Whores on the Hill Read online

  “Scared?”

  “Maybe. You?”

  “What’d you tell your mom?”

  “Sleepover. Your house.”

  At the bottom of my bag, there it was hiding: a gold key tied with string to a wedge of plastic that read BLUE CHATEAU MOTEL in glittered, cursive script.

  Astrid put in the key and turned it, everything was greyish-yellow light inside.

  Dejan and his friend Sarge were beautifully dressed. They were always beautifully dressed. Black wool pants, white starched shirts with French cuffs, cuff links, rings on their fingers, open collars, triangles of tan olive skin.

  “Son of a bitch, shit,” Dejan said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “We thought you maybe change your minds. Got lost. Get in here out of the cold.”

  College boys, Serbian, on foreign exchange semester at Marquette University. We met them at the Coffee Trader weeks before.

  “Zabole, go,” Sarge said. “Your turn.”

  Dejan and Sarge sat on the orange nub carpet, beautifully dressed, flipping playing cards into a plastic pitcher.

  “You want drink? Here. I’ll fix you drink.” Dejan reached behind him and pulled out a bottle of Malibu rum, sloshed it into a paper cup, and swirled some orange juice after. “Shit. Didn’t bring enough cups. You share, okay?”

  The week before, Dejan and Sarge took us to a Serbian restaurant on the Southside, where we ate tomatoes and feta with oil at pockmarked picnic tables. We drank Serbian coffee out of little china cups decorated with carnation blossoms. It was all jokes then, laughter, and hands darting under the table. They opened the world to us, this way, for an exchange.

  “Okay, girls,” Dejan said, picking up two of Astrid’s fingers and putting them in his mouth. He wet them. “You ready for this?”

  The Blue Chateau Motel followed some kind of castle theme, with stucco walls and ugly murals depicting tower bricks and creeping ivy drawn in gold paint. Three horseflies beat their wings against the dirty yellow light. Underneath, two twin beds with gold brick bedspreads sat in the middle of the room. I tried to add it up in my head but couldn’t make sense of it: the three of us, the two of them.

  I thought about walking it, alone, all the way home. Past the truck stop, up the road, following the ditch for the twenty miles back to Milwaukee. The grey road would twist and turn through the prairie. Queen Anne’s lace would skirt the road like shredded paper. It would be long, bitter cold, and lonely. Everything would look like trash.

  “Here, give me a hand with this,” Dejan said, knitting the fur of his eyebrows together. He picked up the little table between the beds and placed it over by the door, next to Juli. With one shove, Dejan and Sarge pushed the two twin beds together.

  “All right,” Sarge said. “Where’s the bloody thingiething?” He tossed cups around, plastic bags, looking for condoms, I guess.

  Juli reached behind her to flick off the light switch, but Dejan laughed instead, saying, “Lights on, girls. We want to see.”

  Whatever would happen here would happen in the open, the three of us, the two of them.

  Astrid caught my eye and whispered, “You okay, Jellybean?”

  Back home, at Juli’s house, when it was my turn, I’d lie down on Juli’s white shag carpet while Astrid and Juli crowded around me. It always started with a little death, this game.

  We didn’t always die by someone else’s hand—sometimes we drowned, or fell and hit our heads, even suicide, once, although that didn’t work quite as well. We liked our deaths dramatic, usually in the woods or some exotic locale, preferably at the hands of some big, hairy guy.

  “The stranger has you by the neck now. Breathing on you. He points his pistol at your heart. Releases the safety with his thumb.” Astrid would make circles on my temples. “He pulls the trigger. It’s fast, the bullet. Burning a hole straight through your heart. You don’t even have time for one last breath. Just bang. Gone. Dead.”

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

  Dejan peeled off the bedspread and threw it on the floor. Juli sat down awkwardly on the bed and watched while Dejan unbuttoned his beautiful white shirt. Dejan’s and Sarge’s bare, auburn skin looked slick, as if they’d just stepped from the shower. Sarge snapped the waistband of his striped boxer shorts and looked down, embarrassed.

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

  Dejan slipped his hand inside Juli’s shirt to pinch one bare, brown nipple, saying, “Come on, girls.”

  “Hey.” She winced. “Watch it.”

  There was no turning back. Astrid arched one eyebrow and gave me the nod. We knew what to do.

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

  We stepped off the carpet, gingerly, and into Dejan’s open arms. He gathered us up off our feet, breathless. Just like that.

  LET’S BE CAREFUL OUT THERE

  When Astrid called, I said, “I’m busy.” I said, “I’ll call you later, okay?” I said, “My mom just broke up with her pot-smoking boyfriend. Very messy. We’re going to rent a movie.”

  I stayed home. My mom had just broken up with her pot-smoking boyfriend. We knocked around the house in our pajamas and sock feet, shared the couch on Saturday night.

  “Look at us,” my mom said with a funny smile. “ Popular girls.”

  “Do you miss Dad?”

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Do you?”

  We stayed in and watched Hill Street Blues. We made sundaes with whipped cream and Hershey’s chocolate. I started to ask her about sex.

  She said, “When I was fifteen, I didn’t know the first thing. My boyfriend asked me if I wanted to French kiss and I said, ‘Are you crazy? I don’t want to get pregnant.’ ”

  I laughed hard, snorting through my nose, and tucked my feet under her butt on the couch. It’d been years since we sat like that. My mom and me.

  I said, “This is nice.”

  “Isn’t it?” My mom smiled. She made it halfway through Hill Street Blues, falling asleep before soft-spoken Sergeant Phil Esterhaus told his moody police crew, “Let’s be careful out there. Now move.”

  After school, I started helping Sister St. Joe bake donuts for donut day instead of peeling through town in Juli’s lemon-colored Audi. She still baked donuts for the missionaries in El Salvador, even though her fingerless brother was no longer one of them. He got a parish in Green Bay and two plastic fingers as a homecoming gift. We brought the lunch lady’s heaving mixing bowls up to the chem lab and mixed dough there on the slate-topped desks.

  “Six cups sugar, eight cups flour,” Sister St. Joe said. She hummed a verse of “Sisters of the Moon” to herself.

  “Some girls say this room is haunted,” I said, squeezing the soft dough between my fingers. “Ever get scared?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Deb Scott’s ghost, maybe.”

  “What’s with you girls and the morbid fascination?” Sister St. Joe laughed, the flour clouding between her tapered fingers. When she saw that I was serious, she stopped laughing and said, “Want to know a secret? She sat over there, fourth row, second to last seat.” I looked up quickly and blushed.

  “Your seat.” Sister St. Joe smiled, weakly.

  “You knew her?”

  “Sure, of course.” Sister St. Joe stopped and adjusted her veil, getting blond dough on the ends of it. “Everybody did.”

  Afternoons were short in Wisconsin that time of year. We watched the sun set at three thirty, a last blast of color, orange and pink across the sky, and then grey, dirty dusk and night.

  “You’re safe here.” Sister St. Joe winked. “I swear.”

  In the library, after school, I thumbed through yearbooks, looking for old pictures of Deb Scott. It gave me a thrill to track her down, put a face to the famous last name. I was surprised to find her freshman year, growing out a bad perm and working on a float in the Sacred Heart cafeteria. In the gritty black-and-white picture, she held up all ten fingers, covered in papier-mâché, her f
ace a happy girls’ school grimace for the camera. Sophomore year, she was photographed with the field hockey team, running across the weed-eaten lot behind Sacred Heart, holding a hockey stick over her shoulder, screaming, “Charge!,” I bet.

  I cracked the yearbooks at their spines and laid them flat on the library table. All the noise of the school, the banging of lockers, the ringing bells slammed down to zero. Deb Scott smiled for the camera. I could see it.

  Dark smudges began to circle her eyes junior year. Her hair grew bushier, blacker, like a nest on her head. 1982: page 47. Hall shot, down on the left. Deb Scott flashed devil horns for the camera, stuck out her tongue. Wild, tangled hair. Her skirt, high, a jagged tear at her knees. The girl who would become the legend.

  Senior year, there were no candid shots of Deb Scott. Just the overblown standard senior photo in an oval border. Smoky black bangs in her eyes. Raccoon-rimmed lids. Almost familiar-looking. Deb pursed her lips in a squared circle for the camera, as if she was blowing smoke, half grinning, her own odd kind of smile. Where other girls listed the clubs they had joined, the after-school sports teams, the awards on their bookshelves, Deb Scott printed, simply, in all caps:

  I AM YOUNG AND OUT FOR GLORY.

  I ran my finger over the print, just to feel the shape of it.

  The librarian kept a card catalog under the front desk with note cards that listed the books all students had checked out over the years. When she ran to the bathroom, I nicked Deb Scott’s old frayed beige card. Over the course of four years, she had only checked out three books: Valley of the Dolls, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates.

  I took them home. Folded in the very back of the Socrates book, I found a grimy, pencil-blackened note, folded five times over in a tiny, little square in the checkout envelope. It smelled like charcoal. When I opened it, I found scrawls written in a square, around the four corners of the paper and ending in the middle. Turning the paper, from bottom to top, side to side, I read:

  What are you so afraid of? I went there for you. I gave myself up, don’t you know? You know what that means? I don’t care what your wife thinks or your baby girl either. Get yourself over here, fool. I’m sick and tired of waiting. XO.—DBS

  And then I was obsessed with the bell tower. Took to hanging around the big metal door on the third floor, the one with KEEP OUT taped over the frosted glass pane. On tiptoe, I peered through the glass and saw a black spiral staircase, curling up to the ceiling, cobwebs and nothing else. I tried bobby pins and knives in the lock, trying to trick it, but nothing clicked. What was up there anyway? Somebody said, Deb Scott.

  Two weeks into the bleak and lonely month of January, my mother’s pot-smoking boyfriend called. He apologized. My mom fixed her hair. Put waterfall earrings in her ears, the same old story.

  “Don’t wait up for me, okay? I might be a while,” she said. “Why don’t you go out tonight? Have some fun. What’s your friend’s name again? Ariel? Astrid? And the pretty little Chinese girl?”

  I walked around the empty house without her. I walked across the lawn at midnight and lay down on the frozen front yard grass. Just at the edge of my vision, the house looked like it was moving, swaying, about to fall in the night. Like the whole house could come tumbling down if you nudged it with your pinkie. I walked into my mother’s bedroom and tried on all her clothes. I even sampled her sexy underwear. Wondered, Is this what it’s like to be a woman? Or this? Or this thing with the straps?

  I took her silk scarves out of the top drawer and wrapped them around my hair first, then my eyes, my nose, my chin. Mummy girl. I felt safe and calm for a minute, everything was quiet, all I could hear was my own jagged breath. I peeked at my mummy’s reflection and said, “Boo.”

  When Astrid called, she said, “I’m sorry, Jellybean. Jeez. You didn’t have to if you didn’t want to. What else do you want me to say?”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay. Whatever.”

  Juli pulled up to the curb, her muffler chirping but rhythmic. Astrid said, “Get in, girl. Let’s go.” We turned up the radio. Juli revved her engine. Everything was noise and music and drinks in plastic cups. Girls talking. We flew at the night, blind as bats and feral, birds of prey.

  MAGIC

  Juli made a Ouija board from the back of a cardboard box. “Here. It’s easy. My aunt Liz showed me how. She’s into all that New Age stuff,” she said.

  Juli scrawled YES, NO, and MAYBE across the back of the cardboard box with a black Sharpie pen. She scratched out the letters to the alphabet too. Flipped over a highball glass and started pushing it around.

  “Ask away.”

  “Okay,” Juli whispered. “Will my parents split up?” We followed the glass, slowly, over to YES.

  Juli’s face crumpled.

  “Oh, it’s just a dumb game,” I said. “Come on. Trial run.”

  We turned off the lights except for Juli’s Virgin Mary night-light, her exposed red heart burning like a bruised, gory eye. We lit scented candles, jasmine, cedar, lemongrass, and placed them in a circle. We opened the window a crack to let the night breeze trail in.

  “Okay, concentrate.” I sat cross-legged on one side of the tattooed cardboard, Juli on the other. I considered asking about dusty-skinned and olive-eyed Devin from the speed racing night, but decided instead to hold my desire close, like a pebble some people keep in their pocket for luck. “Ask again,” I said.

  “I’ve got one. Here we go.” Juli grinned openmouthed. “Quinn Catherine. Is she a virgin?”

  The glass drifted over the letters to the alphabet, floated around the numbers, before skirting over to NO.

  We laughed.

  “And Taliferro Moss Lady?”

  The glass shot over to YES and we exploded with laughter.

  We asked all the questions that waited, leering and faceless, blank as babies, in our future, the universal mysteries of our lives: Would we go to prom? Who with? How about college? Where? For what?

  Would we be journalists, movie stars, or (“Please no”) homemakers? Would we stay in Milwaukee? Would we move someplace special, like New York or Paris? Would we have a house? An apartment? Would we be rich and famous? Would we fall in love? How many times? Would he love us back? What would happen to us? Where were we going? What would we do once we got there?

  It caught you up in a dream world, all that hoping, dreaming, wishing. Tossed you around in the stars, where everything was possible. We caught our breath and followed the highball glass, spelling out the words to our future.

  We had no idea what would happen to us. We were the girls from Sacred Heart, where nothing ever changed, except a boy’s affection. Even that you could count on, easy as a three-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  So we kept on asking questions.

  Had Sister St. Joe ever been in love? (YES.)

  Was Astrid having fun on her date? (MAYBE.)

  Would Juli’s parents get divorced? (Again, YES. “You’re pushing it,” Juli complained.)

  We stared at each other over the glass, running out of questions, still laughing a little and breathless, when the glass started moving by itself, our fingertips barely touching the bottom of the highball.

  THERE, it said, gliding over the letters.

  And then some more. Scrolling, scripting, pausing over one letter like a flip of the skirt, teasing, dancing out the words across the board.

  SEE YOU.

  We caught our breath.

  “I’m not kidding,” Juli said. “Stop pushing.”

  “Okay,” I exhaled. “Okay. Only I’m not pushing anything.”

  The Virgin Mary’s heart looked at us, bleeding like a pierced strawberry.

  “Here. Wait,” I whispered, my index fingers just grazing the smooth, heavy glass. “Who are you?” I asked.

  The glass swooped back and forth, in the shape of figureeights, spelling, YOU KNOW.

  “What?”

  Juli sucked on air as if through a sieve. “
Okay. Let’s stop. This is freaking me out. For real.” But she didn’t stop, she didn’t take her fingers off the glass.

  We watched the glass duck and bob across the board, cutting graceful curves around the letters.

  My mind fused onto one thought, without even meaning to. Dusky skinned and olive eyed.

  The highball glass shot over to YES. Our fingers just a whisper above the glass. The breath caught in my throat like cold water.

  “Let’s stop, Thisbe, okay? Please?” Juli blinked her eyes, brown and flecked with gold, at me.

  “Hold on,” I whispered. “One more.” I ducked my head and closed my eyes, like a prayer. “What’s your name?”

  Slowly, lazily, like it was shy or something, idling and kicking up a shoe, the glass skirted around the corners of the board, flirting, teasing, making us wait, a skittish colt. Finally, the glass started pulling towards the letters, making its elegant dance, spelling out the letters to a name like a match of fire.

  The glass moved so fast, I couldn’t catch much but a D, then a B and S.

  We both yanked our fingers back from the glass like we’d been burned.

  The door to Juli’s room crashed open with a cry. “Hey, what the fuck?”

  Astrid stumbled into the darkness, spilling the contents of her blue suede satchel, her pins, her barrettes, her tins of shiny gloss.

  “Boring,” she cried. She pulled off her striped sweater and shook out her curls. “That guy. Gross. He had breath like the crypt. Really. I said, ‘Pick up some Tic Tacs and call me later. Maybe.’ ”

  Astrid fingered one of her candle-colored braids and looked around, taking in the ripped piece of cardboard with letters scrawled across it, the highball glass that somehow lay tossed in pieces across the white shag carpet. She looked at Juli, she looked at me, both of us white.

  “So. What’d I miss? A big makeout session or something?”