Scar Girl (The Scar Boys #2)(37)

“Cheyenne, there’s a boy on the phone!” She underlined the word boy. I hated that she did that. She had to announce to the whole universe that a boy was calling me, like she was trying to shine a light on my future life of sin. If she’d only known.

Plus, it’s not like she didn’t know Johnny, Harry, and Richie, the only boys who would ever actually call me. I mean, it’d been forever since any other boy had called me. I think the last one must’ve been Greasy Jack.

That was the name my family gave him. And he didn’t call on the phone; he was dumb enough to show up at the door.

Jack went to St. Augustine, an all-boys Catholic school that was somehow connected to Our Lady of the Perpetual Adoration. I met him at a birthday party—I didn’t really have friends, so I was there as a pity invite—and he just kept hanging around me. I tried to stand quietly in the corner until it was time for my mom to pick me up, but he wouldn’t leave me alone.

“Do you like sports?” and “What kind of music do you listen to?” and “What’s your favorite TV show?” and “Are you going to the freshman mixer?”

That last one caught my attention.

“What freshman mixer?”

He told me that twice a year our two schools held a joint mixer. It’s one of those rituals that cheesy movies seem to get right. Boys stand on one side of a badly lit and badly decorated gym, while girls stand on the other. The popular kids spend the night trying to sneak shots of alcohol.

“At your school, in November,” he said. “Are you going?”

“I didn’t even know about it.”

“Well, now you do.”

The guy was pushy as hell, but he was cute in a goofy kind of way, too. He had a mop of light brown hair that matched his eyes. I liked that he wore a Clash pin on his denim jacket.

“What’s your name?”

“Jack.”

“I don’t think I’m really allowed to go on dates, Jack,” I told him. I didn’t know if this was true, because I’d never been asked on a date before. I wasn’t even really sure I was being asked.

“Well, if we meet at the dance, it’s not really a date, is it?”

“I guess.”

So I went to the mixer—my mother approved of any school-sanctioned event—and met up with Jack. We danced and then snuck outside and kissed. He was the first boy I’d ever kissed, which was a big deal for about one minute, but then the novelty wore off. He had braces, and his breath smelled like pepperoni.

I thought that was that until two days later when he showed up on my front step. I was in the living room, sitting next to my dad, trying to hear a M*A*S*H rerun over his snoring, when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” I called. My mother got there first.

“Hi, is Cheyenne at home?” Jack was wearing the same denim jacket, this time with more buttons, including one that said Sex Pistols and one that said I’d Kill Flipper for a Tuna Sandwich. His hair was slicked back with some kind of goop, though in God’s name I couldn’t tell you why. I guess he thought it made him look more presentable. I thought it made him look more like a serial killer. By this time, three of my sisters and I were standing behind my mom.

“Oh, hey, Chey,” he said, craning his neck around my mom to see me. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

“No,” my mother said before I could answer, her voice all serious and mean. “Cheyenne does not want to go for a walk with a boy that has a sex button on his jacket. Come back wearing nicer clothes, and perhaps I’ll introduce you to her father so you can ask permission properly.

“And get a haircut,” she added as she closed the door in Jack’s face.

My sisters howled with laughter. I wanted to die. “Mom!”

She didn’t say anything, just walked by me with her head held high, like she’d won some sort of morality contest. I was fourteen, for Christ’s sake.

Anyway, from that day on, my sisters and mother referred to him as Greasy Jack.

For the record, he never came back, and I never went looking for him.





HARBINGER JONES


Greasy Jack? Yeah, I’ve heard the story of Greasy Jack.

I actually knew Jack. My mother and his mother were in the same bowling league, and he was forced to have playdates with me when we were younger.

When he found out I was in a band with Cheyenne Belle, he called and asked me all sorts of questions about her. This was like two years after the two of them’d met. I’d already heard the story from Chey, so I turned the tables and asked him about it. According to Jack, he and Chey did kiss at the mixer, but when he called her house several times over the next several days, she wouldn’t come to the phone. Mrs. Belle, according to Jack, was never anything but pleasant. Jack never showed up at her door.

But that’s Chey. It’s a better story her way, even if the truth is stretched a little bit.





CHEYENNE BELLE


When my mom said there was a boy on the phone, I rolled my eyes and picked up the receiver that sat between my bed and Theresa’s. My sister lived her life on that thing, so I hardly ever used it. If some girl from school wasn’t calling her to gossip, then some boy was calling to flirt.

It was Johnny.

“Hey, Chey,” he said, in response to my weak “Hello?”