“A cold spot,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you found it, you lucky dog! It’s the closest I’ve ever come to real contact. Now let’s go get some lunch. My treat.”
“Okay,” I smiled. I mean, true faith is a hard thing to come by these days. Why ruin it for her?
That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep under those crisp sheets, the snow softly pelting my window, Aunt Kathy knocked on my bedroom door again.
“Honey?” She pulled her satin kimono around her waist. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure.” I scooted over and made room for her in the bed.
“You remember yesterday, when you were asking me about what I was like in high school?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Well, I sort of lied a little bit.”
“You did?”
“I mean, I was a misfit who sat in the back of the classroom and read Sylvia Plath and dyed my hair black. But that was only my senior year, after . . . Well, the point is, I was in the popular crowd for most of high school. So I know what kind of girls you’re dealing with.”
“Well, what happened? What changed?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on, Aunt Kathy,” I said. “You can’t come in here and tell me you lied to me about something, and then keep lying about it.”
“Fine.” She slipped into the bed next to me. “But it’s going to depress you.”
“I think I can handle it.”
“Okay. You know those two crosses down by the railroad tracks that run along Avondale Avenue? For the two ASH girls who were hit by a train all those years ago?”
“Of course. I know all about it. Tiffany Maldonado and Sandy DiSanto. When they died, mom’s painting of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Saints Corridor cried for a week. And people claim that if you say their names at midnight when there’s a full moon, the streetlights explode. Why?”
She fiddled with the belt of her kimono, tying it and untying it. Outside, I could hear the cars rushing by on Monroe fifteen floors below. Finally she let out a long breath.
“Sandy and Tiffany were my best friends.”
“What? Oh my God, Aunt Kathy. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, honey, don’t say that. That’s why I never tell people about it. I’m the one who lived. No need to feel sorry for me. On the night it happened, we were all at the homecoming dance after-party. Kerri O’Rourke’s house. At the time, I was dating this boy, Tony Cutro. He was this Italian kid, real religious. Altar boy and everything.”
“You dated an altar boy?”
“An altar boy who smoked unfiltered cigarettes and drove a Camaro. He wasn’t a total saint, okay? So anyway, Tony had been to our house a couple times and had noticed the little shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes your grandpa had set up in the front room. Being the smart Italian kid that he was, Tony knew that the way to get in good with a girl was to get in good with her father. So, that night, it was our six-month anniversary, and he gave me a gift: a scapular of Our Lady of Lourdes.”
“Like mine!” I exclaimed, my hand fluttering involuntarily to my naked neck as I remembered the moment after David Schmidt’s graduation party when it had been torn off me.
“Just like yours. You’re right. Anyway, I figured he was going to mark the occasion by giving me his Saint Mike’s ring, or flowers, or some bracelet he’d bought at the Harlem Irving Plaza. But this scapular—it was so thoughtful and sweet, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Before this night, Tony and I had kept things very PG. But when he got all shy, pulled that scapular out of his pocket, and put it around my neck? It changed everything.
“Tiffany was supposed to give me a ride home a little while later, but I was so gaga over my gift that Tony and I snuck down to the laundry room. One thing led to another, and, well, I ended up losing my virginity on a pile of the O’Rourke family’s dirty towels.”
“Aunt Kathy! Real classy!”
“Hey! The important thing is, we used a condom. Remember that. Anyway, I guess Tiffany had to get home—her dad was always a stickler for curfew—and she and Sandy were stumbling around the house trying to find me. But Tony and I were in the basement laundry room with the door locked and we couldn’t hear what was going on upstairs and we didn’t know what time it was because we were doing things together that sort of made us lose track of time, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” I admitted, “but I wish I did.”
“Good. Hang on to your virginity like the prize that it is. Remember that, too. Anyway, earlier that night, Tiffany had snuck a flask of tequila into the dance in the waistband of her pantyhose. She had no business getting behind the wheel, but who was going to stop her? She was untouchable, the most beautiful, popular girl in school. So she and Sandy left without me. And, well, you know the rest.”
“So you were supposed to be in that car?”
“I was supposed to be in that car. And the only reason I wasn’t was because of that Our Lady of Lourdes scapular.”
“That’s amazing. And also horrible.”
“Yeah. Well, anyway, a week or so after they died, the nuns gathered us all into the auditorium for a special memorial service. And at the end, Sister Dorothy got up and gave us this big lecture about the dangers of drunk driving, and how Sandy’s and Tiffany’s deaths should teach us to always behave ourselves and make good decisions. I mean, she had a point, of course. If Tiffany hadn’t been drunk, they probably wouldn’t have died. But at the time, I was this big festering pile of grief. I didn’t appreciate Sister Dorothy standing up there and trying to teach us a lesson, to assign logic to this awful loss. I figured if God was the type of higher power who’d put two innocent girls in front of a train as some sort of elaborate public service announcement, then that wasn’t a God I wanted to believe in. I don’t know. Maybe it was survivor’s guilt. Or maybe it was just that the world can be a terrible place, and sometimes when people try to explain it, all they do is make it worse. Whatever the case, the day Tiffany and Sandy died is the day I stopped considering myself a Catholic.”
“But what about Our Lady of Lourdes?” I asked. “I mean . . . in a way, she kind of saved your life, didn’t she?”
“Honey, I said I stopped believing in God. But Our Lady of Lourdes? She’s my girl until the day I die.” She reached into her kimono and fished out a faded scapular on a scrap of brown string around her neck. “Haven’t taken this off in twenty-five years. It’s the only part of the Catholic Church I still believe in.” She dropped it again and it disappeared into the folds of her kimono. “I don’t know very much about the ways of the universe, Wendy,” she said. “I don’t have any answers. Except one: If you’ve got Our Lady of Lourdes on your side, nothing can ever hurt you.”
After she left the room, I couldn’t sleep. I lay there for a long time, thinking about things, and finally reached over and switched on the bedside lamp. I picked through the architectural magazines on the nightstand until, at the bottom of the pile, I found a heavy hardcover book: Rituals of the Ancient World. As I paged through it, listening to the blowing wind and the cars rushing by far below me, I came across a chapter titled “Tattoos and Spirituality.”
Tattoos were prevalent in many cultures across the globe, dating as far back as the Neolithic period. People ornamented themselves in tattoos for a wide variety of purposes, both cosmetic and spiritual. The Pazyryk people of Siberia boasted some of the most beautiful and intricate tattoos known to the ancient world. Pazyryk mummies dating back to the third and fourth century BC, whose skin has been preserved by the permafrost, display intricate etchings of roosters, goats, tigers, panthers, and other animals.
Interestingly enough, most of these tattoos were located on the right shoulders of the mummies, a part of the body that normally would have been covered by clothing. Scientists can conclude, then, that these beautiful images were tattooed on their owners not for cosmetic purposes but for their magical powers of protection.
Magical powers
of protection.
As I read those words over and over, an idea began to take shape in my mind.
It’s important to remember that while today, tattoos are seen largely as a cosmetic, ornamental, or fashion statement, they have an ancient tradition of protecting their wearers from danger, and for paying homage to religious and spiritual figures.
I closed the book and drifted off to sleep, and by the time I woke in the morning, my idea had solidified into a decision.
14
AFTER I GOT BACK FROM CHRISTMAS at Aunt Kathy’s, I needed to come up with a plan for avoiding my friends for the remainder of the break. The thought of confronting them directly, of just saying the words I’m done was too terrifying, and I needed to buy myself some time, to figure out a plan. So when Sapphire sent a group text about a Saint Mike’s party that we all COULD NOT MISS because some boy she was obsessed with was going to be there, I made up a lie that my mom had found the bottle of cherry-flavored vodka Kenzie had gotten me to stash under my bed for her earlier that summer. So I’m grounded, I wrote. Can’t even go out for New Year’s or anything.
Grounded? was Kenzie’s skeptical response. Your mom doesn’t really seem like the grounding type.
Well, her dad was an alcoholic, I said, another lie flowing effortlessly across my keyboard. So she’s weird about drinking.
Fine, came the reply. But you better not have told her it was mine.
I couldn’t look Jayden up on Facebook because I didn’t know his last name, and the only person I knew who had his phone number was Kenzie, who I wasn’t about to ask. So what I did was, I just showed up at his garage one afternoon near the end of Christmas break when my mom was at work and I had the day off from the deli.
It was a nasty, freezing, windy day. The snow that had fallen at Christmas had turned dirty and slick; the sky was gray, the sun a weak yellow ball hanging low in the sky. As I trudged through the slushy alley toward Jayden’s garage, I thought of the flight boards at O’Hare, sitting there with Alexis as we fanned ourselves and pretended to dig our toes into the hot sand. Honolulu. Phuket. Fiji.
“You’ve been to California, right?” Alexis had asked me once.
“Yeah, last summer.”
“Tell me about the ocean.”
I’d told her about its briny taste, the delicate crust it left on your skin that made your legs feel like warm sugar pie, about the way it curled back on itself, white and alive, when it crashed against the cliffs. That’s when I fell in love with the idea of going to college out west: UC Santa Cruz. Loyola Marymount. Santa Clara. Or maybe if I did really well on the ACT and got some sort of huge scholarship—hey, if I was going to fantasize, I might as well really go for it—Stanford.
I took a deep breath and knocked on the garage door. After a moment it yawned open. Jayden stood there in a puffer vest and sweatpants, glowering into the light from the cave of his garage. I stepped inside.
“You’re Kenzie’s friend, right?” He pressed a button and the garage door screeched shut behind me. “Sergeant Boychuck’s kid.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you could give me a tattoo,” I said.
“Course I can. What do you want?”
I scrolled through my phone and found the picture of Our Lady of Lourdes that my mother had painted in the Saints Corridor, the one that had been watching over me since the day I started high school, that was the patron saint of my family, that had saved my aunt Kathy’s life, and that now, I hoped, was going to save mine.
Jayden took the phone from me and squinted at the screen.
“Is that the Virgin Mary?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s the Virgin Mary as she appeared to Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto in Lourdes, France, in 1858. There are, like, hundreds of different versions of the mother of Jesus in Catholicism. Our Lady of Lourdes is one. Our Lady of Knock is another. Queen of Peace, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, the Blessed Mother, the Madonna, you get the idea.”
“Of course I get it. I’m Mexican. You basically want Our Lady of Guadalupe, but white.”
“Our principal says that the Virgin Mary transcends our ideas of race or ethnicity.”
“Wow.” Jayden whistled. “They teach you pretty good up at that Catholic school. So where do you want this Virgin Mary who transcends race and ethnicity, anyway?”
“Across my right shoulder. Just like the Pazyryk people.”
“That some new gang I don’t know about?”
“No,” I laughed. “They’re a tribe who lived in ancient Siberia. They wore tattoos on their right shoulders. For protection.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thanks for the history lesson. This is a sacred ancient art form I practice in this garage here. Which is why I charge the big bucks. You got money?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then. You’re lucky you caught me on a slow day. This is gonna take three, four hours just to do the outline. Then we wait for it to heal—which will take a couple more weeks. Then you come back and I’ll fill in the color.” He peered at the picture on my phone and nodded to himself. “Yeah. Two sessions. You can pay me at the end.”
He had me lie facedown on the office chair, my chin hanging over the headrest so that I was looking down at the concrete floor.
“You’re going to need to take your shirt off,” he said. I complied, and he moved the space heater closer when the goose bumps began popping up and down my back.
“You’re going to have to take your bra off, too.”
“No problem.” I tried to sound casual, but my heart was hammering in my chest. I reached back and unclasped the bra, feeling my breasts fall free, and I squirmed so that they wouldn’t show between the cushions of the office chair. I remembered all my dad’s cautionary tales about the women’s bodies he’d seen, raped, beaten, strangled, dropped in rivers, and chopped up in abandoned suitcases. And here I was, in a garage with some strange man, shirtless, while not one person on earth knew where I was, and my phone was floating somewhere at the bottom of my backpack, just out of reach on the ground beside my chair. I stared at the motor oil stains on the garage floor, squeezed my bra tightly in my hands, and felt my mouth go dry with dread.
“Sorry, but I’m not gonna be able to talk to you while I work,” Jayden said, adjusting his earbuds. “I need music to help me concentrate.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just . . . zone out or something.”
“Do whatever you gotta do.” He brought up his music on his phone and placed it on the workbench. After he traced the design onto my back, there was a jolt as the needle buzzed to life and bored its way into my skin. At first, I had to fight the urge to flinch and squirm—I knew it would hurt, but I hadn’t realized how badly—but soon the sharp, even pain suffused from my back throughout my body, purifying my mind of fear, and I relaxed. There’s something about physical pain that almost feels like relief—it’s so simple, so clean; you know exactly why you have it and exactly where it came from and exactly what you need to do to make it stop. I’d take it any day over loneliness or fear or heartbreak or that weird lost feeling that had dogged me ever since the day I decided not to be Alexis’s friend anymore. The harder Jayden pressed into my skin, the more it hurt, and the more it hurt, the more relief I felt, until the pain had become a part of me, beating through my body like blood. I almost couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel it, so when the garage door groaned open again and I saw a silhouette, backlit by the snow, step into the garage, I was grateful when Jayden kept working, not even bothering to look up and see who it was.
“Wendy?” Tino squinted into the darkness of the garage. He was carrying a greasy bag from Suzy’s Red Hots. “Is that you?”
Mortified, I squirmed against my chair, hoping to God that my breasts were fully covered.
“I didn’t know you had tattoos.”
“I don’t,�
� I said a little too defensively. “Just this one.”
He craned his neck to check it out.
“What is that supposed to be?”
“It’s Our Lady of Lourdes.”
“Oh. Is that kinda like Our Lady of Guadalupe, but white?”
Jayden swiped off his earbuds. “The mother of Jesus transcends ideas of race and ethnicity, dude,” he said in a high, urgent voice that was clearly meant to make fun of me. Then he stuffed the buds back in his ears and resumed his work.
“Does it look all right?” I asked.
Tino leaned closer.
“It’s hard to tell—he’s still only, like, halfway through. It’s probably gonna be another hour or two.”
He rolled one of the wheelie chairs over and sat next to me.
“Need someone to keep you company?”
“Sure,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been here forever. I’m not used to just, like, lying around without my phone, you know?”
“Totally. They write you up if you use your phone at work, but kids are getting fired over it all the time. Bad habits.”
“Where do you work?”
“Target.” He grinned. “Didn’t you notice my Red Team polo shirt? I’m just coming from there now. Today I had to break up an actual fistfight between two crazy college girls fighting over the last sequined tunic from the guest designer collection.”
“An actual fistfight?”
“There was punching. And scratching. And the popping off of fake nails.”
“Who got the tunic?”
“Nobody! They both got arrested.”
“Sounds a lot more exciting than a day at the Europa Deli. You don’t really see too many fistfights over the last batch of smoked trout.”
“I thought you worked there!” He sat up in his chair and turned his snapback so the brim was facing forward and his eyes were cast in shadow.
“Yeah, I work there. How did you know?”
“I saw you through the window last weekend. I waved to you, but you didn’t see me. You were scooping some potato salad for this old dude.”
My mind traced back to the previous weekend. Had I worn makeup to work that day? Had I been wearing my hairnet? It seemed very important that I remember the answers to these questions.
Neighborhood Girls Page 14