Whores on the Hill Page 15

  “Thisbe, p-please,” Devin stuttered. “Listen to me.”

  “Don’t you get it?” I asked. “I d-don’t l-love you,” I said, mocking his stutter.

  Devin pulled away from me and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, the air knocked out of him. He whispered, “Jesus.”

  We paced around on the street, awkwardly, after. Devin stood barefoot on the sidewalk, in his frayed Levi’s and the old blue-and-green Izod shirt, torn at the collar.

  He thumbed his lip. “Go on,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Listen,” I said. “Wait.” I took his arm, but he pulled away from me.

  “Don’t. Please,” Devin said. “I don’t know how to do this.” He put his fists in the bottom of his shirt and stretched it that way.

  “Don’t,” I said, taking his hands out of his shirt. “You’ll ruin it.”

  And that was how it ended. That was how you lost the things you loved. Devin kissed me on the cheek. I walked down the street and knew Devin was watching me, watching my back, watching my uniform skirt flip a little when I walked, like a dance, like a cantanelle. My throat was hoarse and sore and raw. When I turned around at the corner to check him, to catch his face one more time, to see him standing there barefoot and sad, like a boy, like a child, he was already out of sight, gone.

  THE SOUTHSIDE STRANGLER

  Early April and every news station was saying it:

  “The Southside Strangler. Responsible for abducting four girls. An eleven o’clock curfew is now in effect for the Milwaukee area, including Cudahy and Wauwatosa counties.”

  The police found one of his lovers on the banks of the Fox River, Samantha Fisher, thirteen years old, cracked at the neck and naked, her white arms flung out at her sides as if for an embrace. But the rest of the girls, the other three, Can-dace, Faye, and Meghan Beth, just went missing, gone, disappeared.

  I didn’t go back to school for a week. I couldn’t face Astrid. But still, she called when school was canceled.

  “Thank God,” Astrid sighed over the phone. “I had a trig test. All those binomials. Man, being a sophomore sucks.” Over the phone I heard her take a drag off a cigarette. “So, you going to hole up in that house forever, Jellybean?” she asked. “When will Juli and I see you again?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  The Southside Strangler liked pretty girls. He preferred blonds, but would settle for a nice brunette with big bangs. He liked a little curl to the hair and clean fingernails. At least, so far. It’d only been ten days—four girls had disappeared in ten days—so who really knew? Mainly, he just liked them young: twelve to twenty-one.

  I stayed home for supper, those early days of spring when it stayed light later, past five o’clock and six, the sky a rosy hue. My mother, nervous and worrying, reaching out for me all of a sudden. Gingerly touching my hair, as if I was lost but now found. I moved like a cat under her touch, preening and luxuriating in the sudden attention.

  Over the dinner table, the pretty TV news anchor droned: “Profilers believe the Southside Strangler is a white man in his late twenties to early thirties, a tattoo of a cobra on his right arm. An eleven o’clock curfew remains in effect for the entire Milwaukee area.”

  A picture of Meghan Beth, the Strangler’s latest victim, flashed across the screen. Only twelve years old, she wore her featherlight hair in a shaggy pixie cut. The Strangler plucked her right off the Wauwatosa Day School playground at recess. Just poof, gone, like that, history. Nobody could find a trace of her, not anywhere.

  Astrid called when I was lying in bed, socks off.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “Grubb and I are coming to get you. His friend is dying to see you again.”

  “No way,” I whispered. “I’m already asleep.”

  “Stop sulking, Jellybean. Be quick like a bunny. We’ll be there in five minutes flat.” Astrid bit off the words and the line went dead.

  My heart kicked up a beat as I fumbled for my jeans and ran a brush, blindly, through my hair. Dangling my feet out the window, I waited in the dark. One honk of the horn and I slipped through the wet grass of our front lawn and into the buzzing heat of Grubb’s car.

  “Hey girl, long time no see,” Astrid said, flipping around in the front seat. Her eyes were raccoon rimmed with black kohl. I hadn’t seen her in over a week, not since the night of Deb Scott’s party. It was hard to look at her and breathe at the same time. “You know Jerome.” Astrid smiled.

  “Cutie,” Jerome said. “There’s my cutie-pie.” He wore a leather jacket with a metallic gold cobra across the back. He smelled like rain and boy and leather, and a boggy wood smoke smell.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Someplace special,” Grubb said. He sat behind the wheel, big and bearlike, driving with meaty claws. He wore his black hair in a greasy pompadour. He downshifted and dragged the car out of town. Astrid laughed and passed me a soggy tab of acid. I swallowed it. It tasted like powdered sugar or candy.

  “Give us some,” Jerome said, and I offered him my powdery thumb. He put it in his mouth, licked it.

  Grubb drove with one hand on the wheel, the other lounging in Astrid’s lap. He steered us out of the suburbs, deeper into the country, past the White Hen, the Pizza Hut, all the skinny, new elm trees.

  “Up here, on the left,” Grubb said, steering the car deeper and deeper into the back roads. We lurched over to the side of the road, pulled up in front of a ramshackle farmhouse, the porch falling off the face of it like loose teeth, and parked it.

  “I used to live here,” Grubb said, stepping out into the bitter wind. The heels of his steel-toed boots clicked on the asphalt road. “That was my room, right there. Back in the day.” He pointed to a squashed, sad rectangle over the garage.

  “Man, I wouldn’t put my snake in a room like that,” Jerome said, hiking up his shoulders against the wind.

  “Come here.” Grubb grabbed Jerome in a loose headlock, the both of them grunting and yelling, and ran, sideways, into a dirty, melting snowbank.

  “Fags,” Astrid called. Then she turned to me, smiling. “Did you know Jerome was in juvie?” Astrid asked. “For setting fires in parked cars. Still, he’s kinda cool, yeah?” She stood in the street with her cargo jacket open, blowing in the wind. She pawed her raw hands through her satchel for a cigarette, before giving up and sighing. “Jellybean. Find me a Kool, will you? My hands are fucking numb.”

  Astrid stood in the center of the black street, her blond hair messy and scrunched up like a used napkin. Her exhausted eyes were black beads, her raw, chapped hands stuffed in the pockets of her threadbare, cotton coat. She looked like one of those girls you see at the edge of the road, walking, and then forget about five minutes later.

  “C’mon, Jellybean. Don’t look at me like that,” Astrid said, swatting at my arm, but I just ducked.

  “Look alive, ladies,” Grubb snorted while Jerome shook the snow out of his bushy, brown hair. “I’ve got something to show ya.”

  We trudged through the snow, our heads tucked down to the wind. First Grubb, then Astrid, then me. I watched her uniform skirt from the back—grey squares, blue squares, and red stitching thread.

  “See. What do you think?”

  Behind the ramshackle farmhouse, an old, abandoned cemetery sprawled across the open field. Loose headstones were tipped over, the gate yawned off a singular, stone mausoleum like a mouth.

  “This was my kiddieland,” Grubb said, grinning. For the first time, I realized, Grubb was missing both incisors. Like he was defanged.

  “You wanna know?” Grubb asked Astrid. “You wanna see how I got the name Grubb?”

  “Get offa me,” Astrid said, trying to shove him off, but Grubb pulled her, kicking, screaming, into the yawning open pit and dust flying. They turned over and over, arms in the air and a mess of hair, rolling, falling, into the shallow grave.

  “When I was a kid, they couldn’t keep me out. I loved it. Jumping in, grubbing ar
ound with the grubs and worms,” Grubb said. He grabbed a fistful of dirt and smeared it along Astrid’s leg. “You like it. You like this, baby?”

  “Make him stop,” I cried, tugging on Jerome’s sleeve.

  But then Astrid started laughing. She rolled over, pinned Grubb with her weight, and lay on top of him. “You’re a madman!” she screamed. She leaned over and kissed his dust-skinned face, lightly, tenderly. Then, “It’s fine. I’m fine, Jellybean.”

  “See?” Jerome tugged my hand, urging me around one of the big headstones, one with a cherub’s pudgy face on the front of it. He edged his body up to the back of mine, pressing the hard, small muscles in his chest against my shoulder blades, placing the junk in his jeans against my ass, nudging his nose into my neck. He said, “It’s okay, right? Everything’s okay, see?”

  I stared at the night sky. Jerome’s hands moved up and down my arms, slipping up and under my shirt.

  I reached my hand behind me and slipped my hand into the open mouth of Jerome’s jeans. His sex fell into my hand, warm and breathing, moving. Jerome snuck one hand up the front of my shirt and I jerked him off with mine. I thought about the metallic snake on his leather jacket, the gold scales, green eyes, and forked, curling tongue. I held Jerome’s warm, wet sex in my hand and stared out into the sky.

  I heard Astrid laughing in the night. Jerome ejaculated on the small of my back and sank his teeth into my shoulder, whispering, “Jesus.”

  In the morning, Astrid and I woke up hungover and exhausted to find it all over the news again: SOUTHSIDE STRANGLER GRABS GIRL.

  “Look at this.” Astrid smiled. “Another get-out-of-jail-free card.” She cracked the newspaper flat on my mother’s kitchen table, tore at a piece of toast smeared with pinkish cream cheese. Astrid said, “I really missed you, Jellybean.”

  This is how the Southside Strangler took his prize. With kindness, with understanding, with a soft, low voice. Astrid took my hand and pressed it to her cheek. “We won’t see them again, I promise.” She paused a minute, chewed her toast, then added, “Still, it was hot.”

  How did we live with ourselves? How do you live with yourself? With remorse, with grit and shame and a broken, nameless joy.

  BAD HAIR DAY

  “Pass me over that mascara, would you, Astrid?”

  “You know what Seventeen magazine says. Guys hate gloppy mascara.”

  “Please. That rag? What do they know?”

  We were in the bathroom on the third floor, leaning over the sinks, primping. Leaded-glass windows flanked the southern wall, overlooking the parking lot, then the cornfield, and past that, the soldiers’ cemetery, Hollywood.

  I moved my black Doc Martens and there was a single, scarlet drop of blood on the flecked old linoleum tile. Perfect as a petal. I’d been waiting for days to say it, nineteen days to be exact, since Deb Scott’s party, days for it to stop so I wouldn’t have to say it.

  “I’m spotting,” I said, staring.

  “I’ve spotted before,” Juli said, streaking black sparkle paint at the corner of her eyes. “No biggie.”

  I slipped a quarter into the Kotex machine, grabbed a padded square, and swung into a stall. I left the door open, chatting, “God, I hate these things. Like diapers.”

  “Here, what did I just tell you?” Astrid grabbed Juli’s chin and inspected her face. “Don’t glop on the mascara. Your features are too fine.” She dabbed at Juli’s eyes with a handful of thin, powdery toilet paper. “You know what? You should just go with brown. Only earth tones. If you ask me.”

  “Well, I’m not.” Juli swatted her hands away. She wore her green ragweed wool sweater, the same green ragweed wool sweater she wore in Dorothea Dix and had been wearing ever since, despite the coffee stains, the cigarette burns, the tattered dark stains around both the cuffs, the stains that could have been anything, even her own blood.

  Astrid cracked open one of the old-fashioned windows by turning a crank. She sat on the heater and dug through her blue suede satchel for cigarettes.

  I stood there, feeling enormous and swollen, like a cannon-balled shipwreck or something.

  “Here, take one,” Astrid said, passing a cellophane package of cigarettes.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said, blowing cigarette smoke out the window in a straight, funneled line. “My breasts are sore. And I’m a couple weeks late.”

  “How late?”

  “Oh, you know.” I tapped the ash out of the window. My turquoise ring made a tinkling, musical sound when it hit the glass. “Late.” I bit the chapped skin on my lips. “Almost three weeks.”

  Juli leaned in over the sink, closer to her own mirrored reflection, and angled a pair of silver tweezers over her thin, bare eyebrows.

  “That’s nothing,” Juli said, staring at herself. “I started Xanax two months ago and I still haven’t gotten my period. My dad even took me to the gyno for a pregnancy test.” She plucked a few hairs and winced. “Doctor said, ‘Hormones. Growth spurts. Mood swings. Completely normal for a teenage girl.’ ” Her eyes watered. “Shit, that hurts.”

  “For real?”

  “Sure. It’s just probably stress. Exams. Devin. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.”

  Astrid sat in the corner of the window, afternoon sun spread across her knees like a crocheted blanket, turning her face to the greyed bathroom window, that angel face on a young woman’s body.

  “Come on, Jellybean. Overreact much?” she asked, smiling.

  A week later and we sat in the waiting room at Planned Parenthood, flipping through brochures that said, “Bathing Your Baby” and “Postpartum Depression and You.”

  Astrid convinced me to lie about my age. “You know,” she said, flipping up her sunglasses while I filled out the forms. “Just in case.”

  We wore black Jackie O. sunglasses and paper orchids in our ponytails, Lady Day style but anonymous.

  “Look at us, incognito.” Astrid leaned over, laughing, and grabbed my hand. I bit my lips, smiling through the cramps in my back. A chubby girl in blue scrubs and a pastel shirt printed with cat cartoons opened a door and called, “Thisbe Newton.”

  All three of us got up and followed the Cat Woman down the hall. A hundred cartoon cats smirked at us from her back. Astrid popped her gum loudly and said, “Jesus, look at that spaghetti,” pointing at a doctor’s model of a uterus on the wall.

  “There’s a pregnancy test here.” The nurse palmed me a paper-wrapped stick and a little plastic cup. “Go in the bathroom, take that, and leave your urine on the window for the nurse. Then put on this gown. The doctor will be with you shortly.” Cat Woman slipped a green file into a plastic case and shut the door behind her.

  Astrid and Juli opened their mouths like monkeys, gagging. I swung into the stainless-steel bathroom and shivered on the toilet.

  I had these fantasies. If I was pregnant, I’d take the baby and run. Hop in the dented Nova with Devin and hoof it to the beaches of Florida. Devin would pick me up in the air, swing me around for measure. “Peanut,” he’d call the baby, blond and gorgeous like him. We’d find a way to get by together, a patchwork family.

  When I got back from the bathroom, Astrid was sitting on the counter, kicking the cabinets with her feet while Juli picked at her plantlike scabs.

  “What are you gonna do, Jellybean?”

  I turned my back to them and slipped my sweater over my head. “I don’t know.” My teeth chattered. “I’ll figure it out when they tell me, I guess.”

  “I had an abortion. Last year. It was like that,” Astrid said, snapping her fingers.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Juli slumped onto the orange vinyl chair, pulling the cuffs of her filthy green sweater over her brown, inching scabs.

  “Oh, we weren’t even really friends,” Astrid said, fixing the paper flower stuck back in her hair. It drooped. “You were hanging out with what’s her name? That beard, Bonnie Hunt.”

  “Still, we were sort of friends. I could have helped.”

 
; I hopped up on the lounging patient’s chair in my paper gown and sock feet, holding both corners of the gown tightly, like a prayer.

  “I’m having such a bad hair day,” Astrid said, combing out her bangs with her fingers. For a minute, I wanted to punch her in the mouth.

  The door opened and a middle-aged doctor with white bristle whiskers stepped in, saying, “Congratulations, Miss Newton. You’re pregnant.” He glanced up at me from his file and his face shifted. “Sorry. You are Miss Newton, that’s right?”

  “Yes,” I told him. I tried to process this, break it down, define it: Congratulations, you’re pregnant. My knees shook, my hands, my teeth, this long aching rattle. “That’s me.”

  “You’re twenty-one?” He said, flipping through the paperwork in his manila file.

  Astrid and Juli sucked in their breath, suddenly going silent.

  “Okay,” the doctor said, frowning. “I can play along. Let’s take a look here.” He patted the stirrups with his powdery hand, saying, “Get up.”

  It was like moving in a dream, scooting my butt down, putting my feet in the stirrups. Dr. Gilder dug his fingertips in, up by my navel. “And does this hurt?” he asked.

  “A little.” I closed my eyes and saw pricks of light, yellow and ginger behind my lids. Like a Lite-Brite machine, I imagined the old shapes: butterfly, an apple, a snake’s charming forked face.

  Dr. Gilder inserted instruments while asking questions: “Cramping? Fever? Pain in your lower back?”

  I nodded and mumbled yes, but only heard pregnant like a ringing, echoing bell in my head.

  “Steady now.” Dr. Gilder peered between my knees. “How long have you been spotting?”

  “A week. Maybe two.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Gilder poked and prodded. My face flooded with blood, for shame. I felt like I had a cavern inside me, dark and mysterious, filled with secrets.

  Dr. Gilder pulled the paper gown down to my knees and said, “I believe you’re having a miscarriage. From your test, it looks like you’re three weeks pregnant. But all signs point to a miscarriage—the heavy spotting and cramping. I’ll send a nurse in to take your blood.”