Hailey's War by Jodi Compton Read Free Book Online Page A

She placed her fist on her sternum. “I swear, Hailey. The first time I saw a helicopterup 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,