AND SO CONTINUED THE LONELIEST CHRISTMAS break of my life. My mom was so busy working extra shifts at the hospital that I doubt she even noticed I spent pretty much the entire holiday either working or sitting on the couch. When I was at home, I spent most of my time examining my tattoo in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to get more and more hideous every time I looked at it. And that was the weird thing: even though just looking at it made me sick, I couldn’t stop looking at it. It was mesmerizingly horrible. Still, I felt it had its own dark power, and even after it was mostly healed I could still feel it pulsing, as if it had its own heartbeat.
I recognized that my belief in the power of my Our Lady of Lourdes tattoo might just be as superstitious and crazy as Aunt Kathy’s obsession with the ghost of Lady Clara. Still, when I walked into school on the Monday morning after Christmas break with her face hidden beneath my uniform blouse, I felt strong. I felt protected. As I gathered my books for my morning classes, the original Our Lady, painted above my locker, gazed down at me with that saintly half-smile, as if to say, Hey, I know your secret. And I’ve got your back.
I had made a promise to myself on New Year’s Eve, standing alone on our balcony wrapped in my thin peacoat and watching my downstairs neighbors blow off illegal fireworks in the parking lot behind our complex. High school might only make up five percent of my life, but for the next sixty-some years I had left, I was going to be better, starting right now.
How was I going to do it? My plan was pretty basic, actually. Every teenager knows that the cafeteria is the ground zero of social drama at any high school, the place where friendships bloom and die by the simple placement of a lunch tray. The first step for breaking free, I figured, was to stop sitting with Sapphire and Emily and Kenzie at lunch. It was simple, it was bold, and it was terrifying, not just because of how they would react, but because I didn’t have any other friends to fall back on. I’d done the math: In the eyes of 90.5 percent of my classmates, I was a bitchy, stuck-up stranger.
So much for popularity, huh?
When the fourth-period bell rang, I went down to my locker to get my lunch, lingering below the painting of Our Lady, praying for her to give me the strength to do this one small, hard thing. I took a deep breath, walked into the cafeteria clutching my lunch bag in my fist, and, looking straight ahead, I found a table near the vending machines and sat down by myself. I pulled out my Dr Pepper and a leftover piece of strudel I’d brought from the deli and arranged it on my tray. Then I began pretending to work on my Spanish homework. I knew Alexis saw me. I could almost sense a tiny tunnel of hope opening in her heart that maybe I wasn’t a total and complete coward and consummate asswipe. Then I heard Kenzie’s voice, rich with confidence, peal across the vast linoleum plain of the half-empty cafeteria.
“Hey, Wendy! What are you, lost?”
I looked up at her. I could now feel not just Alexis, but the whole school watching me.
“I just have to catch up on some homework,” I mumbled.
“Homework? We just got back from break, dork! Get your ass over here. I have a new man and you need to hear about it.”
“I really have to get this Spanish project done,” I told her. I bit my lip, forcing myself to look her in the eye. She sucked some Diet Coke from her pink bendy straw, staring at me over the lid of the can.
“Your loss.” She shrugged finally, then turned back to her lunch table.
For the rest of the period, I ate my strudel, pretended to do my nonexistent homework, and listened to the conversations that hummed around me in the cafeteria. Girls talked about Christmas and New Year’s and boyfriends and sports and music and clothes and physics homework and Ms. Lee’s new pixie haircut. They traded sleeves of Oreos, bruised bananas, and ziplock bags full of Chex Mix. They worked on their math homework. They borrowed pencils and hair ties and ChapStick.
They were nice to one another.
I realized, as I sat there listening, that Academy of the Sacred Heart was full of kind, funny, genuine girls. Girls who would have accepted me no matter what my last name was. When I thought about how in five months this school would close forever and most of us would be swallowed up in the enormity of Lincoln High School and its labyrinthine hallways packed with 3,200 strangers, I felt tears spring to my eyes, mourning the losses of all the friends I’d never made. And when PE class came along, the last class of the day and the only one I shared with Kenzie, Emily, and Sapphire, I whispered to Sister Dorothy that I had period cramps and asked her if I could just have a study hall that day instead. She opened her mouth, prepared, most likely, to give me a lecture about how girls had been getting their periods since the beginning of time and if every woman felt the need to take the day off just because of a few cramps the world would cease to run. But when she saw the look on my face, the tears in my eyes, she relented and wrote me a pass to the library.
The next afternoon, I carried my tray to the same empty table and sat down, spreading out my things like it was totally normal and not at all awkward. I had barely cracked open my Dr Pepper when Kenzie called out across the cafeteria: “Let me guess: more Spanish homework?”
Alexis was sitting at her table a few rows behind me with Ola and Marlo and a couple other orchestra girls. Don’t go, Wendy, I could feel her thinking. Show me you can be better than them.
Our Lady of Lourdes, I prayed, please let me be brave. Let me be good. Let me stand up to her. In the silence that followed while I waited for some kind of sign, Kenzie picked up her bag of cheese puffs and her Diet Coke. She shook out her hair, stood up, and walked toward me, her micro-mini uniform skirt swishing ominously. Sapphire and Emily gathered up their lunches and followed her.
When she got to my table, Kenzie yanked out an empty chair, sat down across from me, and cracked open her pop.
“Okay,” she said. “If there’s something wrong with that table, then we’ll come to you.”
“Um,” I said. Then my tongue turned into paper. I’d used up the little courage I had on my long march across the cafeteria to this table for one and now I had none left. I suddenly understood what Sister Dorothy meant when she’d told us once that the right thing is always the hardest thing.
For the rest of the lunch period, it was as if nothing had changed, at least outwardly. I heard all about Kenzie’s new boyfriend, an older guy named Gabe, who was a semiprofessional DJ and had his own apartment in Logan Square. I heard about the sick New Year’s party he’d had there, at which Emily had vomited all over his vintage record player and Sapphire had hooked up with an Italian exchange student named Alessio who wore decorative scarves and had never eaten a hot dog.
“So, are you still grounded or what?” Kenzie finally asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said, concentrating on the little air holes in my sandwich bread.
“For how much longer?”
“My mom didn’t really say. At least another couple weeks.”
“God, your mom’s a bitch.”
I winced. Tino was right: Kenzie really was evil. I felt like grabbing her pink bendy straw and poking her mascara-fringed eyes out with it. “Yeah,” I said instead. “She really is.”