Hailey's War

surprised an outsider with the diversity of their features and coloring. At first glance, they all conformed to gang style, with cheap tattoos and hard masks of eyeliner and dark lipstick, long nails painted fuchsia or black. Some sharpened those nails to points for an unexpected weapon in a fight.

Up close, though, you saw the differences. Their hair was reddish, golden, black, or brown; skin creamy pale or tawny gold. In Juicy Couture and Skechers, for example, Heartbreaker would have blended in with the UCLA girls on Melrose Avenue. She was five-ten, with a lean, flat volleyball player’s stomach, golden-brown hair, and wide-set greenish eyes. Her cousin and closest friend, Risky, was a small, fine-boned girl who could have been taken for Italian, with straight brown hair, brown eyes, and pale skin. Trippy, Serena’s lieutenant since Teaser died, was tall and strong, with chestnut hair in sharp bangs across her forehead and long down her back. Teardrop had classic Hispanic looks, straight black hair and rich brown skin.

The four of them, who made up less than half the sucias’ number, were in Serena’s living room when I came out a little after ten. I’d slept all day, and I still didn’t feel too hot. The girls were playing with Teardrop’s baby daughter and talking in Spanglish. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the table to eat. They ignored me, except when Teardrop said in Spanish, Look, she’s all red, meaning badly sunburned, and the rest giggled. I told myself it wasn’t a slur I needed to answer and pretended I didn’t hear.

I’d told myself more than once that it was stupid to seek validation from a tribunal of gang girls. Underneath the hard shell of gang identity, they were just teenagers, emotional and naive, sentimental about babies and their abuelitas, desperate for the slightest affection from a homeboy. Most of them knew little of the world outside East Los Angeles. I, on the other hand, had jumped out of planes in Airborne School and boxed on my company’s team back east, sparring with guys my height and weight in the ring. But none of that mattered to the sucias. To them I was less than, just because I was white and unaffiliated.

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.”