardly ever came around anymore. Thanks to something of a perfect storm—being in different schools, my wanting to be with Alli all weekend, and their disapproval of all the drinking and weed-smoking I was doing—for a bit I saw a lot less of Esther and Lynette.
Alli had let her guard down around me in a way I hadn’t seen her do before or since; but even when you lifted the chain mail, she was still a pit bull underneath it. Yet every once in a while, if we were alone in my room, she’d lie belly up on the carpet, high and silly, eating Cheez Doodles, telling me my Rancid album “isn’t that wack, I guess, but Biggie is up next,” and for at least a few minutes, she looked like the fourteen-year-old girl you could sometimes forget she was.
While other teenage best friends expressed their mutual love by writing their names in their notebooks with BFF underneath, Alli’s way of showing me she cared was by threatening to beat up a girl who ratted on me for smoking in the bathroom. She didn’t tell me she was going to do it. I came out of class to find Alli waiting, dead silent, arms crossed, eyeing the girl down. Then, without a word to me, she stepped up to her and said, “If you ever mess with my friend again, I will fuck you up.” The girl burst into tears, and Alli hooked her arm under mine, and we walked away. It was the closest thing I ever got to an “I love you.”
For six straight months we hardly spent more than a few hours apart, and yet Alli and I still looked like the types of girls who not only sit at different tables in the cafeteria, but who spend the entire lunch period sneering at each other, mutually enraged by the other’s mere existence. But there we were, day in, day out, at our very own table, alone, together.
Our sole common bond was the love of trouble, as well as a shared disdain for sobriety, and we egged each other on to start as much of the first and have as little of the second as possible, though we weren’t competing against each other as much as we were a tag team versus badasses the world over.
She kept us constantly supplied with weed and cigarettes, while I plotted each new scheme, hiking up the risk factor every go-round: “It’s 1:00 a.m., and my mom is sound asleep; let’s take her car for a spin around the block! Now let’s take it on the highway and see how fast we can go. Now that the Pizza Hut lot is frozen over with ice thanks to this blizzard, let’s drive over there and do donuts. Now let’s drive all the way into Manhattan and back. Now let’s drive all the way to Manhattan, park in a garage, laugh our asses off when the attendant points to the Yellow Pages in the driver’s seat (I couldn’t see out the windshield without it) and asks, ‘You sure you’re old enough to drive?’ then go to a club with our fake IDs, drive home high and drunk just after 4:00 a.m., park the car exactly as we found it, and tiptoe back to bed so that our parents will be none the wiser.” (And they weren’t.)
Having gotten away with so much legitimately illegal activity for so long, it came as a shock to both of us that what started out as one of our lesser, impromptu, in-school pranks our freshman year was what finally got us in some real trouble.
We were sitting together in the science lab when I launched the plan:
“Psst. Yo, Al?”
“Yo.”
“You see that, the pipe, in the back?”
“The red one, with the steering wheel thing at the top?”
“Uh-huh. I’m guessing that’s the gas line for the spigot things on our desks. Think I’m right?”
“Probably. So what?”
“I’m gonna turn it on, get us all out of class!”
“How the hell you gettin’ up there without Sammut seeing you?”
“You jump up on the desk, start dancing around like crazy to distract him, and then I’ll shimmy up the pipe. Cool?”
“A’ight. Fuck it.”
For the first five minutes afterward everything went according to plan: she danced, I shimmied, the gas came out of the spigots, Mr. Sammut screamed bloody blue murder at Alli and me, then chucked our backpacks out the classroom door and into the hall and told us to pick them up on our way to the principal’s office. As soon as we cleared the doorway, we cracked up, but ten seconds later an announcement came over the loudspeakers: “Teachers and staff, please usher all students out of the building to the yard immediately. This is not a drill,” followed by the full blast of the school fire alarms. We stopped dead, let out an “Oh, shit” in tandem, then turned on our heels and ran straight out the front door of the school to the street. We kept going until we ran out of breath.
It wasn’t until later that night, when Brother George (the principal) called our parents, that we got the full story: the sophomore chemistry class was in the adjoining lab using the Bunsen burners at the very same time that our classroom was filling with gas. When the teacher in that class heard Mr. Sammut’s screams, then saw some of the burners in her lab flickering strangely, she knew something was up and thought fast. She shut off the gas in her room, opened the windows, and called the school office. Thanks to that there wasn’t a huge explosion, but we still became known as “the girls who blew up the lab,” and our parents were told to find us another school.
It’s closing in on 8:00 a.m., and it’s mayhem inside the no-name bodega on 179th Street and Hillside Avenue. Like peasants in revolt, the mob at the front counter pump their plastic packages of Drake’s Cakes, Little Debbie Honey Buns, and wax-paper-wrapped buttered rolls in the air, waiting for the guy behind the register to point at them and scream, “Fifty cents!…Seventy-five!…Buck fifty!” before they slap down their stacks of coins and bulldoze out the door. In the back, it’s three-deep at the deli counter, heads popping up and down like the moles in Whac-A-Mole: Up on tiptoe to place an order—“Lemme getta bacon, egg, and cheese, salt/pepper/hot sauce!” “Coffee, light and sweet!” “Make that two!”; going back down to wait; up again when the guy calls out that it’s ready, to y
ells of “Yo! That’s mine!”; back down as a chain of outstretched hands crowd-surfs the food to the waiting customer. And though the breakfasts may differ, every single one of those hands belongs to a teenage girl, each one unique with regard to the severity of her Don’t fuck with me stare, or her lack or overabundance of gold jewelry and makeup, or whether she has a penchant for airbrushed fingernails, but all of them wearing identical white button-down shirts, pleated wool skirts, and matching vests.
When the girls empty back out to the street, they’re joined by hundreds more climbing up from the F train station or out of any one of dozens of city buses, together forming an impenetrable conveyor belt of Queens Catholic school girls streaming down Hillside, past the check-cashing place, the OTB, the 99-cent store, and the hole-in-the-wall Caribbean and Chinese restaurants, before turning the corner onto 178th, a quiet side street that climbs a supersteep hill, at the top of which, in a beige brick Gothic building surrounded by spiky black cast-iron fencing, loomed the Mary Louis Academy, my and Alli’s second high school. On a really, really good day it looked like Camelot…and on all the other ones, Alcatraz.
In lieu of King Arthur or wardens, Mary Louis was home to the Sisters of St. Joseph order of nuns, and in lieu of Lancelot or inmates, the Academy boasted a volatile mix of Queens girls from all corners of the borough—bad girls from good neighborhoods, good girls from bad ones, and the ultra-religious from both. We were the New Yorkers who never make it into the popular imaginings of our city: hard-ass Filipinos with thick Queens accents, loud-mouthed Koreans drinking Tropical Fantasy soda, Colombian goths, prudish Puerto Ricans hunched under enormous backpacks, their white uniform shirts buttoned all the way to the neck. Miraculously, most of us got along, and all of us were the better for being sequestered.
There were several factions of Irish/Italian girls at Mary Louis, and within the first few weeks at our new school, in September 1995, Alli and I found our rightful place with the toughest ones. There was Lisa, an Italian, who beat out even Alli in the contests for the shortest skirt, longest fake nails, and brownest lipstick—the way she carried herself, if it weren’t for the uniform, you’d have sworn she was thirty. And Erin and Claire, two first-generation Irish girls who spent their Saturdays at a local pub in Woodside, where, come ten o’clock, all the hard-drinking old men in tweed caps were replaced by dozens of young teenagers lined up on stools with their money on the bar, ordering rounds like pros. And then there was Kristy, who lived alone with her dad, a sweet-hearted construction worker she loved dearly but who was an on-again, off-again drug addict.
At fifteen, Alli and I were still finding trouble after school—smoking blunts in the park with her new boyfriend and his crew, sneaking out to clubs in the city with our new school friends—but we weren’t doing half-bad during the day. We showed up on time; we did just enough to pass our classes; we didn’t blow anything up.
I was still a frenetic, mischievous ball of energy, hyped up on my daily breakfast of weed and Tropical Fruit Starburst, but, thanks to a collaborative intervention by Alli and Mom, I had since ditched the travel-shampoo flask. After a year of my drinking from it all day and then really going overboard at parties come Saturday night, one day Alli gave me an ultimatum: “For real, you’re crazy with the drinking! Either you quit, or I’m telling your mother.” (It should be noted that Alli wouldn’t have dreamed of ratting on anyone with any other mom, but she truly loved and trusted mine, and she knew I did, too—it’s not all that common for little hooligans to also be mama’s girls, but I was one. Shit, I still am.)
Turned out, I didn’t have to make that choice. One night I came home so wasted, Mom found me throwing up in the bathroom. When it was over, she didn’t yell, she just patted my forehead with a towel and said, “Oh, my Chickenella, how long has this been going on?” I told her. She cupped my face with her hands and said, “It’s time to stop.” And I did—by the time I turned sixteen, that May, I hadn’t had a drink for a year.
I was still smoking my weight in weed and cigarettes, though, and right before the end of sophomore year, when I headed into the bathroom in between classes for my usual smoke, I found Kristy, locked in a stall, bawling. She didn’t say anything at first but waved me over, opened her school bag, and pointed to a resin-stained glass pipe.
“I found it in his room. It’s a crack pipe, right?”
“Oh, shit. I mean, yeah, I think so. Whattaya gonna do?”
“Dunno…but you gotta promise me you won’t say anything, okay?”
“Okay. For sure, I promise.” Bell.
Kristy never cut classes, but she didn’t move.
“Yo, you comin’?”
She shook her head. No.
Right before I walked out the bathroom door, I looked back, hoping she had changed her mind. That image of her, with her back to me, staring out the bathroom window, clutching her school bag to her chest, wrecks my head something fierce, even today.
Immediately afterward, Kristy took on a full-time night job as a gym receptionist to pay the rent, since she knew her dad wouldn’t be able to cover it. The job left her so tired during the day that she’d sleep straight through lunch, head down on our cafeteria table. Still, for fear of getting him in trouble if the school administration or his construction boss caught wind of his using, she didn’t tell anyone she was working nights, not even us, for over a year.
Kristy’s secret was mighty big, but she certainly wasn’t the only girl in our group to have one—who was dating a twenty-five-year-old, whose dad had mob ties, whose brother was locked up…these secrets mostly stayed hidden for many years. But then, one came along that couldn’t be kept for more than a few months. In the summer between our sophomore and junior year, just after her sixteenth birthday, Alli found out she was pregnant.
Squatting in front of a bookshelf with a stolen cup of coffee, I tilted my head like a dog at a shadow. Ear to shoulder, eyebrows raised, I mouthed the title of a book I’d never seen before: K-I-N-G L-E-A-R.
Huh. Must be some Knights of the Round Table type-a-thing, I figured.
Straightaway I pulled the book from the shelf and split it open, not looking to read it so much as to perform an autopsy. I had smuggled the coffee from the teachers’ lounge and had to stay hidden in a rarely used classroom to drink it. I was hoping for pictures or some chivalric bit of nonsense to help me pass the time. Instead, there on the page was line after line of language as beautiful as it was bizarre, and I was mesmerized. I plopped down, crossed my legs on the cold linoleum, and turned to the beginning. Act One. Scene One.
I was at the tail end of my junior year, and I had never read a book on my own. But I kept at this one in a fury, cutting one class after the next after the next, until I was done.
After the end-of-school bell, I put the book back on the shelf, peeled my legs off the floor, and rushed to catch the bus, excited to find my friends at the bus stop on Hillside and tell them about what I had read.
From my preferred center seat in the last row of the Q43, I started to recount the story. For this particular stretch, Hillside was more than just a major avenue; it was also the dividing line between one of the poorest neighborhoods in the borough, Jamaica, and one of the richest, Jamaica Estates. Outside the right window scrolled tree-lined streets filled with English Tudor–style mansions, and outside the left, garbage swirled up the stoops of dilapidated clapboard houses, while I talked about “this crazy old motherfucker” and his “two grubby, bitch-ass daughters.”
When madmen lead the blind…
No one gave a crap.
—
Just a few months earlier, on March 4, 1996, I had been in that very same seat on the Q43, but I was heading in the opposite direction, in every sense—instead of synopsizing Shakespeare for my uninterested friends, I was alone, cutting school to go to Jamaica Hospital and meet Alli’s newborn daughter.
Sister Joan, our principal, along with Alli’s parents, decided that Alli would stay in school until she started “
showing,” which worked out to right until Christmas break. After that, she’d do her schoolwork from home. I still saw her almost every day, after school, but instead of talking about the next party or prank, we were talking about baby clothes, baby strollers, diapers, and Alli’s boyfriend, the baby’s father. He had dropped out of high school, claiming he had gotten a job to take care of Alli and their daughter. But she had her doubts.
As soon as I walked into her hospital room, Alli said, “Go call his ass now!”
I called from the waiting room, then from home the next day, and the next, and the next. He never called back.
As flies to wanton boys.
—
With so much of Alli’s future suddenly so indelibly written, it soon occurred to me that I should start working out my own. Up until she got pregnant, neither she nor I thought much beyond the next blunt in the park. My mother wanted me to go to college, but my father often said he would have been fine with me going into the police academy or even the army. I wasn’t sure about any of it, until I read King Lear.
I ran home from the bus that day and straight to my room, grabbing my mother’s stack of old magazines and a pair of scissors on the way, and set out to make a collage based on the themes of the book. I had done very few of my assignments for English class and hoped this would count for something to my teacher. In the middle of a sheet of paper I glued a King of Hearts playing card and surrounded it with phrases like twisted sister. For the first time, I cared about something that could be called schoolwork.
The next day I stood at my teacher’s desk, too giddy to keep up my typical tough-girl act, and started to explain to her, “So I read this book yesterday—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it—King Lear? And, uh—”
“Cut the crap, Clancy. No, you didn’t.”