AFTER I GOT BACK FROM CHRISTMAS at Aunt Kathy’s, I needed to come up with a plan for avoiding my friends for the remainder of the break. The thought of confronting them directly, of just saying the words I’m done was too terrifying, and I needed to buy myself some time, to figure out a plan. So when Sapphire sent a group text about a Saint Mike’s party that we all COULD NOT MISS because some boy she was obsessed with was going to be there, I made up a lie that my mom had found the bottle of cherry-flavored vodka Kenzie had gotten me to stash under my bed for her earlier that summer. So I’m grounded, I wrote. Can’t even go out for New Year’s or anything.
Grounded? was Kenzie’s skeptical response. Your mom doesn’t really seem like the grounding type.
Well, her dad was an alcoholic, I said, another lie flowing effortlessly across my keyboard. So she’s weird about drinking.
Fine, came the reply. But you better not have told her it was mine.
I couldn’t look Jayden up on Facebook because I didn’t know his last name, and the only person I knew who had his phone number was Kenzie, who I wasn’t about to ask. So what I did was, I just showed up at his garage one afternoon near the end of Christmas break when my mom was at work and I had the day off from the deli.
It was a nasty, freezing, windy day. The snow that had fallen at Christmas had turned dirty and slick; the sky was gray, the sun a weak yellow ball hanging low in the sky. As I trudged through the slushy alley toward Jayden’s garage, I thought of the flight boards at O’Hare, sitting there with Alexis as we fanned ourselves and pretended to dig our toes into the hot sand. Honolulu. Phuket. Fiji.
“You’ve been to California, right?” Alexis had asked me once.
“Yeah, last summer.”
“Tell me about the ocean.”
I’d told her about its briny taste, the delicate crust it left on your skin that made your legs feel like warm sugar pie, about the way it curled back on itself, white and alive, when it crashed against the cliffs. That’s when I fell in love with the idea of going to college out west: UC Santa Cruz. Loyola Marymount. Santa Clara. Or maybe if I did really well on the ACT and got some sort of huge scholarship—hey, if I was going to fantasize, I might as well really go for it—Stanford.
I took a deep breath and knocked on the garage door. After a moment it yawned open. Jayden stood there in a puffer vest and sweatpants, glowering into the light from the cave of his garage. I stepped inside.
“You’re Kenzie’s friend, right?” He pressed a button and the garage door screeched shut behind me. “Sergeant Boychuck’s kid.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if you could give me a tattoo,” I said.
“Course I can. What do you want?”
I scrolled through my phone and found the picture of Our Lady of Lourdes that my mother had painted in the Saints Corridor, the one that had been watching over me since the day I started high school, that was the patron saint of my family, that had saved my aunt Kathy’s life, and that now, I hoped, was going to save mine.
Jayden took the phone from me and squinted at the screen.
“Is that the Virgin Mary?”
“Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s the Virgin Mary as she appeared to Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto in Lourdes, France, in 1858. There are, like, hundreds of different versions of the mother of Jesus in Catholicism. Our Lady of Lourdes is one. Our Lady of Knock is another. Queen of Peace, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, the Blessed Mother, the Madonna, you get the idea.”
“Of course I get it. I’m Mexican. You basically want Our Lady of Guadalupe, but white.”
“Our principal says that the Virgin Mary transcends our ideas of race or ethnicity.”
“Wow.” Jayden whistled. “They teach you pretty good up at that Catholic school. So where do you want this Virgin Mary who transcends race and ethnicity, anyway?”
“Across my right shoulder. Just like the Pazyryk people.”
“That some new gang I don’t know about?”
“No,” I laughed. “They’re a tribe who lived in ancient Siberia. They wore tattoos on their right shoulders. For protection.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thanks for the history lesson. This is a sacred ancient art form I practice in this garage here. Which is why I charge the big bucks. You got money?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then. You’re lucky you caught me on a slow day. This is gonna take three, four hours just to do the outline. Then we wait for it to heal—which will take a couple more weeks. Then you come back and I’ll fill in the color.” He peered at the picture on my phone and nodded to himself. “Yeah. Two sessions. You can pay me at the end.”
He had me lie facedown on the office chair, my chin hanging over the headrest so that I was looking down at the concrete floor.
“You’re going to need to take your shirt off,” he said. I complied, and he moved the space heater closer when the goose bumps began popping up and down my back.
“You’re going to have to take your bra off, too.”
“No problem.” I tried to sound casual, but my heart was hammering in my chest. I reached back and unclasped the bra, feeling my breasts fall free, and I squirmed so that they wouldn’t show between the cushions of the office chair. I remembered all my dad’s cautionary tales about the women’s bodies he’d seen, raped, beaten, strangled, dropped in rivers, and chopped up in abandoned suitcases. And here I was, in a garage with some strange man, shirtless, while not one person on earth knew where I was, and my phone was floating somewhere at the bottom of my backpack, just out of reach on the ground beside my chair. I stared at the motor oil stains on the garage floor, squeezed my bra tightly in my hands, and felt my mouth go dry with dread.
“Sorry, but I’m not gonna be able to talk to you while I work,” Jayden said, adjusting his earbuds. “I need music to help me concentrate.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just . . . zone out or something.”
“Do whatever you gotta do.” He brought up his music on his phone and placed it on the workbench. After he traced the design onto my back, there was a jolt as the needle buzzed to life and bored its way into my skin. At first, I had to fight the urge to flinch and squirm—I knew it would hurt, but I hadn’t realized how badly—but soon the sharp, even pain suffused from my back throughout my body, purifying my mind of fear, and I relaxed. There’s something about physical pain that almost feels like relief—it’s so simple, so clean; you know exactly why you have it and exactly where it came from and exactly what you need to do to make it stop. I’d take it any day over loneliness or fear or heartbreak or that weird lost feeling that had dogged me ever since the day I decided not to be Alexis’s friend anymore. The harder Jayden pressed into my skin, the more it hurt, and the more it hurt, the more relief I felt, until the pain had become a part of me, beating through my body like blood. I almost couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel it, so when the garage door groaned open again and I saw a silhouette, backlit by the snow, step into the garage, I was grateful when Jayden kept working, not even bothering to look up and see who it was.
“Wendy?” Tino squinted into the darkness of the garage. He was carrying a greasy bag from Suzy’s Red Hots. “Is that you?”
Mortified, I squirmed against my chair, hoping to God that my breasts were fully covered.
“I didn’t know you had tattoos.”
“I don’t,” I said a little too defensively. “Just this one.”
He craned his neck to check it out.
“What is that supposed to be?”
“It’s Our Lady of Lourdes.”
“Oh. Is that kinda like Our Lady of Guadalupe, but white?”
Jayden swiped off his earbuds. “The mother of Jesus transcends ideas of race and ethnicity, dude,” he said in a high, urgent voice that was clearly meant to make fun of me. Then he stuffed the buds back in his ears and resumed his work.
“Does it look all right?” I asked.
Tino leaned closer.
“It’s hard to tell—he’s still only, like, halfway through. It’s probably gonna be another hour or two.”
He rolled one of the wheelie chairs over and sat next to me.
“Need someone to keep you company?”
“Sure,” I said. “I feel like I’ve been here forever. I’m not used to just, like, lying around without my phone, you know?”
“Totally. They write you up if you use your phone at work, but kids are getting fired over it all the time. Bad habits.”
“Where do you work?”
“Target.” He grinned. “Didn’t you notice my Red Team polo shirt? I’m just coming from there now. Today I had to break up an actual fistfight between two crazy college girls fighting over the last sequined tunic from the guest designer collection.”
“An actual fistfight?”
“There was punching. And scratching. And the popping off of fake nails.”
“Who got the tunic?”
“Nobody! They both got arrested.”
“Sounds a lot more exciting than a day at the Europa Deli. You don’t really see too many fistfights over the last batch of smoked trout.”
“I thought you worked there!” He sat up in his chair and turned his snapback so the brim was facing forward and his eyes were cast in shadow.
“Yeah, I work there. How did you know?”
“I saw you through the window last weekend. I waved to you, but you didn’t see me. You were scooping some potato salad for this old dude.”
My mind traced back to the previous weekend. Had I worn makeup to work that day? Had I been wearing my hairnet? It seemed very important that I remember the answers to these questions.
“Well,” I finally said, “why didn’t you come in and say hi?”
“I was going to, but you were kinda busy. I was gonna buy some of that homemade dumpling soup they got. You ever had that soup?”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“It’s superb.”
I laughed. “Well, it’s one of our bestsellers. The old Polish ladies line up in the mornings, after mass, to buy these big tubs of it.”
“What do they put in there? They got a secret ingredient or something?”
“I don’t do the cooking,” I explained. “I just work the deli counter. But the owners, Alice and Maria, they’ve got some recipes that have been passed down for, like, generations.”
“Man, I could go for some of that dumpling soup right now. It’s so much better than this crap.” He held up a wilted french fry.
“Well, you should have told me that. I get a fifty percent discount. I could’ve brought you some.”
“Dammit.” He shook his head. “But wait. How could I have asked you to bring me dumpling soup if I don’t have your number?”
Up until now, I’d been starting to relax, a new feeling for me when talking to a cute boy. But now I froze. I mean, was this him asking me for my number? Was I now supposed to offer it? Well, I was not going to do that. I’d been burned before.
“I guess I should just start carrying a tub of it around in my backpack, in case I run into you,” I said instead. I thought for a minute that I saw his face fall, but it was hard to tell in the dim red-and-green glow of the garage and his hat pulled down low.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “it may have been a shitty day at Target, but hey, now I’m sitting here having a nice conversation with a beautiful topless woman, so I guess things could be worse.”
Beautiful. Did he just call me beautiful?
“Can you try to relax, Wendy?” Jayden interrupted. “You’re, like, trembling all of a sudden.”
“Sorry.” If a person could die from blushing so hard that all the blood in their brain rushes to their face, I would definitely no longer be alive.
“So,” Tino said, spinning back and forth in his wheelie chair and knitting his fingers behind his neck, “he’s a real piece of shit, isn’t he?”
“What?” I looked at him, the giddiness of the previous moment immediately replaced by another, more familiar feeling. “I mean, you don’t even know him. Being a cop is one of the hardest jobs—”
“What? No!” He shook his head. “I’m not talking about your dad. You know, paranoia is a real medical condition, Wendy. I’m talking about Iago.”
“Iago?” I said dumbly.
“Yeah. Like, one of the worst characters in all of literature.”
“Oh.” The relief gushed out of me like a deflating balloon. “You’re talking about Othello. Sorry.”
“I mean, aside from being totally racist, he was just conniving and evil and awful. You know who he reminds me of, actually?” He turned his hat backward so that now I could finally see his eyes clearly. “That friend of yours.”
“She’s not my friend anymore.” Even as I said it, I realized that this was only true in my head. It was going to be a lot harder to make it true in real life. It was one thing to blow off Kenzie’s texts, to pretend I was grounded as an excuse for why I couldn’t hang out. But I knew that once we got back to school, I would have to face her and Emily and Sapphire head on. I would have to find the courage to walk away.
“So,” Tino said, “you finally saw the light?”
“I finally saw the light.”
“I’m glad.”
I smiled.
“Me too.”
By the end of the third hour, evening had fallen and the golden purity of the pain had given way to a yellow agony that didn’t clear my mind so much as muddle it. I couldn’t talk to Tino anymore. I just had to focus on the pain. He went over to the couch and read his book, while I began to concentrate on not passing out or barfing. The smell of Suzy’s Red Hots hung in the air, a pungent mix of au jus and fries, except now, instead of making me hungry, it was starting to make me nauseated.
“Almost done,” Jayden reassured me over the buzzing needle, as if he could feel the tension through my skin. Finally, when I was at the point of abandoning my pride and flat-out begging him to stop, the pressure eased, and the needle snapped into silence. Jayden called Tino over to check out his handiwork.
“Pretty dope, huh?” he said.
Tino didn’t say anything. I didn’t take that as a very good sign.
Jayden took a picture of my shoulder with my phone and brought it around to show me. All I saw was an expanse of pink, swollen skin. I couldn’t even get a good look at the tattoo itself because blood was seeping from my pores as quickly as he could blot it away.
“The blood and stuff is normal,” Jayden said. “This is a real operation. Clean. Professional. Tell your friends.”
I tried to answer him, but found that I couldn’t speak. Black spots were worming across my vision, like my eyes had become lava lamps, and I sat slumped in the chair with my face pressed against the damp stickiness of the headrest, waiting for the feeling to pass.
“Hey.” Tino’s voice was soft and close by. “Take it easy. Let me help you.” Jayden sauntered out to the alley for a cigarette while Tino took his place on the little wheelie stool. With as much gentleness as my mom’s nurse’s touch, he began patting the A+D Ointment onto my skin.
“I guess I’m just a wimp,” I murmured.
“Nah.” I felt his gentle fingers, the goodness of him, even through the aching of everything else. “The first one is always the hardest. My William Shakespeare nearly killed me.”
He reached to the floor and picked up my bra.
“Lift up your arms,” he instructed. “I’m not going to look, okay?”
“Okay.”
Somehow, he managed to loop the bra straps around my shoulders and hook them closed over the gauze while keeping his eyes squeezed shut the whole time. Then he helped me with my shirt. Finally he stuck out his hand. I put mine in his, and he pulled me to my feet.
“Does it look all right?” I asked. “Be honest.” His eyes, I noticed, were the color of brown velvet. Not flashily gorgeous, like the flinty copper of Darry’s, but softer, kinder. They seemed to absorb light, not reflect it, and they had a pattern of lighter brown threaded throughout, like honeycomb.
“I’m not gonna lie to you,” he said. “It’s not Jay’s best work ever, okay? But, I mean, it’s still hard to say. You’re going to have to let it heal before you can really get a sense of it. You’re going to have to see the final product.”
I followed him out into the alley on shaky legs.
“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t you let me walk you to your car?”
“Okay.”
I leaned on his shoulder as we picked our way through the slushy potholes in the alleys and back out onto Fullerton Avenue. We didn’t talk, but I didn’t feel the need to fill our silence with nervous chatter, the way I usually did.
“So,” he said when we arrived at Red Rocket.
“So,” I said.
We looked at each other.
“You’ve gotta come back in a couple weeks and get it finished, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. So I’ll probably see you then?”
“I’ll see you then.”
“Bye, Wendy.” He brushed his hand on the arm of my coat. I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what and I didn’t know how. He put his hands in his pockets and disappeared back down the alley.
When I got home, the apartment was dark. My mom was at work as usual. She’d left a plate of cold ham and baked beans under plastic wrap on the counter. Just below me, Sonny was blasting AC/DC, the album he listened to when he was getting himself pumped for a night on the town. I left the plate of ham untouched, locked myself in the bathroom, removed my shirt, and gingerly unpeeled the bloody, sticky gauze to examine the tattoo. I craned my neck around and, when I saw it clearly in the mirror, I felt a rising panic in my gut.
The face of Our Lady of Lourdes was drawn with rough black lines, thicker in some places than others, like when I’m trying to take notes in class but my mind wanders and my pen, held in place for too long, bleeds blots of ink on my paper. Absent of color, its face looked more like that of a demon woman in serious need of an exorcism than the mother of Jesus appearing to a young French girl in a grotto. Its eyes were unnaturally large and round, pupil-less, and seeping little dots of blood through my aching pores. It watched me watch it, silent, dead-eyed, unholy.
I just barely made it to the toilet, painting the bowl with a yellowish mess of the potato pierogies I’d eaten for lunch. Then I lay on the cool tiles, splayed on my stomach, until the nausea passed. Slowly, I rewrapped the wound with gauze and changed into a loose sweatshirt that wouldn’t stick to my skin, then flopped onto my bed and opened my laptop, desperate to think about anything but the thing I’d tattooed across my shoulder. I fiddled around on social media for a little while before tapping into my email. That’s when I saw something that made me want to puke all over again.
A PRISONER FROM THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS HAS SENT YOU AN EMAIL. TO ACCEPT, CLICK THE LINK BELOW.
IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE CONTACTED BY INMATE STEPHEN BOYCHUCK, PLEASE CLICK HERE.
This was not shaping up to be a very good day.
My dad had sent me various cards and letters since his imprisonment, for Christmas and Valentine’s Day and my birthday. Whenever I saw my name printed in those small, neat capital letters and the Nebraska postmark, I threw the mail away unopened. So I don’t know why I opened the email now, even though my fingers had turned into gummy worms and my heart slammed in my chest. But I did, and there in front of me were words written by my father, the first words I was allowing him to speak to me in over two years.
Hi honey,
How’s my girl?
So, they have this new program where you can email for 5 cents a minute (better type quick, I guess, haha!). If you’re reading this, it means that you agreed to read my letter, and that makes me so happy. Mom says you’ve grown three inches, that you wear your hair down these days, that you’re even wearing mascara and rouge and all that other stuff I KNOW you don’t need because you’re perfect just the way you are (I know, I know, that might be the most “dad” thing anyone has ever typed).
Anyway. Things here are okay, I guess. The best word I can use to describe prison is BORING. When you kids were first born, people would tell us, with a new baby in the house the years are short but the days are long. That’s how prison feels. Except the years are long, too. And my babies aren’t here. So I guess it’s not the same at all.
One good thing, they have programs here to help us pass the time. I’ve started a painting class. I know what you’re thinking—the only thing I’ve ever painted is drywall. Remember when I tried to help you paint your dollhouse? And the job I did on the shutters? Yeesh. But still, I like it. It gives me something to do. And I’ve been reading, too. Probably more books than I’ve ever read in the rest of my life combined. I’m hoping that by the time I get out of here I’ll be smart, like my kids.
Well, anyway. Just thought I’d drop you a line. Remember the lyric from “Born to Run,” the one we named you for? Well, Wendy, I want you to know that I still love you with all the madness in my soul. And I’ll keep loving you, like the stubborn bastard I am, no matter how you feel about me. When it comes to your kids, love ain’t always a two-way street, you know? It goes and goes and goes, even if there’s no traffic coming in the other direction.
All my love,
Daddy
I closed my laptop, stood up, and paced around the apartment for a while. I wanted to call my mom, or Aunt Colleen, or Aunt Kathy. I wanted to call Alexis. I wanted to go out partying with Kenzie and Sapphire and Emily in something tight and skimpy, drinking beer until my stomach hurt and my head felt like a balloon. I wanted to grab Tino by the shoulders and kiss him until I forgot who I was.
But instead, I unwrapped the plate of ham and beans, warmed it up in the microwave, and ate my dinner alone at the kitchen table. When I was finished, I washed and dried my dishes, sat back in front of the laptop, and composed a very short reply to my father’s email.
Don’t ever contact me again. I won’t respond. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a father.
I hit send immediately, before I could change my mind.
During one of her many anti-war lectures, Sister Dorothy told us about the drone pilots whose job it is to attack targets in the Middle East from the safety of an American Air Force base. The way she described it was sort of like a video game where instead of seeing in real life the spray of blood, the torn-apart limbs, the screaming children and howling women and rubbled houses after an air strike, you watch your destruction onscreen, thousands of miles from the front lines. But, she said, the strange thing is, killing from afar doesn’t prevent those soldiers from getting PTSD, because they still have the knowledge of what they’ve done, without the honor of having risked their own lives to do it.
On a much smaller scale, sending a hateful email must feel a little like that. All you’re doing is sitting at a computer. All you’re doing is moving your mouse over the send button and clicking it. You don’t see the email zipping through the atmosphere. You don’t see the explosion in the recipient’s heart when they read what you’ve written. You believe that what you’re doing is necessary, even good, and yet after it’s done, even as soon as it’s done, the thought of that exploded heart begins to seep into your own heart, a cold, wet drip.
After I sent my dad that email, I felt great.
Five seconds later, I burst into tears.