The Price of a Good Education

My sister went to St. Elizabeth's High School. It was an all-girls Catholic school. It offered Latin as a language, that's how elite this school was. She bought her uniforms herself. She did charity work to help offset the cost. She worked as a coat check girl on the weekends and baby-sat weeknights and did all her homework and kept her grades up. Her eyes were fixed firmly on that most miraculous of prizes -College. She never wavered from that goal. She was proud of her school, and proud of herself... and she deserved it!
She saved her money and bought a St. Elizabeth's jacket, it cost $40. She wore it all the time. I think that jacket was a statement for her, but it was practical too. It was warm and it was weather resistant. She had earned the right to wear her bright red St. Elizabeth's jacket. Earned or not, it brought all sorts of trouble to her.
There was a girl in our neighborhood named S. S was tall and fat and filled with bitterness. Oh, and she was a slut too. She had no future and an ugly past, and she hated my sister. J was everything S was not. J was slender and petite and popular because she was fun to be around. S was only popular because she would beat you up if you didn't kiss her ass. The neighborhood kids breathed a collective sigh of relief when S came of age. Once you turn 18, if you beat up someone younger you go to jail. For about a minute, we all thought we were safe. Then S found people to do her fighting for her. She would go behind the scenes, spreading discontent and lies until it would erupt into violence.
Bitch.
She was the kind of person who would kick you when you're down and aim for your teeth or your uterus. She was one of the few people in this world that I actually pitied... Until she went after my sister.

She told my best friend (coincidentally the most vicious fighter in the neighborhood, after S) that my sister thought she was too good for the neighborhood. Everywhere I went, for weeks, S was chatting with C (my best friend) to the point where I hardly ever talked to her myself. All that time she was feeding the beast named Righteous Indignation. I'm actually surprised C held out as long as she did.
One night, we're sitting on our front porch, and S calls us down to her. It was a cool autumn evening, so of course J was wearing her Lizzies jacket.
We step onto the sidewalk, and see the whole neighborhood bunched up by the entrance to the Game Room. The air was filled with that particular kind of tension that signals a fight. The pack starts to move forward, and I have an internal conversation with myself about the wisdom of running for the house and hoping whatever it is this time blows over. C steps forward from the group and she's wearing her fighting clothes. Shit! This is gonna be bad.
She confronts my sister and starts to point out all the ways J supposedly rubs everyone’s nose in the fact that she's better than them. The jacket is the major bone of contention; J's snootiness is a more minor argument. The rant went something like this, "You walk down the street with your snobby-assed jacket and your nose in the air like you're too good for the world. You think you're better than us? You ain't better than anybody you fucking bitch. You ain't nothin' but trash like the rest of us and I'm gonna put you in your place!"
My sister calmly says, "I wouldn't sully my hands on you."
I started getting really afraid for her then. Before, my primary concern was for the jacket. That was her winter coat, and it was intended to last for four years. I was busy thinking of some way to help buy a new jacket for her, sure that this one was toast. Then she goes and opens her big, fat mouth. I don't know if C had ever heard the term "sully" before, and it certainly pissed her off. Her skin actually got all red and she punched my sister square in the face. I've been punched by C, she hits like a freight train.
I'm shaking with adrenaline and fear, my stomach is all fluttery and it's hard for me to think clearly. Every instinct I have is telling me to run, and there's not one friendly face around. They're all enjoying seeing my sister get her come-uppance. These are the same people she hangs with every day. How could they turn on her so suddenly?
Again my sister states, "I won't hit you. You're not worth the effort."
"Jesus Christ! She is a snob!" I think. C punches her again and almost knocks her down. It was well past time to put a stop to this. One of the mottoes of my neighborhood is "blood is thicker than water" meaning you can hate your family as much as you want in private, but you put your neck on the chopping block to save them in public. I met the guillotine by getting between then and saying, "You have to go through me first." I had hoped that this would bring some sense to her. I hoped in vain. C said, "My fight's not with you, and she's had this commin' for a long time." I replied, "Blood is thicker than water. You have to go through me first." C knows the rules as well as anybody else. She was psyching herself up to hit me when some guy grabbed me and put something cold against the side of my head.
An interesting thing happened then. My fear was gone. There was no nervousness or anger. I thought, "NO." And then I was facing him, staring down the barrel of a tiny little handgun. While my brain was thinking, "You are not allowed to decide (when I die)", my mouth said, "Shoot me, or put it away." I was very calm about this. And I meant it with every fiber of my being. I looked straight into his eyes, calmly expecting death at any moment, not caring, doing nothing but looking into his eyes. I must have stared him down for a whole 2 seconds. During that time, he broke out in a sweat, his eyes flickered to the gun, then to the wall of the Bar, and then he blinked. I knew in that instant that he was not going to shoot me.
He stuffed the gun in his pocket, it was probably unloaded anyway.
He had broken a cardinal rule about neighborhood fighting. You don't bring a gun to a fistfight. When all is said and done, you don't kill a member of your community. We were all in this together, and you don't decrease the numbers. Taking out one person drags the whole neighborhood over that invisible line between decency and scum. You don't bring a gun to a fistfight. Ever. When I turned away from the idiot with the not-so deadly weapon, most of the audience was gone. The rest were standing around chatting like nothing had happened. Some were even approaching my sister to talk with her and express their support for her. They were praising her for boldly standing up to C, and laughing over her soon to be infamous words- "I wouldn't sully my hands on you".
I went and sat in the shadows of my front step and waited for the world to snap back to reality. Ms. Bitch walked away, up the street, her only companion the fool with the gun in his pocket. I found out later that he was her boyfriend, and not from our neighborhood.
C came over and tried to apologize for wanting to beat up my sister, even though she had it coming. I told her she was not allowed to beat up J. If she had a problem with any member of my family, she had best take it to me first, because I'd be watching my sister's back every time.
The up side to it was that my sister escaped relatively unscathed, and her jacket lived to be worn another day.