Hailey's War

So we stopped. We were going to be in high school next year; it was time to put away childish things. No big deal.

In high school, we drifted apart a little. This was partly because Julianne scraped together the money to move us out of the Mooney home and into a rented house in town. But what really set CJ and me on different paths was something that happened to me in a bookstore, a few months before I finished eighth grade.

I was looking for a present for Julianne’s birthday. I knew she didn’t want a book as a gift, but I was mad at her for moving us out of the Mooney house, where I’d felt comfortable. In theory, Julianne and I had moved “so Hailey can have her own room.” In reality, it was so she could have privacy to entertain the Air Force guys she liked. I hated the house-it was cramped and Helen Keller could have done a more tasteful job on the color scheme-and disliked most of the men she dated. I missed the Mooney house with its warmth and life. So there I was, browsing, when I passed a display of educational books and a thick volume caught my attention.

It was Wheelock’s Latin. I wasn’t interested in foreign languages, but even so I picked it up and ran my finger along the words inside-difficult, opaque, more than merely foreign, almost alien-and somehow they dazzled me. This, I thought, was the language of ancient soldiers and empire builders, of discipline and honor. And it seemed to me that it was somehow my birthright, because of my father, who had been in my eyes a warrior. By the time I left the store, I’d not only bought my mother’s birthday gift but also the Wheelock’s, and it wasn’t long after that I understood that I would someday apply to West Point.

That’s a pretty big leap in logic, I know. The ideas that you have at thirteen rarely stand up to the test of time. But they’re very powerful in the moment; you feel things at that age with an intensity that few people can still access in adulthood.

Those feelings also run pretty hot and cold. I studied the Latin text voraciously for about five days before casting it aside in frustration. But I started up again when I began high school in the fall, and worked at it more slowly and patiently. When it was time for my appointment with the guidance counselor, and she asked me what I thought I might like to do for a living, I told her about West Point. Her eyebrows inched toward her hairline, and I couldn’t blame her: Nothing in my life that far suggested any latent achieverhood. To give her credit, she didn’t voice her skepticism. Instead, she asked me if I’d thought about the Air Force Academy in Colorado-remember, we were in Air Force territory. I told her to fuck off the way fourteen-year-olds tell adults to fuck off-“I’ll think about it”-and she nodded and then did something to my file that switched me from graduation track to college preparatory.

She explained the drill: four years of math, four years of English, three years of science, two years of foreign language. I asked her if there was any way I could get credit for studying Latin instead of the Spanish, French, or German our school offered. Her eyebrows made that same ascent and she said she didn’t see how that would work, and besides, for a military officer who might be stationed overseas, French would be a much more useful language.

I spited her by enrolling in Spanish instead, and on my own time I studied Latin. By the time I was a junior, the principal was sufficiently impressed with my resolve that he signed off on the deal that let me out of study hall twice a week to bus over to the community college to take Latin classes there.

It’s hard for me to explain what Latin means to me. My guidance counselor had been right: It wasn’t at all useful to a military career. But to be fair, I think Latin got me into West Point, because studying it was how I learned I could do difficult things. Hard things had happened to me-my father’s death, most of all-but Latin was the first burden I picked up of my own choice.

It has to be said that I wasn’t squeaky clean in high school. I got in some fights, and I got in some backseats. I can’t say I don’t know what a meth high feels like. You have to grow up in a small town to understand. On Friday and Saturday nights, things go on in farmhouses that would shock the ghetto. But I was always in homeroom with my schoolwork done on Monday morning, so the adults around me never knew. That’s something that all smart kids figure out pretty early on: As long as your grades are good and you don’t smoke or wear heavy eyeliner, the authority figures around you generally don’t look any deeper than that.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a delinquent. I didn’t start fights, but I didn’t back down from them either, so I had some pretty good scraps with girls I wasn’t even sure how I’d offended. Some of it was about my plans for the future, I guess, my grades and West Point ambitions. Some people will tear you down for no reason other than that you’re trying to build yourself up.

And the sex? I never actually went all the way, not back then. Like many girls, I protected my reputation by making the distinction between giving head and giving it up. If my generation didn’t invent the idea of “oral sex isn’t sex,” we’d popularized it, and I wasn’t reluctant to show a guy I liked him in that way.

And maybe on some level I was competing with CJ, who was going through my female classmates at a truly amazing rate. Because while I was becoming somebody different, my cousin was, too.

All the Mooney kids adapted to California-their accents softened, and they called the freeway “the 246,” not just “246,” and so forth. But it was CJ who went native in a big way. In his freshman year he’d started going to the ocean with friends who had driver’s licenses, and the sun and salt water brought out gold lights in his reddish-blond hair, which he let grow out to his shoulders, smoothing out the tightness of its curls. He traded in his checked flannel shirts and dark-blue jeans for T-shirts and faded, ripped Levi’s and casually unlaced basketball shoes. Though I could always spot him in the halls because of his height, sometimes I barely recognized the skinny country cousin I’d first met.

In our second year of high school, CJ got his driver’s license, and not long after he bought a twenty-year-old silver BMW that he’d seen advertised “for parts” and rebuilt it from the ground up. He also won a starting spot on the baseball team, where he vexed opposing batters with the deep sinker and nasty screwball that Porter had taught him.

I don’t know if my cousin ever had the kind of life-changing moment that I did in the bookstore, but he told me a story about the time when, as far as he could tell, school turned around for him. It was in the middle of that sophomore year. CJ was getting books from his locker when a pretty black girl, a new transfer from Oxnard, took in his height-he was six-three then, on his way to six-five-and said teasingly, “Do you hang off the end of your bed?”

CJ had winked at her and said, “Only recreationally,” and not only had she laughed, the kids around her had, too.

By the end of that week, CJ and the girl from Oxnard were going out, and suddenly the entire female population of our school discovered, seemingly all at once, the aphrodisiac qualities of a Southern accent. CJ, of course, was happy to help them enjoy that discovery.

By our junior year I saw very little of him on weekends, not just because he was out with girlfriends-though he often was-but because once he got his car running, he could go to Los Angeles without waiting to ride along with friends. CJ wasn’t antisocial, but his interest in L.A. wasn’t the same as that of his friends. They went to surf and drink around campfires on the beach. CJ went to sweet-talk his way into L.A.’s music venues, the eighteen-and-over or twenty-one-only clubs where the new hip-hop acts debuted. All the money he earned repairing cars for his father went either to gas money or to two-drink minimums. He kept his grades up just high enough to stay on the baseball team, but that was all.

Teachers sighed and shook their heads about CJ Mooney, but there was no animus in it. The guidance counselor, she of the mobile eyebrows, saw that he’d inherited the Mooney gift with cars, put him on the graduation track, and loaded his schedule with shop classes.

They didn’t see what he was. Back then, none of us did.

Sure, it was obvious that he loved music. But in high school, what kid doesn’t? Even the fact that he was a white boy in love with black music didn’t raise any eyebrows; that was a story older than Elvis Presley.

Then, after our junior year, he dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to try to find work in the music business.

Even in poor and rural areas, that doesn’t happen so much anymore. It caused a stir. At school, the teachers were shocked, the baseball coach cursed the loss of his best pitching arm, and the girls went into mourning. But his parents took it hardest. Several Mooneys of their generation had dropped out, but they’d made damn sure none of CJ’s had. They were convinced he was on the road to ruin: just seventeen, talented but with no marketable skills, in a town that ate gifted youth for breakfast and sent them home broke and failed. Both Porter and Angeline called me, asking me to talk to him. I said I couldn’t; it was his life. Secretly I believed what everyone else did-that in a