Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  24

  WHEN I RETURNED TO SCHOOL the next day, I chose not to eat lunch at my secret table beneath the arched windows of the empty library. Instead, I walked into the cafeteria, found an empty table as far away from my former friends as I could get, and sat down. Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily didn’t follow me this time, but I knew they were watching me. Everybody was. I didn’t even need my tattoo to tell me that. At first, I was tempted to take out my books and pretend to do my homework. Or to read A Farewell to Arms. Or to play around on my phone when the lunch monitors’ backs were turned. But I didn’t do any of these things. I simply sat down, unpacked my lunch, and ate it quietly. I didn’t want to hide behind anything anymore. I was a junior in high school, and I had no friends. I had started over once at the beginning of freshman year, and again when my dad went to jail and we lost our house, and I was starting over again now, only this time, I knew it was going to be okay. I had nothing to be ashamed of, not anymore. Maybe it sounds sort of pathetic, but that day, as I sat eating my lunch in complete solitude, I knew that when I looked back on it, I would remember this as one of my proudest moments of high school.

  One morning, a couple days later, I was sitting in chapel, working on my physics homework and waiting for prayers to start when Alexis and Ola Kaminski walked past me on the way to their seats.

  “Hey, Wendy,” Ola said, stopping in front of me as Alexis continued down the aisle, “can I ask you a homework question?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was more flattered than surprised: Physics was one of my best subjects, but Ola was the smartest girl in school. Word was she’d already been offered an academic scholarship to Northwestern. She put her bag down, sat in the empty seat next to me, and pulled out her homework.

  Desiree is riding the Giant Drop at Great America. If Desiree free falls for 2.60 seconds, what will be her final velocity and how far will she fall?

  I took out my calculator and began to explain the kinematic equation to Ola while she scribbled notes and furrowed her brow in concentration.

  Once we had figured out the answer, Ola stood up.

  “You know, Wendy,” she said, “you could always come sit with me and Alexis and Marlo at lunch. We usually just do homework anyway.”

  I could feel myself redden.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m all right, though. It’s kind of nice to just, you know, relax in the middle of the day sometimes.”

  “Is it because of you and Alexis?” Ola leveled me with those clear, Northwestern-bound eyes.

  “No,” I said hurriedly. “It’s just . . .”

  “Because, you know, she’s not like them. We’re not like them. We forgive. We move on.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Prayers began then, but I didn’t really listen.

  All I could think about was the final part of the physics problem.

  What will be her final velocity?

  And how far will she fall?

  The following Monday, I went down to lunch and sat at my usual table for one. I was just taking that first delicious fizzy sip of my Dr Pepper when I saw Ola get up from her table, pick up her tray, and walk across the cafeteria in my direction. Without so much as a hello, she put her tray down at my table, sat across from me, and bit into her spicy chicken patty as if it was totally normal to start eating lunch out of the blue with a girl you’ve barely spoken to in your entire life. A couple minutes later, Marlo joined us, chomping on an apple and carrying a heavily annotated copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. And finally, Alexis, my old beloved friend, stood up, crossed the cafeteria, and sat down right next to me. The three of them worked on their homework for the rest of the period and chatted among themselves as if nothing had changed. They didn’t engage me in conversation, and I didn’t try to talk to them.

  For now it was enough that they were there.

  25

  IN APRIL, IT RAINED AND RAINED. Storms lashed the oak trees on ASH’s front lawn and blurred the tall windows and cast our classrooms into a darkness that even the fluorescent lighting in the ceiling couldn’t fully obliterate. Rumors swirled that our building had been sold—to an international school for the children of wealthy expats, to a charter network, to a museum for vintage surgical equipment. No one really knew the truth, except that ASH began to feel like it was slipping away from us, like it wasn’t ours anymore. Our teachers were absent a lot, going on job interviews, and we got stuck watching lots of movies and doing busywork assigned by the ancient nuns Sister Dorothy had dragged out of retirement to be our substitute teachers. Some of the faculty, like Mr. Winters and Sister Mary Eunice, had been at ASH for thirty or forty years, and the pine cupboards built into the classroom walls were stuffed with decades of their students’ projects and papers and debate trophies and old yearbooks. As the fourth quarter commenced, they began the slow, sad job of packing away their careers into big plastic crates. Outside was darkness and rain, and inside, our classrooms grew barer. We tried not to let it affect us, but every day I left school feeling sad, and the hallways were sort of hushed between passing periods, as if a death had happened. And in a way, it had.

  One Sunday at the beginning of May, Alice asked me to work a double shift so she and Maria could leave early for a First Communion. It was a slow day; the endless rain kept everyone away. Closing time was eight o’clock, but by the time I’d prepped for the morning, pulled plastic wrap over the salads, and chopped the vegetables for the next day’s rush, it was almost nine, and I’d been at work for nearly fourteen hours. I wasn’t complaining, though. I was going to start college in sixteen months, and my savings account was practically empty.

  I locked up, put on my dad’s old police windbreaker—the only waterproof jacket I could find in our apartment—pulled the hood around my face, and stepped out into the rain. Red Rocket was in the shop, but despite the miserable weather, I didn’t really mind walking home. The rain was cold, but the air was warm and misty, and it smelled like mud and wet grass. Lilies of the valley had begun to bloom in people’s gardens, the tiny white petals almost glowing on the dark lawns. Spring, at last, had arrived.

  I was about halfway home when the rain darkened into a deluge, a real thunderstorm. Jagged flashes of lightning seamed across the sky, followed by the echoing boom of close-by thunder.

  I remembered when I was a kid, my dad told me that if you counted the seconds between the flash of lightning and the roar of the thunder, that would tell you how many miles away the lightning was striking. Out of habit, I still counted every time there was a thunderstorm, and I still felt this weird excitement when the numbers grew closer and closer, especially when I was watching a storm from the safety of my apartment building. Now, a brightness forked across the sky, and I began to count. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . CRASH! Four miles away. I shivered and walked quicker, passing all the familiar landmarks of our neighborhood: the empty storefront where the Lebanese men’s club gathered to sit at card tables smoking and watching soccer, Stan’s Pizza with its giant oven and its gruff Sicilian owner standing watch at the window in his flour-dusted apron, the floodlit parking lot of the 7-Eleven, the sprawling stone steps and heavy wooden doors of Queen of Heaven parish church, and Dairy Hut, its windows nailed over with plywood until its Memorial Day grand opening.

  My windbreaker was just a sodden plastic bag at this point, and water was in my shoes. Another flash of lightning and I began to count: One . . . two . . . three—CRASH! It was getting closer. I broke into a run, sidestepping the buses that lurched in and out of the Jefferson Park terminal, belching clouds of noxious smoke.

  The sky lit up. One . . . two . . . CRASH! Shaking hard now, I ducked for shelter in the strip mall with the big green awning. It had a nail salon called NAILS, a dry cleaner called CLEANERS, a liquor store called LIQUOR, and a gyros joint with no name but which everybody called Niko’s, after the owner. Clutching my windbreaker around my face and breathing hard, I huddled under the awning while the ra
in fell in curtains over the mostly empty parking lot. I wasn’t scared. I felt giddy, exhilarated, so wonderfully small and unimportant in this big, strange, crashing world.

  The lightning began to grow a little fainter. I counted four seconds between thunder bursts, then five, then six. At seven, I stepped back out into the downpour and continued down the street that runs along the tracks toward my apartment. The storm had cleared the streets and nobody was around, but when I got within a few blocks of home, I saw a girl hurrying toward me, crouched beneath a wind-battered umbrella. As she got closer, I recognized the shapeless coat, the limp brown hair, the high, white forehead, and the giant, ever-present headphones. When we met in the middle of the sidewalk, we both stopped.

  She pulled her headphones around her neck. The rain drummed on her umbrella.

  “Hey, Alexis,” I said.

  “Hey, Wendy.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Coming home from a violin lesson,” she said. “You?”

  “Coming home from work.”

  “Oh. You don’t have an umbrella?”

  I held out my sodden arms to the sky.

  “What’s the point? You’re not much drier than I am.”

  “Fair enough,” she laughed, looking down at her soaked jeans.

  “So, you got a new violin?” I nodded at the leather case under her arm.

  “Yeah. The umbrella is more to keep this dry than me.”

  “That’s good. You can start practicing for Juilliard now.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at me for a long moment. “Hey, Wendy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know it was you.”

  My cheeks went hot, and I was grateful for the darkness.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The money. For my violin,” she said. “My mom saw you walking away from our house the day you put it in the mail slot.”

  I just stood there. I wanted to say something, but my tongue felt heavy and words had flown away. I really hadn’t wanted Alexis to know it was me. I thought she would see right through the seeming generosity of the gesture, see me for the coward I was, someone who would rather give away her life’s savings than stand up to Kenzie.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “It’s not nothing.” She shook her head. “It’s everything.” And she reached out across the rain and hugged me. I’d totally forgotten that about Alexis: she gave the best hugs.

  “I’ll see you in school, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She slipped her headphones back over her ears, gave me a little wave, and continued on her way.

  I ran toward home along the tracks, soaked to my skin but with a huge smile plastered across my face. If anyone were to pass me, I’m sure they’d think I’d lost my mind. When I got as far as the two white crosses at the site of Tiffany and Sandy’s deadly crash, I stopped for a moment. I knelt down in the mud to fix the drooping display of wilting carnations. These two girls had been my aunt Kathy’s best friends. It was the first time I imagined them as real people and not just ghostly legends in the lore of my neighborhood—girls with moms and dads and sisters and friends, messy bedrooms and homework, crushes and dreams and fears. I remembered that one night back in September, when Darry had said that if you whisper their names when there’s a full moon, the streetlights would burn out. I looked up at the sky and saw that the moon, stationary and glowing behind the shifting rainclouds, was perfectly full, as round and shimmering as a pearl. Tiffany, I whispered. Sandy.

  Nothing happened, of course. The streetlight beaming down on the crosses continued its monotonous, insect-like buzzing. I turned away to head home, a little disappointed and a little relieved that Darry’s superstition had turned out to be as untrue as every other superstition I’d ever heard, when, just behind me, I heard a small noise, like a soft sigh. When I turned back around, the streetlight flickered for a frantic moment, and then with a pfft, burned out into darkness. All of the lights up and down the street followed suit, block after block, until the entire neighborhood as far as I could see had gone black.

  I ran. I splashed through puddles and streaked past houses where, in the windows, I could see the wobbly strobe of flashlights as people fumbled around for their matches and candles. When I got home, I found my mom sitting at the kitchen table in the faint glow of her Our Lady of Lourdes holy candles, talking on the phone to Aunt Colleen.

  “Goddamn electric company,” she was complaining. “Third goddamn power outage this year. Doesn’t anyone care that this is the season finale of Teen Mom 2? I need to see if Leah gets out of rehab!”

  I slipped off my windbreaker, kicked off my wet shoes, and breathed, trying to control my seizing, pounding heart.

  “I don’t know!” she was yelling now. “What do I look like, an electrician? Probably the wind from this goddamn storm must have snapped something. Maybe if someone called the goddamn—” There was a buzzing throughout the apartment, and the lights came on again.

  “You back on?” She peered out the window at the storm. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  After I had showered and put ointment on my still-scabbing tattoo, I got into bed and picked up A Farewell to Arms. While the thunder boomed outside and the trees thrashed in the wind, I stayed up late into the night, knowing, but not caring, that I would be exhausted in the morning. Great books are like great parties: you don’t care about how you’ll pay for it the next day, just so long as it doesn’t end.

  I finally put the book down at the part where Catherine and Lieutenant Henry flee from Stresa in the dead of night and row a boat all the way to Switzerland. Would I have had the courage to do such a thing? Of course you wouldn’t, I told myself. Maybe it wasn’t entirely my fault, though. Back in World War I Europe, people had all sorts of chances to show their courage. But this was Chicago in the twenty-first century. Here, you didn’t need courage to survive. You just needed to be tough, which wasn’t the same thing.

  26

  IN THE MORNING, AT THE RISK of being late for chapel, I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts for a large hot chocolate with extra whipped cream and a chocolate cake donut with red, white, and blue sprinkles. We had just over one month of school left. One more month at Academy of the Sacred Heart. We still didn’t know what was going to happen to the building, but we’d all noticed that the nuns had been holding closed-door meetings with various groups of business-looking people in black pinstripe suits. We didn’t bother asking our teachers who they were because we knew they would never tell us. I’d already received my schedule from Lincoln High School. Instead of plain old English IV, I had been placed in AP Language and Composition—a class ASH didn’t even offer, a class that might give me college credit and save me money in college tuition, a class that Tino—I couldn’t help myself from hoping—might sign up for, too. In place of Topics in Catholic Social Justice, I had signed up for Introduction to Ceramics and Wheel Throwing, which made me feel both excited and sad at the same time.

  Still, I was feeling pretty good. My mom had let me borrow her car, and compared to Red Rocket, her Toyota Camry was like driving to school in a luxury vehicle. Alexis didn’t hate me anymore. My tattoo was healing. I was free of Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily. And Catherine Barkley and Lieutenant Henry had escaped to Switzerland in a rowboat. I was sitting in a pink plastic booth, waiting for my hot chocolate to brew and watching the sleepy-looking construction workers and teachers who stood in line for their early morning coffee when my phone rang.

  “Wendy?”

  Over the course of a person’s lifetime, you hear your mother say your name thousands, maybe millions of times. And each time there is a tone—of love, annoyance, impatience, affection, disappointment. But there’s a special tone that all mothers reserve for the worst things, and even though, if you’re lucky, she only has to use it once or twice, you still know it immediately when you hear it. Up until that phone call at the Dunkin’ Donuts, I’d only heard it once before: when my mom
sat down at the kitchen table with Stevie Junior and me to tell us that our dad’s arrest hadn’t been a mistake. She didn’t even use it when my grandma died, because my grandma had had cancer for a long time and we’d been expecting it.

  “Wendy,” my mother said again. There was a rustling on the other end of the phone, as if she was wiping her nose. “There’s been an accident.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I was struck dumb by that tone. I waited.

  “At the train crossing.”

  She told me, then, as I sat in a booth at the Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting for my hot chocolate and my donut with patriotic sprinkles, about the thunderstorm. About how it had knocked out the city power grid, so that last night, when Alexis was walking home from her violin lesson, there was no red flash of warning lights and no guard rail going down. There was only the urgent, hysterical clang of the 9:45 freight train bound for Kettleman City, California, washed out by the soaring beauty of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor blasting out of her headphones. About how this train, weighted with its thousands of tons of coal, had struck her clean out of her jacket and shoes and thrown her into a nearby ditch of scrub grass scattered with beer bottles and dotted with mud puddles. About how her body had remained in that ditch for over an hour, eyes open and collecting rain, oblivious to the wind and the cold and the airplanes that descended one by one onto the runways of O’Hare Airport. About her violin case, which the police found lying in the middle of Avondale Avenue a few feet from her body. About how, eventually, the head beam of another approaching train illuminated her and the driver of a car waiting at the crossing saw the slash of her dark hair in the white lights, saw her leg that was turned at that horrible angle, an angle that made him tell his son to wait in the car because he knew that whatever was down there in that ditch was something that he didn’t want his child to see.

  Accidents. Coincidences. Miracles. Tragedies. Signs. The train lights had been down, I would later learn, for three minutes and twenty-two seconds—a length of time shorter than a high school passing period.