Hailey's War by Jodi Compton Read Free Book Online

“What happens when you run out of room?”
    She said, “Maybe I’ll get out of the life.”
    *  *  *
    When she was done cooking, Serena and I carried our late-night meal into her bedroom. Just before I followed her in, though, I heard the sleeping bag in the dining room stir, looked back, and did a slight double take.
    Serena switched on a lamp and shut the bedroom door.
    I said, “Either the girl out there has three legs, or there were two girls under that sleeping bag.”
    â€œYeah, there were.”
    â€œAre you that low on blankets and sleeping space?”
    â€œWell, the spare bedroom’s taken, and so is the living-room couch,” she said. “But the girls just like to be close. They’re not gay, it’s just that they like to feel …” She trailed off. “It’s safety in numbers. It’s just something you have to understand.”
    â€œSure,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
    We sat on her bed and ate, and then Serena reached under the bed for an old wooden box. She rummaged inside and found a Polaroid of a group of teenage boys, all with heads shaved, in voluminous shirts buttoned only at 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 Iwas 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.
    â€œIt 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?”
    â€œThere are helicopters all over California,” I pointed out. “They’re in the sky all the time.”
    â€œWay up in the sky,” she corrected me. “Not down low where the sound of the blades feels like your own heart beating.”