Hailey's War

they wanted reassurance that they measured up. I wasn’t kidding when I reassured them that they did. I could already see the terra-cotta-colored marks where bruises would be by morning. Plus, I kept rubbing my collarbone where one of the girls, who obviously knew a thing or two about fights, had jammed her thumb down into the tender underside of the bone and squeezed. There’s no fat there to protect you. It hurts like hell.

Serena came over, holding a forty-ounce, and leaned over me casually. “Come on, Sig’s going to do your ink.” She tipped her head toward a doorway. “In the bedroom.”

“Are we going to give her her name?” Risky asked, sounding excited.

Whatever you called it-gang name, street name, moniker-you didn’t pick it out yourself. It was chosen for you, based on some facet of your personality.

Serena smiled, indulgent. “It’s already decided, thanks.”

Risky settled back into the couch cushions with a small frown, like she’d been left out of naming a new pet. I picked up my beer and followed Serena into the bedroom, which was blessedly dimmer and quieter.

Sigmundo, or Sig, was familiar to me from Serena’s neighborhood, a paraplegic with a racing-style chair with the wheels canted inward for stability. He was artistic before his shooting, a tagger as well as a banger. Afterward, graffiti wasn’t much of an option; good wall art requires a certain amount of flexibility, as well as an ability to flee venues ahead of angry property owners and patrolling cops. Sig’s days of sprinting down backstreets and jumping fences were over.

His work with the needle, though, was much in demand. I knew it was a gift to me that Serena had gotten him here.

“Thank you for coming,” I said.

Sigmundo merely nodded. “You can lie down on the bed,” he said, indicating the queen-size bed with a cheap chenille spread. “Where do you want it, anyway?”

“Um, lower back, I guess,” I said. My lower back had remained unscathed in the initiation, and there the tattoo would remain mostly out of sight.

Serena hoisted herself to sit cross-legged on the bureau, then spooned partially frozen pineapple juice concentrate into a half-full pint bottle of vodka.

I lay down on the bed and pulled my T-shirt up to expose my back, listening to the sounds of Sig’s prep work and the gurgle of Serena’s vodka bottle. I felt very peaceful. Tomorrow I would be hurting, but for now, the post- battle endorphins were flowing, giving me the feeling that all was well.

“So?” Sig was saying, not to me but to Serena. “What am I doing?”

Serena got up and handed him a folded slip of paper. He opened the fold and looked at the word she’d written. “Okay,” he said.

Serena smiled, dazzlingly, at me. “You trust me, right?”

“Right,” I said.

The truth was more complicated. Who knew what Serena was thinking? It seemed likely that she’d chosen something Latin. She hadn’t whispered it to Sig, she’d shown it to him, suggesting that he’d needed to see the spelling. What troubled me about that was the possibility Serena had chosen a name that defined me only in relation to her-gladia, for example, or dextra, which meant “right hand.” I was just proud enough to have my own loss-of-face issues about that.

But it’d be another breach of etiquette to speak up now and make sure that she hadn’t. So I was going to trust her.

Sig began to prep me, tracing the letters of the pattern with his pen. I half tried to pay attention and figure them out but couldn’t.

The needle’s buzzing filled the air, not loud but pervasive. I rested my head on my forearm, eyes closed, barely flinching at the first pinpricks of sensation. After a moment, I got used to it, the needle nibbling away at my old identity to make room for a new one.

When he was done, Serena got off her perch and walked over, looking down at Sig’s handiwork. “Nice,” she said. “I like it. You want to see, Hailey?” She tilted her head toward the bathroom.

I got to my feet and followed. The bathroom was small and narrow, and the mirror was a small one, high over the sink. Serena handed me a ladies’ mirror, the round kind with a pearlized plastic handle, because only in the second reflection would the tattoo be in readable order, left to right. Holding the mirror, I turned and looked over my shoulder. No good. The mirror was still too high, and I was too close to it. I moved awkwardly forward, until I was standing over the toilet, legs wide. I said, “I guess it wouldn’t have killed me to have this done someplace more readable, like on my arm.”

“It’s good where it is,” Serena said. “Where it is, no one has to see it and hassle you about it, if you don’t want that.”

In the wall mirror, I could see the ash-gray Old English lettering, and so I held the hand mirror by my hip and tilted it until the letters came into view.

“Oh,” I said.

I’d guessed it was Latin. I hadn’t guessed this.

The new name Serena had chosen for me was Insula, Latin for island.

“Are you surprised?” She was looking closely at my face with an uncertain expression I’d rarely seen on her.

“A little,” I said.

“I know it’s funny, because this whole thing, getting jumped in, was about you becoming part of something,” she said, “but insula, that’s who you are. Even way back, when you were studying Latin while everyone else was doing Spanish and French, thinking about West Point-you were the only one of us who thought she was meant for something different, and that’s a lonely thing.” She paused, then smiled. “Did you think I was going to put something like ‘Fearless’ on you?”

I shook my head.

“So you like it?” she pressed.

“I do,” I said.

In the bedroom again, Sig gave me a salve to rub on the tattoo for the next few days. Then Serena poured me some vodka and pineapple juice in a plastic cup, and I knew the toast she was going to make before she spoke.

“Como vivimos?” she asked me.

“Ad limina fortunarum,” I answered.

We’d invented that one, half Spanish and half Latin. How do we live? To the limits of our fates. It meant that we were going to push our luck, to live until fortune said it was time to die.

twenty-eight

We were going to see Payaso, the leader of El Trece.

He lived about six houses away from Serena. That surprised me at first, then I felt stupid for being surprised. Their name, Trece, meant 13th Street. It wasn’t as if he’d live across town.

Serena was wearing a trench-length down coat in a shimmering gunmetal color, with fur trim on the hood. The weather outside wasn’t cool enough to justify it, but she looked great, every inch the gangster. I’d borrowed a scuffed leather jacket, which, along with my boots, made me look like a young aspiring biker. I’d woken up this afternoon stiff from the beating, but I’d limbered up okay since, and I hadn’t put any makeup on the bruises; they were part of my credentials.

It was a day after my initiation, a little before eight in the evening. The sky was overcast, the low ceiling limned with bright peach from the reflected streetlights. Serena and I crossed 13th Street, her strides long, her coat rippling around her calves. She began to coach me for the meeting.

“Payaso’s interested in you,” she told me. “Mostly because of West Point. I told him about that.”