Read Hailey's War for Free Online

because I was usually still drunk or high or stoned and therefore able to access my feelings in a way I couldn’t when sober. “I love you,” I’d tell him. “I’d kill anyone who’d try to hurt you.”
    â€œThose are lovely sentiments; go sleep them off,” he’d say.
    But underneath the fevered language, I meant it. The way I thought of it was, I had been born an only child, but in time, the gods took pity and gave me a brother and a sister.

three
    The sister was Serena Delgadillo .
    Technically, Serena and I went back to the seventh grade together. We’d both been chosen for an academic-achievement program called ReachUP, which singled out promising students in rural or disadvantaged schools in hopes of helping them compete with middle-class students at college admissions time. We’d also both played on the girls’ soccer team that year, alongside each other as forwards. No question, she was better than me. The daughter of migrant workers, she had learned soccer on the hard brown fields of California’s inland valleys from her four older brothers and other immigrant kids, all
futbol
fanatics.
    We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. That had been a big step for both of us at the time. Like me, Serena was skinny then, with Kmart clothes and hair her mother cut in harsh black bangs directly across Serena’s forehead. It made her self-conscious except on the soccer field, where she lost her inhibitions, becoming speedy and fluid and exuberant.
    Then, in eighth grade, something changed. Serena dropped out of ReachUP and grew distant. She began styling her hair in the high, lofty wall of bangs that hadn’t quite gone out of style among Latina girls back then, and I only saw her with other Mexicans in the hallways. We sat next to each other in study hall, but she only spoke to me once, to poke me in the shoulder and say, “What’s that?” She’d been looking at the Latin flashcards I was reviewing instead of doing my schoolwork.
    â€œIt’s Latin,” I’d said.
    She’d flipped through a few cards. “Weird,” she’d said, shrugging, and had gone back to her homework.
    The next year, Serena was gone. That was a common thing. Farmworker families are nomadic; the population of our school was always in flux.
    I forgot her pretty quickly.
    In my early days in L.A., after moving down from CJ’s place, I was broke. The one luxury I allowed myself was food from cheap ethnic places. That month, I’d discovered pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup made with oxtail and rare beef. Late one Saturday afternoon, I was waiting in line to get my fix, when I saw that I was being watched by a tall young Latina.
    She was good-looking and slender, her cargo pants hanging off sharp hip bones, braless under a strappy tank shirt, her hoop earrings so large you could have worn them as bracelets. She had straight hair, not quite black, pulled back off her face, and almond-shaped eyes. When I caught her looking at me, she didn’t smile or say “Sorry” like a lot of people would have.
    â€œI think I know you,” she said thoughtfully.
    â€œOkay,” I said. She wasn’t familiar to me, but I’ve learned not to argue with people about that. When you’ve got a birthmark on your face, people can recognize you long after they’ve changed beyond identifiability for you.
    â€œWe played soccer together in junior high,” she said. “Remember?”
    â€œHoly shit,” I said. “Serena?”
    â€œYeah,” she said, laughing. Then: “You’re at the front of the line.”
    I bought my pho; she bought hers, and we moved off to the side to talk. She remembered that I used to hang out with “that Southern boy,” and that I’d been studying Latin. I asked her where her family had gone after eighth grade. She explained that her father had hurt his back and couldn’t do