Neighborhood Girls Read online

Just then, a crash came from inside the garage, a beer bottle smashed to pieces, and two blond boys locked in some sort of wresting stance came tumbling out into the alley, fists flailing, while the rest of the party followed, yelling encouragement.

  “Oh, shit.” Darry shifted his gaze to the boys as they fell onto the pavement and proceeded to pummel each other. “Those are the O’Donnell twins. They do this every weekend. Hey, Wendy, I should get your—”

  “Cops!” someone screamed, just as the warning blat! of a siren ripped through the night and the alley lit up in flashing swirls of blue and red. Kids began streaming from the garage like ants from a kicked anthill, tossing their beer cups and scattering down the alley, over fences, and through yards.

  “Shit!” Darry said again, grabbing my hand. “Come on!”

  He braced his arms on the top of the gate behind the garbage cans and launched himself into a neighbor’s yard, then turned around and held out his hand while I hooked my feet into the laths of the fence. As I toppled over the edge he caught me, his body a wall of summer heat, still smelling faintly of the soap I’d first noticed when he’d stirred the air around me in the ticket line at Saint Mike’s. I felt dizzy, unsure of whether it was the siren lights flashing through the yard, pitching it from red to blue to dark again, or being there with him, so close that his sweat was dampening my clothes. We took off running hand in hand, hopping the low chain-link fences that bordered identical squares of Chicago backyards, our hearts pumping with that glorious mix of adrenaline and fear where you know you might get caught but you think you probably won’t and your night is unfolding into a story that will be worth telling Monday morning at school. We kept running at full speed, even when the sirens had long disappeared and our legs ached and the whispers and drunken laughter of the other running, hiding kids had faded away. We kept running for so long that I started to think that maybe this is what we’d wanted all along—to be alone together—and finally, after we’d hopped our hundredth fence and I could feel the blood on my heels rubbed raw against the backs of my espadrilles, I stopped in front of a wall of high bushes threaded with browning lilacs and pulled Darry to a halt by the back of his shirt.

  “You can slow down now,” I gasped. “I’m pretty sure we’re in the clear.”

  “Sorry,” Darry laughed, leaning with his hands against his knees and wiping the sweat off his forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt. “It’s just that my dad’s a cop. If I got caught, the arresting officers would tell him they caught me drinking, and he’d kick my ass.”

  I nodded, grateful that I was still catching my breath so that I didn’t have to respond. After all, my dad was once a cop, too.

  I slumped down into the grass, my back pressed up against the vines, and he sat next to me.

  “Hey,” he said, turning to me, and before I could say “hey” back, he was leaning over to kiss me. I guess he isn’t big on small talk, I thought, as his tongue wormed its way into my mouth.

  A word about kissing: I secretly think it’s overrated. It’s not like I’m frigid or anything. I think cuddling, for example, is adorable. And hugging is like crack for the soul. But kissing? The tongues, the drool, the paranoia about bad breath? No, thanks. My theory is that the only reason people kiss is because if your mouth is occupied, you don’t have to talk. And who wants to chitchat when they’re touching another person’s body for the first time? That would be incredibly awkward. Which is why you never see old married couples making out. They still hug. They still hold hands. And if I had to guess, they still probably have sex (ew). They’ve just dropped the drooling, pawing makeout sessions, because when you’ve been smelling someone’s farts for decades, awkward silences are no longer much of a concern.

  I know what you’re going to say: if you kiss the right person, you’re supposed to feel electrified. Weak in the knees. Dizzy. And maybe that’s true. But the thing is, I knew I was attracted to Darry. I wanted to touch his hair and feel the soft skin of his neck and the worn cotton of his Saint Mike’s Wrestling T-shirt. I wanted him to kiss me. But then when he did, my mind went to the same place it always went every time I’d kissed a boy: I wondered when it was going to be over. So when a floodlight snapped on and the owner of the house stepped onto the deck and yelled, “Hey! What do you kids think you’re doing back there?” I was embarrassed and startled, but not really all that disappointed.

  Maybe the next time he kissed me, I thought, as he grabbed my hand and we went flying back over fences and through manicured yards, then I’d feel something. Because that was the other weird part about kissing: even though I didn’t enjoy it, I still wanted to do it again.

  As we climbed our last fence and emerged back into the world hand in hand, I saw that we were standing by the train tracks, at the place were Tiffany and Sandy’s whitewashed crosses stood still and crooked beside the railroad ties.

  “My dad told me that when they died,” Darry said, stooping down to pick an empty Cheetos bag from the tangle of carnations someone had left there, “their bodies were so messed up that their parents had to identify them by their high heels.”

  “There’s this painting of Our Lady of Lourdes in the hallway at ASH,” I said. “Legend has it that she wept for a week after they died.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Well, I mean, I don’t know. Afterward, the janitor found a leaky air-conditioning unit on the floor just above the painting. But still. The timing kind of creeps me out.”

  “All right,” he said, “if you believe that, then I’ve got another one for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you know that if you come here at midnight when there’s a full moon, and you say their names out loud, the streetlights explode?”

  “I never heard that one.” I looked up at the streetlamp above us, which beamed a halo of white light onto the street. The moon, I noticed with some relief, was only a sliver in the clear September sky. “Do you believe that?”

  “Not really,” he said, then turned and smiled at me so that my heart squeezed a little tighter. “But maybe we should try it for ourselves sometime.”

  “I don’t really feel like disturbing the dead, if it’s okay with you.”

  “My grandma used to say that we shouldn’t fear the dead—it’s the living we should be afraid of.”

  This made me shiver.

  “Hey,” he said suddenly. “You ever gonna answer my question?”

  “What question?”

  “The one I asked about your dad.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He lives in Nebraska. And I haven’t seen him in a while. So I was just thinking about him, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Now I get it. I mean, it sucks that you don’t get to see him much, but trust me, there’s an upside to it. My parents tried the whole let’s-get-divorced-but-live-in-the-same-neighborhood-for-our-kids’-sake thing. It’s weird how, now that I have two houses, I feel like I have less than one. And it seems like whatever I need at Mom’s house, I left at Dad’s. And vice versa. I leave my history book at my dad’s house literally every Sunday. My teacher is starting to think it’s bullshit.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “My parents aren’t divorced. They’re . . .”

  I looked down the empty train tracks to where they disappeared into the hazy Chicago skyline. If this was going to go anywhere, he would eventually have to find out somehow.

  “My last name,” I said “is Boychuck.”

  I saw a tremor, the tiniest frowny movement, in the corner of his smile. His fingers slackened in mine.

  “Boychuck as in Sergeant Stephen Boychuck?”

  I nodded. “Is that a problem?”

  “No, not a problem,” he said quickly, but something in his voice had gone cold. He let go of my hand.

  “Good.” I smiled, trying to fake our way back to flirty. “Because, you know, I’m not like him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Darry cleared
his throat.

  “No, I don’t think that,” he said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “So, which way to your house?”

  I pointed down the sidewalk. “Just a couple blocks that way.”

  “Are you okay to get home by yourself?” He pulled out his phone and held its glowing shape to me. “It’s getting late. I gotta get going. My mom is going to kill me enough as it is.”

  “Sure,” I said quickly. “It’s no problem.”

  We stood there across from each other before the crosses of the dead ASH girls. “So,” I said, “should I give you my phone number or something?”

  Darry’s hand hovered over his cell.

  “The thing is,” he said finally, “my dad just made commander.” He looked at me, waiting for me, I guess, to tell him that I understood. But the words were jammed up at the base of my throat, and I couldn’t say anything. “I mean,” he continued, “it’s not that I care, but I think it would look bad. For my dad. If, you know, you and me were hanging out. Because, you know, people still—cops, I mean—he made the whole department look bad. You know?”

  I nodded woodenly. My eyes burned, but I blinked fiercely until the tears went away. It’s not that I was, like, in love with Darry. I’d only known him for a couple hours! But here it was again, this curse that would trail me all my life. The curse that struck every time someone figured out who I was.

  “You understand, right?”

  “Totally. It’s cool.” My heart had dried up like salt, but my two years of popularity had skilled me in the art of pretending to be happy. I smiled. Never let them know how much you care, and then they can’t hurt you. This was my Aunt Colleen’s advice in the days after my father’s arrest when reporters were camped out on the lawn and #boychuck was trending on Twitter. I stood on the sidewalk, trying so hard not to care, and watched Darry disappear around the corner, the piney smell of his skin still hanging on my clothes.

  When I got home, I was so close to calling Alexis Nichols. I’d long ago erased her number from my phone, but of course I still knew it by heart—she had been my best friend for nine years, after all. I knew that she would give me good advice, and more importantly, that she would listen. She wouldn’t say something like, “you’re so much hotter than he is anyway,” or “Who cares? Just find someone else!” or “Are you seriously upset by this? You met the dude once, psycho,” all of which were pieces of advice I’d heard Kenzie dole out to our brokenhearted friends at one time or another. Alexis would understand that it wasn’t even about Darry at all. She would understand everything.

  Which was exactly why I’d abandoned her.

  4

  IT WAS JUNE, ONE WEEK AFTER my eighth-grade graduation, when my father was arrested. I had just helped him digitize his CD collection, and we were out in the garage together, blasting Bruce Springsteen and Turtle Waxing his ’72 Mustang.

  “If these speakers got any louder,” he shouted to me approvingly from across the cherry-red hood, “we could be fined for a noise violation.” At that moment, as if on cue, the first police car came down the alley. Dad straightened up, grinning. His cop buddies sometimes stopped by to shoot the breeze when they were cruising down our alley on neighborhood detail, because in the summers, my dad spent a lot of time in the garage doing typical Dad things—babying the Mustang, drinking beer, watching the Cubs on the little black-and-white TV he had mounted above his tool bench. Inside our house, my mom and Aunt Colleen were arranging big foil trays of macaroni salad and fried chicken for my graduation party, while Stevie Junior and Uncle Jimbo played beanbags beneath the big oak tree in the backyard.

  The smile faded from my dad’s face, though, as another police car came down the alley, and then another, and, from the other direction, an unmarked squad. Something was about to go down.

  “The hell’s going on out here?” Dad put down his rag and walked out to the alley. He turned to me. “Wendy, turn that music down.”

  The two cops who got out of the first car didn’t look like they’d come to chat: their faces were hard and their hands rested on their guns. One of them, Terry Ryan, was an old friend of my dad’s, a guy I’d known all my life, a guy who came to our family parties and whose two young daughters I sometimes babysat. But I almost didn’t recognize him, because the Terry I knew had pale, laughing eyes and sometimes let his little girls paint his toenails pink, and today his face was set in these firm, cold lines that made him look like an entirely different man. His eyes were like gray stones, and they seemed to hover just above my dad—at his forehead, sort of, as if they were unwilling or unable to make direct eye contact. Lots of kids my age think it’s cool to hate cops, but being from a cop family, I could never understand why you’d despise the people whose job it is to save your life if you’re ever in trouble. Looking at Terry Ryan now, though, my stomach dropped. I could see how a person could fear—could even hate—the police.

  Terry said something quietly to my dad, while the other cops got out of their cars, hands hovering near guns, and then my dad said, “not in front of my kid.” And they all looked over at me, standing in my bare feet in front of the speakers with the stupid laptop in my hands, which were shaking so hard I could barely hold on to it.

  “Terry?” My voice was small. I heard footsteps behind me and then my mom was standing there, too, still wearing oven mitts on both hands, with Aunt Col trailing through the yard behind her.

  “Terry!” she said sharply. “What’s going on?”

  He wouldn’t look at her. Instead, he put his hands on my dad’s shoulders—almost gently, the way a coach might calm down a player before an important free throw—and turned him around so he could click the handcuffs closed around his wrists.

  “Wait!” I screamed. “You don’t need to arrest him! We’ll pay the fine! How much can it be for a noise violation? I’ve got a bunch of graduation money coming—” I stopped talking when I saw the faces of Terry and the other cops, tight and self-conscious with pity. It’s funny, when I look back on it now, how unbelievably naïve I was.

  Terry opened the door of the squad, and just like they do on TV, he put his hand on the top of my dad’s head and guided him into the back seat.

  “This is all a big misunderstanding,” my dad told my mom, who was covering her open mouth with an oven mitt. Stevie Junior and Uncle Jimbo were standing behind her now, dumbly holding the sets of beanbags in their hands. “I’ll call you.”

  “Now just what the hell—” Uncle Jimbo took a step toward the alley, but Terry ignored him, closed the car door, and got into the driver’s seat. One by one, the police returned to their cars, leaving us standing in the garage with “The River” playing faintly in the background and one half of a Mustang waxed to a mirror shine. And then, like a funeral procession, they took off down the alley, turning out of sight down McVicker Avenue.

  It was the story of the summer. Reporters actually camped out on our front lawn until Uncle Jimbo tried to run them off with his riding mower. This made things even worse, because one of my dickhead neighbors recorded the incident and posted it on YouTube, where it racked up three hundred thousand views by the end of the weekend. I sat in my room alone and punished myself by reading all the user comments.

  Overnight, the name Boychuck became the new Capone, the new Dillinger, and my father became the most hated man in Chicago. In a city of rival baseball teams, machine politics, and gang warfare, hating Sergeant Stephen Boychuck was the one thing that everyone—black, white, rich, poor, north siders, south siders—could agree on.

  They said that he tortured confessions out of nearly a hundred suspects—electrocuting them, beating them, shoving loaded shotguns in their mouths, whipping them with power cords. They said he harassed and intimidated suspects and witnesses and neighborhood activists, some of them women, some of them old, some of them only fourteen or fifteen. They said he had no heart, that he was a sadist, and that he had single-handedly destroyed the credibility of an entire department of twelve thousand officers.
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  How was it possible? My dad was one of the good guys. All my life, he’d painted a picture for us of the twenty-sixth district, where he worked, as a world that was less than ten miles from our house but might as well be on a different planet. According to him, his beat was a battleground of good and evil, and there was no in-between. In my dad’s stories, he was the great force that strode through the neighborhood, protecting the hardworking normal people and destroying the gangbangers and thugs. When he worked the night shift, he’d often come home as me and Stevie Junior were getting ready for school. He’d greet us with barely a grunt, the purple bags like weights under his eyes, and go straight to bed. He wouldn’t come out until we were eating dinner, when it was time for him to leave for work again. And I’d always thought that’s what saving the world did to a person—it sapped you of your energy and your ability to show your family that you loved them. I resented everybody in the twenty-sixth for the sins they committed that weighed so heavily on my poor, heroic father.

  We had to borrow money from my aunt Kathy, who’d never liked my dad in the first place, to bond him out. The night before his bench trial began, we had a family meeting in the kitchen—me, Stevie Junior, and my parents.

  “I want everyone to be prepared,” my dad said. His voice was quiet and neutral. “I’m going to be found guilty, and I’m going to go to jail.”

  “But that’s bullshit!” Stevie Junior exploded. Ever since my dad’s arrest, he’d been out with his friends or his girlfriend nearly all the time. When he was at home, he’d go straight to his room, shut the door, and blast heavy metal until the house shook. It was shitty, the way he gave me no choice but to make me deal with it by myself. And even shittier when, the day after my dad went to prison, he dropped out of college and took off to join the navy. “You were only doing your job!” Stevie was insisting now. “You were trying to get those scumbags off the streets. You didn’t even do anything wrong!”

  “I know.” My dad took a long sip from his bottle of beer.