They weren’t hostile to me. The name they called me, la rubia, meant only the blond girl. That wasn’t an epithet, yet I read a tinge of contempt in it: Blondie. And although Serena had told them I spoke Spanish, they never seemed to believe it: Whenever they spoke it in front of me, it was rapidly and with the clear implication that they were talking among themselves. She’d also told them I had been at West Point, but they seemed to have only a vague idea of what that signified. If Serena had said I’d gone to the South Hudson Institute of Technology, that would have gotten about the same response.
Tonight, though, I had a credential that even the most jaded gangbanger couldn’t brush aside. When Serena came in from an errand, she looked at me and said, “Show them your scars.”
“Why?” I said.
Trippy said to Serena, “What scars?”
“Hailey got shot,” Serena told them. “Twice.”
“For real?” Risky said with disbelief.
I stood from the couch, listing slightly before getting my balance. I lifted up my shirt, revealing the angry, corrugated reddish marks. There was an appreciative murmur as they drew near to get a closer look.
“Can we touch them?” Risky asked. “Will it hurt?”
I nodded-Go ahead-and felt their gentle fingers on my wounds. “That doesn’t hurt?” Heartbreaker said.
“I’d tell you,” I said.
Their fascination was gratifying, but I knew they weren’t impressed by me, personally. I was like the nerdy kid who’d brought an awesome toy to show-and-tell.
Trippy didn’t even direct her questions to me, looking instead at Serena: “Why would somebody shoot her? She doesn’t even claim.” She meant that I was unaffiliated with any gang.
Serena said, “Tell them, Hailey.”
“Why?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that whatever Nidia was running from, it’s not related to anything that happened around here.”
I just didn’t feel like giving a speech. For all that I’d slept, I was still tired, and vaguely dehydrated.
But Serena said, “You never know what people are talking about, what the girls might have overheard.”
So I sat down on the arm of the couch and told the story from the beginning, Serena listening as patiently as she had the first time. When I was done, Serena said, “I’ve got some bad news. I called Teaser’s sister Lara.”
For a moment the name was unfamiliar, then I remembered the cousin of Nidia’s who’d acted as a go-between, enlisting Serena’s help in getting Nidia down to Mexico.
“And?” I prompted.
“Her mother said that the two of them had this crazy screaming fight and Lara split. Her mother doesn’t know when she’s coming back.”
“Great,” I said.
Serena turned to her girls. “Keep your ears open about where Lara Cortez is, Teaser’s sister. Hailey’d like to talk to her. Which is the same as me saying I’d like to talk to her. Okay?”
I’d been rubbing my aching temple, but I stopped to look up at her. “‘Hailey’d like to talk to her’?” I echoed. “What am I going to talk to her about?”
Serena looked at me quizzically. “Where else would you start, to sort all this out?”
“You think I’m going to find out what happened to Nidia?”
“None of the rest of us would know how.”
“And I would?” I said. “I went to West Point, not Scotland Yard. Besides, you told me earlier today you don’t even think Nidia’s still aboveground. Your words were something to the effect of, ‘They might not have needed her alive for very long.’ So what’s the point?”
“Retaliation is the point,” Serena said. “That’s what la vida is about. If those guys killed Nidia, they got something coming.”
“I thought retaliation was by homegirls for homegirls. Nidia wasn’t even one of you. And neither am I.”
Serena said, “I thought-”
“You thought wrong,” I said, getting to my feet. “Thanks for the ghetto hospitality, but this is your problem now. Me vale madre.” Loosely translated, I don’t give a shit.
“Wait!” she said.
I didn’t. I got to her entryway before she caught up.
“Hailey, stop! You don’t have a car. It’s not safe for you to be walking out there at night.”
“Safe?” I repeated. “You mean, safe like I was down in Mexico? Serena, did you even listen to a word I told you this morning?”
She backed up a step, startled.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry I screwed up the mission I didn’t even fucking know was a mission! But you put me in an impossible position, Warchild! You know what happened on Wilshire Boulevard, what I did, and you put me in a situation where I had to run down two guys or get killed myself! Do you have any idea how that feels?”
“Hailey-”
Maybe I raised my hand to her. I must have done something that looked threatening, because suddenly I felt an impact. My back hit the wall, and there was an arm pressed hard against my throat. Also, a cold ring against the underside of my jaw that I recognized as the muzzle of a gun.
It wasn’t Serena. It was Trippy. On the periphery of my vision I could see the other sucias, riveted.
“Thank you, Luisita,” Serena said calmly. “Hailey will settle down in a moment. She’s just not herself right now.” To me: “Right?”
“Serena,” I said stiffly, trying not to cough against the pressure Trippy was putting on my larynx, “you need to get her off me before she gets hurt.”
“Like you could, bitch,” Trippy said.
Serena, though, was watching my eyes. “If I do call her off, are we all going to make nice?” she asked me.
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
Serena said, “Trippy, it’s okay. Take the gun off her.”
“Are you kidding? She just went fucking crazy.”
Serena said mildly, “No, Hailey’s been a little crazy for a while now.” Then, more authoritatively: “Really. Let her go.”
Trippy gave her a hard sideways glance, then, angrily, she stepped back. “This is bullshit,” she said, the all-purpose face-saving line. She walked away, not back to the living room, but out the front door. It banged shut hard behind her.
Serena watched her go, then looked at me with concern. “Feeling okay?”
“A little light-headed,” I said. It was coming on fast, along with a weakness in my limbs.
Serena’s face was worried. “You haven’t been out of the hospital for very long, right?” Her voice was kind. “Come on, lie down again.”
eighteen
I spent the next few days mostly sleeping, whether from a fever or just sun and dehydration and overexertion, I don’t know. Serena tended me. She’d clearly looked after sick people before, probably gangbangers too broke or too hot to go to the ER. She made me drink water and more water, fed me chicken broth and applesauce, and yelled at her homegirls to keep the music and the television turned down. I had a dreamlike memory of waking in the small hours of the night to see her dressed in dark clothing, with the cool smell of night air still rising faintly from her clothes and hair, counting money on the bedroom floor. She’d moved the lamp down from the night table and was counting cash by its small ring of yellowy light. Then she took down her framed print of Vietnam’s Halong Bay, unclipped the cardboard backing, laid a single layer of bills between the poster and the cardboard, and then replaced the whole thing on the wall.