Neighborhood Girls by Jessie Ann Foley

Author:Jessie Ann Foley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

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

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