Hailey's War

the top, and creased khakis. Serena tapped her finger on one of them, sitting on “his” heels in front. “That’s me,” she said, “at sixteen, when I was banging hardest.”

I held the photo by the edges and marveled at it, half in amazement that I would never have recognized her, but also because the picture reminded me strongly of something else.

I had a photo from my West Point days that looked remarkably similar. It was me in full camo, posing with my Sandhurst team. Sandhurst is the war-games competition West Point holds every year against the British and the Canadians. All of West Point’s companies field teams, who compete against one another as well as the foreigners. Every team has one female member, and I was chosen from my company.

Of course, the Brits kicked our asses-they do almost every year-but our company had a pretty good showing, and that day I was glowing with the pleasure of just being part of it. And then we’d posed for the photo in which I, like Serena, had to point out to people which cadet among the guys was me.

When I told Serena this, she looked at me in shared fascination. That was probably the main reason we didn’t hug each other around the neck at the end of the night and go our separate ways. The outside world would have said we were nothing alike, but we were. Those parallels cemented our friendship, and that friendship would set a lot of other things in motion.

In time, Serena told me about her dreams of Vietnam.

They had started in early childhood, around five or six. They weren’t frequent, but they were vivid and remarkably consistent. Serena dreamed of explosions and bloody chaos in the jungle. She dreamed of white and black men in olive drab. She dreamed of snake-silver rivers and huge machines that hovered in the air, the wind they generated beating the grass flat.

“It was Vietnam,” she told me. “I know what you’re thinking, that it’s Mexico, right? But I’ve never been to Mexico, and even if I had, my parents are from the north; it’s dry as Arizona. There’s no jungle there.”

Serena believed that not only had she served in Vietnam as an American GI, but that she had died there.

I must have looked skeptical, because she’d gone on. “I saw white men and black men in my dreams back when I’d only ever been around Mexicans,” she said. “Come on, where would I see a helicopter at that age? Five years old?”

“There are helicopters all over California,” I pointed out. “They’re in the sky all the time.”

“Way up in the sky,” she corrected me. “Not down low where the sound of the blades feels like your own heart beating.” She placed her fist on her sternum. “I swear, Hailey. The first time I saw a helicopter up close, on TV, I knew that sound. I had this feeling like someone walked over the place my grave is going to be.”

The dreams had stopped around the age of fifteen, when she’d been jumped into El Trece. “When mi guerra nueva started, I stopped dreaming about the old one,” was how she put it.

I don’t think Serena told many people this story. At least she said she didn’t. But she wore a pair of dog tags as jewelry, dangling low under her shirt. And somehow her gang brothers had sensed something of her beliefs, because among the cheery, innocuous gang monikers they gave one another-Droopy and Smiley and Shorty-they’d given Serena the name Warchild.

Two years after her juvenile conviction, Serena did a second stretch, this time in jail. It was there that she finally began to let her hair grow. Jail was a clarifying time for her. She was eighteen now. By middle-class America’s standards, that was barely out of childhood, but gangbangers aged differently. For them, twenty was virtually middle-aged. Serena, having survived to eighteen, was a veterana. She had some thinking to do about the future.

The movies spread an old, common misperception about gang life: the “blood in, blood out” thing. It was a saying that meant that your gang jumped you in with a bloody beating and you stayed in until you were cut down in a bloody premature death… or, if you tried to leave the life, that your own gang assassinated you.

The less exciting truth was that gang members left the life all the time, especially girls. It was por vida in name, but age and motherhood often slowed girls down, sidelined them from the life. Others went straight after doing jail time. A few were even “jumped out,” meaning they failed to be tough enough or ruthless enough for gang life, and were beaten by their gang as a contemptuous dismissal.

Serena was not married, nor was she tied down to a baby. And modesty aside, she was more than veterana, she was leyenda, a legend, because of her exploits with El Trece. There were plenty of Serena stories in the neighborhood, not all of them true. Serena had jacked a pharmacy not just for prescription drugs, but carried away boxes and boxes of contraceptives that she’d distributed for free among the girls of her neighborhood. Serena had gone into Crip territory, Grape Street, and robbed a crack dealer there. In the sexy clothes of an aspiring actress, Serena had trolled Westwood and Burbank, stealing Mercedeses and Jaguars right from under the noses of the Beautiful People.

A reputation is capital, and in jail, Serena began to think about how she wanted to spend that capital.

She realized that she wanted to lead a girls’ clique, a satellite to Trece, the kind she hadn’t found when she moved to the neighborhood. And when it came time to name her cliqua, Serena knew one thing: It wasn’t going to be the “Lady” anythings, an innocent naming convention some gangs borrowed from high- school athletics.

Serena named her girls the Trece Sucias. It didn’t translate directly to English. To call them the 13th Street Dirty Girls just didn’t say it. The name sucias could evoke different things, the nasty girls or the sexy girls, but it also suggested dirty hands, with blood and guilt on them.

For all the fearsomeness of the name, though, Serena had higher standards for her sucias than a lot of leaders would have set. She wouldn’t take girls under fifteen, the quinceanera year being symbolic of womanhood in Hispanic culture. That might sound painfully young to the rest of America, but in gang life, it was a high standard-it wasn’t uncommon for children to start banging at ten or eleven years old. And the two crimes that the Trece Sucias specialized in-car theft and pharmacy burglaries-were both nonviolent, if done with enough caution.

And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, younger girls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds-all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.

It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena’s girls told, thinking I didn’t know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.

But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having familia. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she’d never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”

I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we’d hardly known each other back in school, and that I’d once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.

I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn’t anyone else like Serena in Serena’s world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.

Maybe she understood, too, that I’d honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.

I’d like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn’t even shared with CJ, but it wasn’t true. I didn’t tell CJ because I knew he’d lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn’t. She understood about bad luck.

The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.’s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the