Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,4

fat on her face, though she wasn’t at all overweight; she’d been a speedy and accurate striker on the soccer team where I was a midfielder.

By ninth grade, in the halls of our high school, Serena appeared as a proto-gangbanger, outlining her lips in pencil three shades darker than her lip gloss and shaving off her eyebrows to redraw them. Then, after moving to Los Angeles with her family, she’d reinvented herself as a virtual boy, with a shaved head, Pendletons, and khakis, and run with the Thirteenth Street clique, or Trece. After a stint in jail, she emerged visibly feminine again but no less committed to la vida, and she’d formed a clique of girls she called her sucias, supposedly a “girls’ auxiliary” to Trece, but who banged just as hard. Serena had dreamed since childhood of a past life in Vietnam—choppers hovering over the jungle, chaos and fighting—and believed herself to have been an American GI who’d died over there. That was the source of her gang moniker, Warchild, and her conviction that life is war, this time around no less than the last.

The coach who knew the twelve-year-old soccer player, the teachers who shook their heads over the fourteen-year-old underachiever, the gang-suppression officers who ran down alleys after the sixteen-year-old gender-bending chola—none of them would recognize the woman she’d become now. And in fact, conventional wisdom said it was virtually impossible for Serena to be what she was at age twenty-five: the leader of El Trece.

The things we’d done last winter had only raised her profile in the neighborhood. There was more than one version of events in circulation, but basically it was said that Warchild had punked this Italian mobster up north, stolen his grandbaby (or baby, in some inaccurate accounts) right out from under his nose, and gotten away clean.

Of course, Tony Skouras had been Greek. And Serena had taken the baby out from under the noses of hospital staff, not Skouras and his people. And it was me who’d found the kidnapped Nidia Hernandez, arranged a safe home for her baby after her death, and paid the price in the brutal torture session in which I’d lost my finger. But I was philosophical about how much credit Serena got for things I’d done. It wasn’t like I really needed that shit to stick to me. And it made a great addition to the Warchild leyenda.

When she came back to town after the Skouras business, she’d begun paring her sucias down to a core group of dedicated older girls. Hoodrats who only wanted familia to drink and party with no longer needed apply.

This was the state of affairs when the leader of Trece, Payaso, had been arrested and sentenced to a year in Chino, leaving behind a very unexpected edict: “Warchild’s in charge.”

Granted, it was temporary. Serena had understood that he probably had an ulterior motive: Another male might not so easily relinquish his role once Payaso returned from prison. Serena might have seemed the safest choice. That was a viewpoint she didn’t acknowledge publicly. Respect from males was hard enough to come by and to keep.

So she’d installed me as her new lieutenant and protection, dismissing her old second-in-command, Luisa “Trippy” Ramos, as a dangerous loose cannon. Trippy, furious and resentful, had defected to Tenth Street, Trece’s nearest rivals. This wasn’t as rare as you might think. Once ganged up, bangers loved to say that their affiliation was por vida, but the truth was that gang sets or cliques lived so close together that after a slight or betrayal it wasn’t unheard of for a gang member to switch loyalties, or “flip,” to another clique.

I’d been happy to see the last of Trippy. On the surface she’d seemed a lot like Serena: strong, coolheaded, not easily scared. It took time to see that she was, underneath, psychologically unstable, with an almost nihilistic need to fight. She was a bully, too: I’d heard her brag about beating up a pregnant girl and knew she had no qualms about jumping rival girls three or four on one. She’d hated me as well, to the point that she’d sometimes spoken about me in the third person when I was in the room, as though I were absent, or not fully real. She’d never believed that Serena would advance me ahead of her, hence her outraged defection to Tenth Street.

But after she’d gone, I’d learned that there were other people in Serena’s neighborhood who couldn’t understand why she