When I was fifteen, I would have wanted my mother, too, but it was hard to picture Sandy Zoltak thinking about another person with the passion and care my mother had felt for me. I found myself blinking back tears—of frustration, fatigue, longing for my mother—I didn’t know what.
I abruptly left the area, prowling around the hall until I saw Sandra return from the emergency room to the admissions desk. When I went over, she was fishing an insurance card out of her wallet. By-Smart was written on it in big letters; I was relieved but surprised—from what I’d read, the company didn’t provide insurance to their cashiers. Of course, Romeo drove for them; maybe he had real benefits. When Sandra had finished filling out forms, I asked if she wanted me to wait for her.
Her mouth twisted. “You? I don’t need your help for anything, Victoria Iffy-genius Warshawski. You couldn’t get a husband, you couldn’t have a kid, now you’re trying to muscle into my family? Just go the hell away.”
I’d forgotten that tired old insult the kids used to use. My middle name, Iphigenia, the bane of my life—who had let it out on the playground to begin with? And then my mother’s ambitions for me to go to college, the support of teachers like Mary Ann McFarlane, my own drive, some of the kids thought I was a snot, an egghead, an iffy genius. Being Boom-Boom’s cousin, and his sidekick, had been a help in high school, but all those taunts, maybe that’s why I’d done some of the things I’d done, trying to prove to the rest of the school that I wasn’t just a brain, that I could be as big an idiot as any other adolescent.
Despite her spitefulness, I handed Sandra a business card. “My cell phone’s on here. If you change your mind, give me a call.”
It was only six o’clock when I walked out of the hospital. I couldn’t believe it was that early—I thought I must have been working all night, I felt so beat. I looked aimlessly around Cottage Grove Avenue for my car, wondering if I’d forgotten to set the alarm, when I remembered it was still down at the high school—I’d ridden to Hyde Park in the ambulance.
I picked up a taxi at the stand across the street and bullied the driver into going south. All the way down Route 41, the cabbie kept hectoring me on how dangerous it was, and who was going to pay his fare back north?
I refused to take part in one more fight, leaning back in the seat with my eyes shut, hoping that would make the driver close his mouth. He may have kept up his complaint, but I did fall into a sound sleep that lasted all the way to the high school parking lot.
I made my way home more by luck than skill, and fell back down into the well of sleep as soon as I got home. My dreams weren’t restful. I was back in the gym, fifteen years old. It was dark, but I knew I was there with Sylvia, Jennie, and the rest of my old basketball team. We’d run the length of the room so many times, we automatically avoided the sharp edges of the bleachers, and the horse and hurdles leaning against the wall. We knew where the ladders were, and which one had the climbing ropes looped around it.
I was the strongest: I clambered up the narrow steel ladder and unhooked the climbing ropes. Sylvia was like a squirrel on the ropes. She clung with her thighs, hauling up the underpants and the sign. Jennie, keeping watch at the gym doors, was sweating.
Homecoming was the next night, and the dream switched to that. Even in my dream, I felt thick with grievance against Boom-Boom—he’d promised to take me and now he wouldn’t. What did he see in Sandy, anyway?
It was the exposure waiting round the bend in my mind that woke me. I wasn’t going to let myself dream to the end, to Boom-Boom’s anger and my own mortification. I sat in bed, sweating, panting, seeing Sandy Zoltak again as she’d been then, soft, plump, with a sly smile for the girls, a foxy one for the guys, her shimmery satin dress a blue that matched her eyes, going into the gym on Boom-Boom’s arm—I pushed aside the memory and thought instead how I wouldn’t have known Sandy on the street today—I certainly hadn’t known her in the hospital.
It must have been that random thought that brought the punk I’d seen on the street when I was talking to Pastor Andrés back into mind, the “chavo banda” Andrés chewed out for showing up at his construction site.
Of course I’d seen him before: he’d been in Fly the Flag last Tuesday morning. “A punk one sees around, taking from jobsites, or even doing little jobs,” Andrés had said.