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

if done with enough caution.
    And Serena was careful. Her crew only knocked over a few pharmacies a year, at quiet suburban locations Serena carefully scouted, and while she and a trusted second raided the back for lucrative prescription drugs that Serena resold around her neighborhood, youngergirls swept the shelves of Pampers, baby food, cough syrup, and OTC meds—all things desperately needed among the young mothers of the barrio.
    It would be nice to imagine Serena as a kind of urban feminist Robin Hood, but I knew better than to indulge in that kind of fantasy. Violence was inextricable from gang life: grudges and retaliations, attacks and counterattacks, beatings and shootings. I heard the stories Serena’s girls told, thinking I didn’t know enough Spanish to understand. And they routinely went around strapped, meaning carrying a gun.
    But this lifestyle of retaliation and revenge was the price of having
familia
. In its perverse way, it was a virtue, the dark side of loyalty. Serena encouraged the same kind of loyalty among them that the guys had for one another. Unlike male gang members, though, girls affiliated with the same clique often fought viciously with one another, sometimes over gossip, more often over a boy. Serena said she’d never let her clique be divided over a man: “The sucias are for the sucias,” she told them. “We represent like the guys.”
    I didn’t learn all of this at once, of course. But after that first night, Serena was surprisingly open with me, given that we’d hardly known each other back in school, and that I’d once been the straightest of straight arrows, Cadet Hailey Cain.
    I think that Serena had been waiting for someone she could talk to. She had to front around the guys, with whom sharing her feelings would have been a liability. And she cared for her sucias, but they were little more than children, with short attention spans and narrow worldviews. There wasn’t anyone else like Serena in Serena’s world. The person who came closest, skin color notwithstanding, was me.
    Maybe she understood, too, that I’d honored her when, in time, I told her the full truth about why I had to leave West Point.
    I’d like to say that I was wracked with guilt over telling her something I hadn’t even shared with CJ, but it wasn’t true. I didn’t tell CJ because I knew he’d lie awake at night thinking about it. Serena wouldn’t. She understood about bad luck.
    The day after I told her, we went to the Beverly Center, L.A.’s cathedral of capitalism, and did something the rest of the world wouldn’t understand but that made sense to us.
    Perhaps it was inevitable that Serena started to kid me about getting initiated into her clique. She said I could become her second. I took it as gentle condescension. But she kept on it, asking me when I was going to take my beating, get jumped in for real. Slowly I began to realize that she wasn’t entirely kidding, and I began to understand. The things that set me apart from her sucias were, in fact, assets—chief among them my white skin and blond hair. Those alone would make me the ideal driver on a pharmacy job. I was the anti-profile; any LAPD officer would think twice before pulling me over.
    â€œLook at the way you live now,” she said one evening, watching me gingerly put makeup on a bruise I’d gotten in a bar fight. “Getting beat on, partying, sleeping until noon, no plans for the future—how is that any different from
la vida?”
She’d put an arm around me and looked at us in the mirror. “Come and be
mi gladia.”
    â€œGladius meus,”
I said.
My sword
. Serena had learned all the words that went with her warlike life
—milites, hostes, bellum, mors
—but she tended to hybridize them with Spanish. “And no thanks. I’ve seen the beatings that your girls give each other jumping them in, and those are bad