At the end of the night Alexis and I thanked David’s father and stepmom and promised everyone that we’d keep in touch in high school, and we took the elevator down to the waiting city and the train back to Jefferson Park. We walked home together as far as Alexis’s house, and then I headed the rest of the way by myself, hunched over the glow of my phone screen, scrolling through all the pictures I’d taken and already feeling nostalgic for that giddy, happy final night as a grade schooler. I was breaking my dad’s first rule of personal safety—phone away, stay aware of your surroundings—but honestly, even if I had been paying attention, I’m not sure that I would have been able to stop what happened next.
“Hey, Boychuck.”
The voice was close behind me—too close. When I turned around they were standing there, five girls across, on the sidewalk behind me. They were older than me, and they looked tough.
“Wendy Boychuck?”
The tallest one was pointing at my name tag, the one that I’d forgotten to take off before leaving the party, the one with my first and last name typed in large capital letters and the little black-and-white photo of a blond, pigtailed, six-year-old me.
“Yeah.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
“We followed you all the way from Logan Square.”
“Followed me?” I was repeating her words to buy myself time, though I wasn’t quite sure what I was even buying time for. I just knew it was going to be bad, and I wanted to hold on to the last remaining moments of the best night of my life before these girls, whoever they were, ruined it forever.
“Yeah. We followed you. To ask you one question. You’re his kid, aren’t you?”
“Whose kid?”
“You know. Stephen Boychuck. Are you his kid or not?”
“Yeah,” I said. I was scared, but I looked her straight in the eye, drawing on the reserves of courage I had gained so unexpectedly on the dance floor of David Schmidt’s party, the happiness of the night still glowing around me like a force field.
“I knew it.” She crossed her arms. “I hope someone murders him in prison. I hope someone guts him like the pig that he is.” The molten hatred of her words struck me like the first blast of heat when you walk out of an air-conditioned building into the hottest day of the summer.
“I love my father.” I knew, even as I said it, that it was the wrong thing to say. It just sort of came out. The girl stepped toward me. She was queenly, tall and muscular, with pale eyes like broken glass.
“I love my father, too,” she said calmly. “Only my father can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t remember his own name or the names of his children. Want to know why?” Her eyes glittered in the streetlight like some nighttime animal’s while her friends fanned out, surrounding me. “Because your father put him in a chokehold five years ago. Which gave my father a stroke and nearly killed him.”
She took another step toward me, and that’s when I tried to run, but found myself instead slamming directly into the immoveable chest of one of her friends.
“Get her,” I heard, as my arms were twisted behind my back and the Our Lady of Lourdes scapular I wore for protection was ripped off my neck. Somebody’s arm was around my neck, lifting me off the ground, cutting off my air supply. A thought bubbled up in my mind, terrifyingly clear and assured. She’s going to crush my windpipe.
“Where’s my lighter?” I heard. Then, a sickly smell of burning flesh—my flesh?—as she flicked it on and held it to the exposed skin on my back. Sucking in a scream, I tried to squirm away, and somebody kicked me between the legs. I dry heaved, tasting bacon-wrapped dates and blood, then felt a hot, gravelly pain as my face scraped the concrete. There was more kicking and punching once I was on the ground, but I don’t know how long it lasted, because that’s when my memory goes sort of blank.
I do remember limping home, unlocking the door to our empty house, and looking in the mirror. My neck was swollen. A blood vessel had burst in my eye, leaving the round gray iris to float in a smear of red. My knees were open wounds. A blister as wide and long as a dollar bill had bubbled up over the burn across my back. The attack had left me terrified, aching, and scarred, but not surprised. Ever since my dad’s arrest, I could not leave the house without feeling naked and exposed, held hostage by my own name in my own city. I had always known this was coming. This was Chicago, after all—there could be no sin without retribution.
The next morning, as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and gingerly blotted concealer across the bruises on my neck before my mom came home from work and started asking questions, my phone rattled on the sink. It was Alexis, calling me for our usual morning chat. I didn’t answer. Nor did I respond to her follow-up calls, texts, Snapchats, her ringing of my doorbell, or the pebbles she threw up at my bedroom window every day for the rest of the summer. And on our first day of freshman orientation at Academy of the Sacred Heart, when she came running up to me in her pressed uniform skirt, her violin held under her arm and a panicked question on her face, I didn’t even give her the chance to ask me why. I just walked right past her as if I’d never seen her in my life, as if our nine years of best friendship had never happened. Looking back on it now, I don’t really even know why I did it. I knew that nothing was her fault. I knew that those visits to the airport were the only thing that saved me from going crazy that summer. I knew that she was the only real friend I’d ever had. I guess maybe I figured now that I was in high school, I could remake myself somehow, into someone tougher and harder and cooler. I was finished with kindness and loyalty. What I needed now were the kind of friends who laughed loud and threw the first punch, who could give as good as they got.
Girls like Kenzie Quintana.
5
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE OCTOBER, I was at work when Kenzie swung open the tinkling glass door of the Europa Deli and looked around with contempt.
“Hi, I’d like some large wieners,” she said loudly, ringing the service bell so that Alice looked up from the egg salad she was mixing to glare at her. Alice and Maria had learned to tolerate Kenzie’s occasional visits, even though they made no secret of their disapproval of her.
“Free sample?” I held up a plate lined with slices of cured meat and she waved me away, gagging theatrically.
“How do you stand it here?” she demanded. “Not only do they force you to stick your hands in, like, mayonnaise all day, it smells in here.” She looked up at the fat brown links of sausage coiled from the ceiling and wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah,” I said, popping a bite-size piece of sausage into my mouth, “but the free knockwurst makes it all worth it!”
“Don’t make me vomit.” Kenzie squatted down to get a better look at the trays of salads and meats behind the counter. “Hey, what is that? Blood?”
“It’s borscht. Beet soup.”
“Sick.”
I had tasted it earlier that morning and liked it, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit that now. Seeing it through Kenzie’s eyes, it did look like blood, and it bobbed with bald-peeled vegetables like dead white fingers. She held out her phone and took a picture of the tub of borscht. Later, during my lunch break, when I was sitting in the storeroom eating a ham and potato salad sandwich, I would see Kenzie’s picture on my Instagram feed with the caption:
Beet soup or murder scene? #EuropaDeli #nasty #worstjobever
“If I worked here,” she announced, strumming her French-manicured nails on the glass counter, “I’d kill myself.”
Kenzie’s tendency for hyperbole aside, she did have a point: working at Europa Deli isn’t exactly a teenager’s dream job. Sure, mixing drinks at the smoothie bar at the Harlem Irving Plaza would be a lot more fun, but Maria and Alice pay me twelve bucks an hour and I can’t afford to waste my time working somewhere else for minimum wage. I’m trying to save up for college. Some months, I’m even just trying to help pay for groceries.
See, after my dad went to jail, at the end of my first semester freshman year, my h
omeroom teacher, Sister Pauline, handed around everybody’s report cards, and girls started excitedly comparing grades and GPAs. But all I got was a note ordering me to go downstairs and see Sister Dorothy immediately. I sat across from her desk in the principal’s office, beneath the mournful eyes of an enormous framed painting of Jesus, his Sacred Heart bursting from his chest surrounded by jagged rays of light, while she told me in her gentle voice that the school couldn’t release my semester grades.
“Why not?” I demanded.
“That’s a conversation you’ll need to have with your mother,” the old nun said.
I confronted my mom as soon as I got home from school, while she was in her bedroom, packing her suitcase to go visit my dad in Nebraska. She admitted that our tuition check had bounced and, even worse, that we’d spent all of our money, including every dime of my college savings, on my dad’s legal fees. In order for me to continue at ASH, my mom had to swallow her pride and borrow money from my aunt Kathy to cover the payment. Although she’s never said anything to me about it, I have a feeling my crazy aunt has been paying my tuition ever since.
The following month, the bank foreclosed on our house. After my royal ass beating on the way home from David Schmidt’s party, my anger toward my father had mutated into a simmering rage, and now, with this latest setback, it solidified into full-blown hatred. Watching my mom deal with the loss of our house wasn’t exactly a party, either. She dropped thirty pounds. Her hair started falling out in clumps. Every time she took a shower I could hear her trying to muffle her sobs under the hiss of the water. The doctor put her on antidepressants, which as far as I could tell didn’t actually make her feel better so much as make her feel nothing at all. I think there was a good six months that went by where she didn’t smile, or cry, or laugh, or sing. It was like living with a dead person. And still, every other month, like a loyal lapdog, she made the long, lonely drive across the Great Plains to visit the man who had destroyed her life. Worst of all, she always tried to talk me into going with her and couldn’t understand why I kept refusing.
By this time, Stevie Junior was already floating around on some aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. It was just me and the emaciated zombie who vaguely resembled my mom. For a couple months we set up camp in my uncle Jimbo and aunt Col’s drafty, half-finished basement. My mom slept on the couch and I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor. But eventually we found the cat-piss-smelling apartment where we still live today, and even though most of my mom’s hair has grown back, she’s still on the antidepressants, and sleeping pills, and something for anxiety, too. She works so much, mostly at night, that sometimes a whole week will go by and I won’t even see her. And even with all that overtime, we’re still broke.
When I first started at the deli, I found myself surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged ladies who were always clucking at me in a rapid-fire mix of Polish and English. According to them, I didn’t wipe down the cutting board properly after cutting up chicken. I overstuffed the nalesniki. I put too much vinegar in the red cabbage salad. I was four generations removed from my Eastern European ancestors, which made me, in their eyes, hopeless.
I was all set to quit, but one paycheck gradually became two, and then a month had gone by and then a season. Eventually, either because they felt sorry for me or because I started complying with food code when dealing with raw poultry, the ladies’ criticism softened into affectionate sniping. Soon they began to treat me like a beloved (if not very intelligent) family pet. I grew to sort of enjoy the quiet walks to the deli as the sun rose pink over the bungalows of my sleeping neighborhood, the nosy questions the ladies asked me about boys and school, the lunch breaks where I’d sit in the cool, quiet storeroom on an overturned packing crate and eat a piece of fresh-baked bread smeared with butter and homemade plum jam. Two years later, I still work every Saturday and Sunday morning shift, more in the summers and on holiday breaks. And even though over the course of those two years I’ve only been able to save enough for about two weeks of college tuition, not including room and board, I still feel like I’m contributing in some way to our decimated family. I guess in life you have to look on the bright side, right? I mean, yeah, we’ve lost everything and my brother’s on a ship on the other side of the planet and my mom’s depressed and my dad’s a criminal and sometimes I have to hear the horrifying sounds of Sonny’s porno channels drifting up into my bedroom, but I have $2,496.54 in my savings account and I can whip up the best batch of pork meatballs in dill sauce you’ve ever tasted.
That’s not nothing, right?
“Hey,” Kenzie said. She was standing on the other side of the counter from me, snapping her long fingers in my face. “Are you alive in there?”
“Uh, yeah.” I shook away my thoughts, leaning down to adjust a spoon in the horseradish beets while I waited for the heat to burn away from my face. “Sorry.”
“Whatever. What are you doing when you get off?”
I shrugged. “No plans.”
“Do you have Red Rocket with you?”
I pointed outside at the candy-red Ford Taurus, laced along the bottom with a fine sifting of rust.
“Cool. You want to take me to get a tattoo?”
“You say this,” I laughed, “like it’s a typical Saturday afternoon errand. Oh, I’m just gonna pick up my dry cleaning, go to the post office, and pay some guy to draw a picture on my skin that will remain there until the day I die.”
“It is a typical errand for me,” she said. “Over fifty percent of Americans have tattoos, Wendy. You and my grandma are the only people left on earth who still think they’re a big deal.”
“I don’t think they’re a big deal,” I protested. “I just think—”
“Look, can you take me or not?”
With Kenzie, if you want to have any hope of being allowed to finish your sentences, you better talk fast.
“Fine. I’ll pick you up at four.”
“So, what’s it gonna be this time?” We were stuck in Saturday afternoon traffic on our way to see Jayden, Kenzie’s tattoo guy.
She pulled out her phone and held a picture up in front of my face while I tried to navigate into the left turn lane. It was a round pink heart, and inside, in bubble letters, it said I LUV BOYS.
“Isn’t that amazing?”
“I LUV BOYS? Seriously?”
“What?”
“I mean, aside from the misspelling, don’t you think that’s a little general? There are, like, three point five billion boys in the world. I’m pretty sure you don’t ‘luv’ all of them.”
“You’re completely missing the point,” she sighed, propping her booted feet up on my dashboard. “It’s supposed to be ironic.”
“But how is it ironic?”
“Because it’s funny!”
“But funny isn’t the same thing as ironic,” I ventured.
“It’s ironic, then, because I’m totally boy crazy. And it’s funny.”
“But it would only be ironic if you didn’t like boys. Like, if you were a lesbian, then it might be ironic.”
“Ew!” She reached over and smacked my shoulder. “I’m not a fucking lesbo, okay? I love boys! That’s the point!”
“How about those boys?” I pointed to a pair of pale, skinny kids with wispy mustaches, glasses, and Star Wars T-shirts, in line outside the Portage Theater for a sci-fi film festival. “Those are boys. Are they included?”
“Those boys are repulsive losers,” she snapped, “and you know it. You’re just being a bitch, and trying to act like you understand irony more than I do just because you’re in honors fucking English.”
“Evan Munro pops his own pimples in public and wipes the pus on other people’s wallpaper!” The outburst exploded from me before I could stop it, like a wayward belch. In the shocked silence that followed, I braced myself for the withering wrath of Kenzie Quintana, for the guillotine to come down, for my official banishment from the cool group and the commencement of my life as a lonely loser.
> Instead, she began laughing hysterically.
“I know,” she gasped. “He is so disgusting. But his abs are insane and he’s amazing at football.” She flipped down the sun visor and examined her lipstick in the mirror. Pleased with what she saw, she snapped the visor back into place. “You’re hilarious, Wendy,” she said, shaking her head. “For a minute there I thought you were actually pissed.”
Jayden’s “studio” turned out to be nothing more than a corner of his mother’s garage. It smelled like spilled paint and stale weed, and the ceiling was strung with red and green Christmas lights. On one end of the garage stood a sagging velveteen couch where his cousin, who he introduced to us as Tino, sat slumped beneath a Sox hat, sipping an energy drink and glowering into a paperback novel. On the other end was an old pleather office chair next to a workman’s bench lined with little jars of colored dyes and needles in plastic wrapping. The walls were covered with construction tools hanging from nails and faded classic movie posters: Taxi Driver, Scarface, Boyz n the Hood, and Goodfellas—which was, I remembered with a painful twinge, my dad’s all-time favorite movie.
While Jayden directed Kenzie to a folding chair for her “consultation,” I went and sat opposite Tino on the velveteen couch. He glanced up at me before returning to his book. I tried to catch a glimpse at the cover—it was so rare to see somebody reading an actual book instead of staring into a phone—but he had it folded over so I couldn’t see what it was.
On the other side of the room, Kenzie was showing Jayden the picture of the tattoo she wanted.
Neighborhood Girls Page 6