The Girl Gangs of Pacific Avenue

The girls were feral, hard-edged and dirty in the late afternoon sunshine, fierce and fleeting under the midnight streetlamps. They came and went, shrieking or whispering, in large packs or small knots, but always together in some configuration. From what I could gather, they were all around eleven or twelve years old, but it was hard to tell from looking what their true ages were; they sported the ragged jeans and matted hair of younger children, right along with the lipstick and dark fingernails of older girls, of teenagers trying to seem older still. The only living things they got along with were the stray cats that lived between the neighborhood’s buildings, and each other. Grown men avoided them. The ice cream truck, out of fear, never came down our street, so when the girls wanted ice cream, they went to the corner convenience store to get it, staring the cashier dead in the eye while they stuffed candy in their pockets, watching as he cowered with his finger on the police button, never daring to push it.

I didn’t find out about the girl gangs until after I’d moved into the house. The realtor had been oddly tight-lipped when we came to this property. He probably wanted to get the place off his hands as quickly as possible, or maybe he just didn’t like hanging around in this part of town. I introduced myself to the neighbors before signing the paperwork, and they all seemed perfectly pleasant, though a bit reserved. “What do you think of the neighborhood?” I asked one after another. And one after another, they would tell me Oh, yes, it’s very nice, but they all seemed anxious to shut their front doors, sounding a symphony of deadbolts after they did. I suppose I should have known, shouldn’t have rushed into buying it, but the house was too perfect: an intricate old Victorian, immaculately preserved, on a gorgeous lot on the corner of Pacific and Grange, with a wrought-iron fence surrounding a yard full of lilacs