Whores on the Hill Read online

  “Race car drivers. Lucky if you get five all together and a full set of teeth,” Astrid said while we struggled up the bleachers for the top row.

  “Be a sport? Could you just try?”

  We cracked open the pony-necks we brought with the end of Astrid’s lighter. Juli propped her feet up on the cooler and pointed her nose at the placard above our heads. It read TOMMY FIN and had a picture drawn on it of the driver who died on the Southside Speedway the year before in a fiery pileup. In the picture, Tommy Fin had permed, kinky hair.

  “There he is.”

  Devin painted his Chevy Nova purple and ran a fat, silver racing stripe over the hood to the fender. Devin’s number was 52. Inside the car, he was just a shadow wearing a helmet. The rear fender, stenciled in silver paint, read DON’T PUSH.

  “L-l-look. It’s Jellybean’s L-Lothario,” Astrid joked.

  “Funny,” I said. “Look at you, all jealous.”

  Astrid flinched as if I’d slapped her.

  “Watch yourself, that’s all I’m saying,” she exhaled.

  The buzzing hive of revving car engines split the night. A flag dropped and cars filled the dirt track like insects swarming. Camaros, Monte Carlos, all these cars we couldn’t name. Pealing rubber and sparks flying. The stars went silent in the blackening sky.

  “My dad’s giving me these tests. To decide if I’m depressed or hypoglycemic, whichever,” Juli said, picking the silver polish off her nails. She swigged her beer. “Want to know the first question? ‘Do you feel bored?’ Can you beat that? Who isn’t bored?”

  “I’m so bored,” Astrid said. The wind picked at her long, blond braids and moved them around on her shoulders.

  On the track, a yellow Mustang hopped a dented, black beater. The Mustang catapulted, it was airborne for a full second, before it landed, all four wheels and sparks flying, flat on the ground. The crowd tossed things in the air: popcorn, baseball caps, and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  After the race, we walked down to the winner’s circle where the drivers stood, sweating, their families crushed around them. Devin pulled the helmet off his head and his suede-colored curls went crazy.

  “How come you’re not dead yet?” Astrid asked.

  “L-lucky, I guess,” he stuttered, smiling.

  “Well, we’re leaving,” Astrid said.

  The night deflated like a popped balloon. Devin eyed my nicked knees, the blue ribbon running through my tennis socks.

  “I’ll g-get her home, okay,” he said, kicking at the dust.

  And like that, the night rose, enormous with possibility.

  Devin laced his fingers through mine and we walked knee high in the wet fields behind the track. Astrid and Juli were gone, driving back to the suburbs with the windows down, their long hair blowing in the breeze.

  I felt thin as grass and jubilant, free of Astrid and Juli. Who knew what the night could bring me on my own?

  The fields lay blue-black and frozen before us, still fragrant with hardy, flowering weeds. Devin squeezed my hand and said, “Shee-it. That Mustang flying? I thought I was a goner.”

  We lay down in the frozen fields. Devin kissed my eyelids and whispered, “Dear.”

  “Your friends, what do people call you?” Devin touched my lips, gingerly, with his fingers.

  I shut my eyes against the night, squinting hard and saying, “Please, don’t say it.”

  He smelled like gasoline and oil, like a blue streak on a hot night. Devin shed his jumpsuit like snakeskin. His skinny chest was golden and hairless, warm to the touch. He tasted like the road, like something on fire, moving that fast.

  “Keep me out of trouble,” I whispered, touching the raw, red line where the helmet rested on his forehead.

  “Okay, su-sugar. Whatever you say.”

  GOD GRANT ME

  Sometimes, it could not be avoided, we wished we were anything but the Whores on the Hill.

  “Public school. Milwaukee East. Milwaukee West. I don’t care where,” we said. “I’d give anything to go anywhere but here.”

  We envied the girls in frayed jeans, the ones who wore their bangs feathered back in sweeping wings, who carried their books across their chests and walked to Milwaukee West, six blocks down the hill from Sacred Heart.

  “Look at them,” Astrid said when we circled the squat, beetle-shaped public school. “Stupid wankers.”

  This is how we coveted other girls. It was a practice we picked up from reading teen magazines, where all you wanted was to be anything but yourself and how you are.

  Even though she didn’t say it, Astrid wanted to be half of the Friar twins. Miranda and Melinda Friar weren’t only identical twins from Singapore, they were also confirmed child prodigies on the violin and cello, respectively. They played with the Milwaukee Symphony, traveled to Berlin for the string consortium, and even performed a live set on the local NPR station where they were described as “the String Sisters.”

  Astrid betrayed her envy with teasing: “Look out, girls, it’s the String Sisters going to class.” And in the cafeteria, “Hey, the String Sisters are eating cheese.” In morning meeting, “Yessss! Look at the String Sisters playing their strings. Where would we be without the String Sisters?”

  The String Sisters had black hair that separated into silk sheaths when they walked. Clear, jade bracelets clinked on their wrists. The String Sisters wore only the finest wool cashmere sweaters, they carried their books in imported Italian bags. Astrid found out where the String Sisters bought their cable-knit thigh-highs and bought three pairs for herself, in red, blue, and black.

  We watched them all. Keeping score, in our heads. “I like her hair. Her pointy heels. Her blacked-out fingernails. The raven-head charm she wears on a silver chain around her throat.”

  We watched, lazily, through a haze of Astrid’s cigarette smoke: Jessica Carlisle, the singer and songwriter, who carried her guitar into the Coffee Trader on Wednesdays; Helen Ross, the Thomas Aquinas junior who modeled for Seventeen in her spare time; the punked-out lesbian chick who worked the counter at Organic Express and flexed her muscles when we asked; the picture of Joan Jett that Astrid kept hanging in her locker.

  Of course, we all wanted to be Deb Scott, the baddest of bad girls, even after somebody graffitied all the walls with DEB SCOTT’S DEAD. DEB’S DEAD.

  Even little Becky Tribble, the freshman with the brain tumor—Juli wanted to be her. Just for a minute. “Well,” Juli admitted. “It’s just all the attention. And the flowers alone. To know you are loved like that. I mean, in your lifetime.”

  “God, pathetic much?” Astrid laughed.

  But Juli just stood skinny in the hall, staring at her combat boots, swaying slightly.

  “Juli, hello?” Astrid snapped her black shellacked fingers.

  Juli’s eyes popped open, surprised, like the blank, eggshell stare of the starved. “What? Okay sure,” she said. “I mean, what?”

  This is before we were women, this is how we became women. By comparing, weighing, and contrasting what we could and could not become.

  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Sister St. Joe said. “Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”

  “Rock on,” Astrid said, knocking fists with Sister St. Joe until the young nun blushed.

  Sister St. Joe had another saying. She whispered, “Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.”

  Which, of course, we didn’t understand. Until, like most things, it was much too late.

  JULI EARNS HER REP

  The Sung house always smelled like cooked rice and weird different meats.

  “Pig’s feet,” Astrid joked when we walked through the back door to Juli’s stucco mansion on the East Side. “Bull testicles,” she whispered, goosing my skirt.

  Juli’s dad, Dr. Sung, was named one of the top ten psychiatrists by Milwaukee Magazine. The Sungs were seriously swimming in money. And miserable on top of it, all of them. />
  “Don’t forget to leave your shoes at the door,” Juli said. She rubbed her puffy red eyes with the back of her left hand. “Come on, I’m not kidding. My mom’s on the warpath, again.”

  The Sungs were notoriously messy, the four of them, Juli, her parents, and an older, overweight brother who lived at home, only venturing outside after five p.m. for night classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They tore up the house, even with the twice-a-week maid. Still, we stepped over half-chewed dog bones in our sock feet, stumbled over scrunched-up rugs, brushed aside newspaper sheets strewn over the butcher block, and hiked up our skirts to sit on the counter.

  “My parents are splitting up,” Juli said, filling a glass with tap water. “They say, ‘You say who you want to live with. You decide.’ ”

  “Brilliant. Really,” Astrid exhaled, kicking the cabinets with the balls of her sock feet. “Who came up with that one? Your dad? He’s a headshrinker. Shouldn’t he know better than that?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Juli wailed. “What should I do?”

  What could we tell her? Her mom was a nervous, brittle thing who wore silk Fendi scarves and Bill Blass perfume, drank NyQuil on the sneak from the bottle, and left the house only on Mondays for her mah-jongg group of bored Asian wives.

  “My mom cares more about scoring chows than me,” Juli whispered. What could we say? It was true.

  Meanwhile, her dad kept giving her these multiple-choice tests, to decide whether she was anemic, depressed, or just plain PMS-ing. Even when Juli did test positive for depression or ADD, all he’d do was hand her a flyer from his clinic describing the disorder: “Do you feel lethargic? Irritable? Persistently unhappy? You may be depressed.” He wouldn’t even ask her if she was okay.

  I stared out the kitchen window at the Sungs’ manicured English garden, trimmed with a scrim of brown, dingy winter leaves. I thought about Devin, the way his lips tugged on mine, the way he’d tap the front seat of his stepdad’s Chevy Nova, winking, and say, “W-why don’t you scooch over closer?”

  “Come on, Jellybean, what do you say?”

  “Hey space case.” Juli snapped her fingers. “What the fuck?”

  How could I explain it? The way I thought about him all the time, even in my breathing.

  “I’m kind of scared.” Juli laid her face right down on the counter. She was so tiny, just eighty-five pounds and barely five feet tall, brown freckles dotting her nose. She poked her chin over the cluttered butcher block and said, “Hand me some of those spicy Chinese peanuts, would you? I can’t decide. I need to eat something.”

  Juli couldn’t decide, so she bleached strips of her black hair white and went to a party instead.

  Juli never told us, but we heard the story. At this party, she gave eleven guys blow jobs in the bathroom. There was a line snaking down the stairs. The boys were chanting her name in between sips from their beers: “Ju! Li! Ju! Li!”

  A Fenwick boy was in line at the party. He told us one night at the diner. He said when it was his turn, Juli was kneeling on the tile floor, with her hands between her knees.

  “I asked her, you know, ‘Are you all right?’ I said, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ Hey, was she listening?” He said Juli yanked his zipper down and took him in her hand. He spit the words, “I came all over the floor.”

  “So,” Juli said, after the Fenwick boy zipped himself back up. She fingered the burnt tips of her new dye job. “Like, are you gonna ask me to prom now or what?”

  “ ‘Yeah, right,’ I told her.” The Fenwick boy laughed. “ ‘Sure, you and me, whatever.’ ”

  The last weekend in February, Juli helped her mom pick out expensive Oriental rugs for her new loft apartment in the chic Third Ward. Mrs. Sung took her boxes of Fendi scarves, her thick, cloying perfume, her NyQuil and Robitussin, her sets of mah-jongg tiles in ivory, cedar, onyx, and moved out in a week. Juli stayed with her father instead.

  “Pretty girls dig graves,” Juli said, rolling over onto her back on the white shag carpet of her bedroom.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Astrid asked, lounging, pushing the blond hair behind her ears and lighting up a cig.

  “I don’t know.” Juli smiled and closed her eyes. “It’s just a lyric, I guess. Something from a song.”

  The house was lonely without her mother. I could feel it. The windows sort of rattled with the wind. Her father sat in his study in the dark, illuminated only by the blue glow of the Macintosh XL, playing Donkey Kong with the volume turned off.

  “Divorce isn’t so bad,” Juli said. “Really. No kidding.”

  JUST LIKES SHE SAID IT WOULD BE

  One early night in March, when Devin’s mom left for business, he gave me a key to their apartment. His mother was a stewardess for Delta. She wore starched blue cadet-looking dresses. All her suitcases rolled.

  Devin said, “Tomorrow morning. Before s-school. If—if— if you want.” Then he placed a key tied with string in the center of my palm. I’d never known a kid who lived in an apartment before.

  I cut morning meeting and headed over to Devin’s when the sky was still a bluish grey with dawn.

  Their stairwell smelled like Hershey’s chocolate. Cellophane cheese wrappers and crumbs littered the kitchen counter. A knife stuck out of the peanut butter jar, cardboard pizza boxes were strewn across the floor.

  On the transistor radio, Paul McCartney’s voice sang, “Here comes the sun.”

  I walked down the long, narrow hall to Devin’s bedroom, tiptoeing as if I were trespassing. I stood in the door to Devin’s bedroom and shifted my weight as if deciding, one foot in, one foot out. Everything carrying the scent of him: suntan lotion, Ivory soap, Wrigley’s spearmint gum. I tossed my book bag onto the bed.

  Devin rolled over onto his stomach, dusty blond hair in his face, he cracked open one sleepy eye, smiling.

  “Hiya,” he said, groggy and clearing his throat. “Are you really here? I was just thinking about you. Or d-dreaming. Whichever.”

  I stood there, picking at the grain in the keyhole, smiling stupidly.

  “Are you still sleeping?” I asked.

  “M-maybe. You look so nice, and I’m, I’m naked.” He tugged on one earlobe, nervously, and closed his eyes again. “Well, do you want me to b-beg?” he asked, lifting up a corner of the sheet with one hand and smiling. “ ’C-cause I can, if—if—if you want.”

  Blond, dusty motes of hair circled the areolas on his chest, but otherwise his skin was smooth and hairless, tan from the Florida sun.

  I slipped under the covers with him, uniform skirt and tattered oxford shirt both. “Hi,” I whispered, safe under the sheets. And again, “Hi.”

  It was never the same, it was never again the way it was with Devin. I had no idea. That boy, he knew things, his hands, his mouth, his body. Like a secret language, casting spells, the way he could conjure my body.

  “Do you like this?” he asked. “Or this?”

  I was always catching my breath with him, closing my eyes and opening them, wondering, “Where am I?”

  His hands darted between my knees like a fish, warming the skin. I rolled out of my skirt. I lifted my hands over my head. He unbuttoned the buttons on my shirt and slipped it off my shoulders.

  “There,” he said. “Okay now.”

  His skin sent a shock through mine. He cupped his chest to mine, lightly. I felt small as a doll, and scared. Brushing my lips against his neck, I whispered, “You’re gonna be late for school.”

  He spelled the letters of his name across my face, like a kiss, like a flick of the tongue, across my eyes, my nose, the bones in my throat. D-E-V-I-N, Devin, over and back again, D-E-V-I-N, Devin, mapping my body.

  “Get over here. Get—get closer,” Devin said, holding the boiled-wool blanket between his thumb and forefinger like a tent. I rolled my body over into his. “W-why can’t I get you close enough?”

  It was like he was dreaming, his hands everywhere, at my neck, thumbing my b
reastbone, brushing my stomach, my legs, knotting my hair. His tongue soft as fruit.

  He was like a fire, a heat rash, all across my body.

  “Wait.” I pushed back, panting. “Hold on.” My heart was pounding. Devin took my hand and brushed my fingers across his dusty-haired areolas while I tried to speak.

  “Listen,” I said. “Wait,” I said. “I can’t, you know, I’ve never.” I put my face to his chest, pressed my nose against the turtleplate of his breastbone and spoke into it, “Orgasms.” I hated the word, I hated it, saying it. “I just don’t. I can’t. You know?”

  I wanted to die, this shame. Like a defective girl, malfunctioning. My face hurt. My dirty little secret, all that pretending. And what would Astrid say?

  “W-well, okay,” he said, his hands trailing their orbits around my body again. “It’s okay.” He slid down under the sheets and put his tongue inside my belly button. “W-what did you think? I’d kick you out of bed?”

  I laughed, my stomach shaking. The drop ceiling in Devin’s bedroom was covered with posters, like a dentist’s office, only it was rock bands and old movie posters, Jim Morrison, bare chested and druggie eyed. Right above my head, there was an orchid. PHALAENOPSIS, it said underneath it, in purple cursive script.

  “H-hold on,” Devin said. He looked up at me, that shock of dirty blond hair like a girl, those olive eyes with yellow flecks. Just looking at him, I caught my breath. “Let’s try something different here,” he said.

  And we were moving. His skin in my mouth, biting his lips, nibbling, I made my way around his face, his neck, his ears. He flipped me onto my back, he held on to my hips with his thumbs. It was a new thing for me, to give in to it, to close my eyes, to just let things happen, when there were no words for it, when there should be no words for it. He was rough with his hands, tugging and turning me over. Then generous, luxurious. It was like this for a long time. Everything was caught and carried and swept away in the mouth of desire.

  When I was exhausted and worn to it, his love, he moved over me, placing his knees on either side of my hips, raising me, lightly, by the fingertips, he slid into me, like easing his body into water. He rolled me over onto my stomach, my side. He touched me. He sighed and something moved in his throat, a soft clicking sound. The orchid bloomed above me, the petals fat as sex, beautiful and pink. It started in my legs, first, a burning, crashing wave. I thought that I might die.