Whores on the Hill Read online

  Panic filled my body like water.

  “Wait. What?” I grabbed the paper gown with my fingers and shifted up in my seat. “Like now? Right now? What?”

  “I’m ninety-nine percent certain you’re having a miscarriage,” the doctor said again, speaking slowly as if I was stupid. When he scribbled in my file, his fountain pen scratched the paper. “This happens sometimes. Your uterine wall is shedding. It won’t hold the baby.”

  “Is this because I was on the Minipill? Or because I’ve been drinking caffeine? Is that it?” I stuttered, racking my brain for everything I’d done wrong in the last four weeks, every word, every syllable, every stupid, useless breath.

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said, peering at me over his bifocals. “Sometimes, these things just happen. Your body decides, not you. The nurse will be in to take your blood. You can call us in twenty-four hours to check the results and find out for sure.”

  Just like that, Dr. Gilder patted my hand and left the room. I picked my clothes out of the plastic chair with my hands shaking.

  “Well. No offense, but thank God, right?” Astrid said, standing up and slipping the strap to her blue suede satchel over her head.

  “Come on, let’s go to the Coffee Trader. I’ll buy you a mocha latte, my treat,” Juli said. She looked like a battered woman in her Jackie O. glasses, her eyes puffy and hungover from the Xanax.

  Slipping my sweater back over my head, I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “It’s for the best,” Astrid said. “Really. Now you don’t have to pay for an abortion. Besides, you wouldn’t have even known whose it was—would you?”

  I looked at her, tried to smile, showing my teeth, and turned towards the little doctor’s sink and vomited.

  “Shit, are you okay?”

  “Easy, Jellybean. Just take it easy.”

  I turned the little silver knobs, cupped the cold water and splashed my face, rinsed out my mouth. I twisted the water off. I wished my friends would just disappear.

  “I think I wanted it,” I whispered.

  It was quiet. Doors opened and closed with a click in the hall.

  “That’s just your hormones talking,” Astrid said. “That’s how a woman’s body works. Tricking you into becoming a breeder, a slave.”

  At home, in my bedroom alone, I stared at my reflection before getting into bed. I stared at my skull, the bone in my forehead, the one, pale freckle on my lower lip.

  I thought of the stupidest things, I thought of nothing. I thought about Astrid, bitching about Seventeen magazine. “All those craft articles. Oh, please. ‘Got an old pair of ripped jeans? Wrap them around your head for a do-it-yourself head-dress.’ ” Devin stood on one of Florida’s white beaches in flipflops, white sand between his browned toes. He thumbed his lips, smiled, and said, “Red Dragon.” Juli rubbed black sparkle paint in wide, looping circles around her eyes. She said, “You know, you should really stick with earth tones.”

  “Death mother,” I whispered to my reflection. “Diseased.” I bit my chapped lips and tore the skin. The blood tasted industrial, like silver casing, in my mouth.

  MY GOOD ARM

  I started throwing things. Don’t ask me why.

  At first, it was little things. And in private. Like throwing a pencil, a notebook across my bedroom when I couldn’t figure out the answer to a geometry word problem. Or balling up my favorite T-shirt, the one with two bluebirds on it, and tossing it out the window when I spilled coffee all over it.

  Astrid, Juli, and me were driving around aimlessly, picking up skaters, when I took it up a level. Ryley Spinner, cute kid, blond skater cut, rode shotgun. Juli had a hard-on for him forever. She spelled his name out on her notebook covers, drew little bicycle wheels around his name. He said, “Hey Betty, wanna get your ashes hauled?” I threw a tape case at the back of his head so hard it bled. “Oww,” Ryley said.

  “What?” Juli asked.

  “He just asked if you wanted to screw.”

  “So?” Ryley touched the back of his head lightly with the pads of his fingers. The way he’d never touched a girl.

  “It’s called being a gentleman. Ever hear of it?” I stared out the window at the blond cornfields beating by, counting silos to stagger my heart rate.

  We were waiting on Astrid, two a.m., outside Metropolis. She met this kid in a pin-striped suit, Converse sneakers, and said, “Gimme a sec. Half a sec.” Juli and I ran across the street to the twenty-four-hour George Webb and got a cup of coffee each, to go. We were standing on the sidewalk, shivering, flipping up our jean jacket collars against the spring winter wind. It came in off the lake with teeth, gnawing at you.

  “I’m so sick of this shit,” I whispered, jittery with cold.

  “Preaching to the choir, sister,” Juli said.

  I hauled off and launched the coffee at the double doors to Metropolis. It made a sound like a paper bag exploding all over the porthole windows.

  “Try it,” I said to Juli. “It feels good.”

  She tossed her steaming hot coffee, right when the bouncer opened the door and she tagged him, all two hundred and sixty-some pounds of him. From the top of his hoodie sweat-shirt to the tips of his Nike Air Jordan high-tops.

  “Oh shit.” We laughed, howling, and ran until we were out of breath.

  People started saying things to me. Kids at parties, boys I knew, even Astrid. Things like:

  “Why do you have to be such a bitch?”

  “Overreact much?”

  “You should take something for that. I’m not kidding.”

  “It’s called being a cunt. Look it up.”

  Juvenile. Temper tantrums. Babyish. I knew I was. But I couldn’t stop it.

  Besides, I got really good at it. I threw beer bottles out of car windows, whacking stop signs; I threw cookies, lit cigarettes, cans, cartons of milk, SweeTARTS one by one by one, eggs at houses.

  My favorite things to break were things I’d made myself.

  In Ceramics II, I’d make pinch pot after pinch pot, fire them in the kiln, glaze them, fire them again. Then I’d open the third-floor window and let them drop, smashing, one by one by one.

  I’d make personalized T-shirts with Astrid and Juli in the afternoons and scrawl my nickname—JELLYBEAN—in silver glitter across the pink cotton. When I got home, I’d cut up the T-shirts with a pair of scissors and save the diamond-shaped pieces in an old shoebox.

  I’d make my mom a leather-tooled bracelet for her birthday from an ugly strip of rawhide with the words MOMMY DEAREST beaten into the front side of it. When she stayed out late with her pot-smoking boyfriend instead, I’d fire it in the oven like a Shrinky Dink.

  I didn’t think about Devin at all. I mean, not really.

  One time, I tipped over a keg at a party, spilling ice and beer everywhere. But that was an accident.

  I took one perfect Tiffany champagne flute out of Juli’s kitchen cabinet when no one was looking and chucked it across her driveway, the crystal flipping end over end, until it shattered. I broke a vase. I drove my mother’s car into a snowbank.

  “You’re gonna hurt somebody,” Juli said, tugging at my elbow.

  “You’re telling me, Miss Ginsu Knife Sleeves? Really? You think so?”

  We were lounging around on the shag carpet in Juli’s room when I put on a Billie Holiday record I bought at the Thrift. Astrid went, “What’s this shit? It’s like listening to a cat being dragged to death.”

  I grabbed a jade Buddha off the desk and tossed it at her blond, tousled head, asking, “Why? Why do you have to ruin everything?”

  Astrid ducked and the Buddha missed her head, barely.

  “Careful, pussycat,” she said.

  DEMERIT

  NAME: Thisbe Newton

  DATE: May 7, 1988

  INFRACTION: Defamed school property

  DEMERIT(S): 6 demerits plus a one-week suspension

  SISTER ST. JOE’S BLACK VEIL

  My father, lounging about like a movie star
, an aging model god, waited outside the Sacred Heart Holy Angels office to discuss my suspension. He sat in a cracked mahogany chair that was too small for him, his Armani suit rumpled. He wore a yellow striped tie around his neck and a silver Rolex at his wrist. It had a broken clasp he fiddled with when he was nervous. Dear old Dad.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked, sliding into the chair next to him.

  Instead of answering my question, my dad just stared, fiercely, at me. Whenever he was angry, his eyes popped, the whites practically swallowed the blue irises, and he moved jerkily, his head bobbing around on the knob of his spine.

  “You know,” he said, “this is going on your permanent record. This could affect your choices for college.”

  “Dad,” I sighed. “It’s just a suspension.”

  My father stopped picking me up for school in the mornings after Juli got her Audi. It’d been three months and seventeen days since I saw him last. Despite his irritation, he looked even more handsome than I remembered, his skin tan and his clean white teeth curved like clamshells.

  “Tell me, again, exactly,” my father said. “How did you pull this one off? How did you get suspended from Sacred Heart for a week?”

  It was after school, that nowhere time when the halls were ghostlike, just a handful of stray girls, three or four of them at a time, straggling down the hall, chatting about Key Club and the next brownie sale. I stared at the trophy case across the hall from us, at the dusty plaques and cheerleading trophies.

  “I was angry,” I whispered, picking at the thread in my skirt, not daring to look at my father. “I had some spray paint this kid left in Juli’s car, so I hit the walls. I know it was stupid.”

  “You’re a graffiti artist now, is that right?” He smiled, briefly. “What did you write?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’d like to hear it from you,” he said.

  “Somebody else started it,” I told him. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life before. Honest.”

  Behind the trophy case, girls from Sacred Heart and girls from Holy Angels stared at us from black-and-white pictures. All of them blending into one student, one face, one girl who wore smart, full-skirted dresses with matching skinny belts, white gloves, and a pearly white smile. What happened to them? How did they become women? How did they make it to the other side?

  “What did you write?” my father asked.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “ ‘Deb Scott’s Dead.’ ”

  The door to the office swung open. I thought it was what I had said that made his face go white, his fingers searching nervously for the clasp on his watch. But then I looked up and saw Sister St. Joe standing in the open door, her black veil on her shoulders, her pretty, haunted doe eyes opened wide.

  My father stood up. He face went from white to burning scarlet red. He whispered, “Deb?”

  Sister St. Joe, looking just as startled, turned her face, sharply, to the left as if she’d been slapped. She stared at her shoes and started talking fast. “Thisbe . . . I . . . you . . . can’t come in here.”

  “Deb,” he said. My father took a step towards her, then nervously stepped back. He reached out his hand to her and then just stared at it, the fingers flexing in the open air.

  “Did you know that I work here now?” Sister St. Joe asked. She wouldn’t look at my dad, she wouldn’t look at me, but she wouldn’t stop talking either. “I teach all the hard sciences. Sex,” she said, “Darwin, and death.”

  Deb Scott of the blue smoky eyes. Deb Scott of the wild black hair.

  I whispered, “It’s you.”

  It wasn’t even a thought, not really, the way my book bag slid off my shoulder, over my elbow, the strap taut in my hand. And then it was flying, gliding across the hall, soaring past Sister St. Joe’s black veil until it found its purchase in the glass panes of the trophy case. First the crash, then this moment, this breath of silence, an intake of air, before the glass fell like rain. Everything stopped. I took a long tear of breath, then another, like beads on a string. It’s like I wasn’t even there, just a ghost of myself. Everything quiet, calm, perfect as petals.

  Then the glass crashing, falling in a hundred thousand glittering pieces, a thunderstorm of glass raining down on the crumbling memorabilia of Sacred Heart Holy Angels, the cheerleading trophies, the plaques, the black-and-white photographs of girls that went before me, smiling, blank eyed for the camera, the two graduation tassels—purple and yellow for Sacred Heart, green and white for Holy Angels.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “What the?”

  There was a flurry of activity, the nuns swarming through the halls in their swishing black skirts, girls, laughing and pointing at the glass everywhere.

  My father shook my bag loose of broken glass and put a giant paw on my shoulder. All the time not daring to take his eyes off of Sister St. Joe’s face, her pretty doe eyes, her young, troubled mouth.

  “I can’t,” my father said. “I don’t,” he said, stopping.

  Sister St. Joe bit her lip hard and took a breath, struggling to pull herself together. I wanted to tear off her veil and run screaming down the hall, crashing through the double glass doors, out into the world, never looking back once.

  “Go on, get out of here,” Sister St. Joe said. “Please.”

  My father drove me home. I picked at the biscuit leather braiding of the seat, my hands doing this wavy, palsied tremor kind of thing.

  “So,” I whispered. “You’re her married man?”

  My father exhaled and trained his watery blue eyes on the dotted line of the road. He gripped the steering wheel with a stranglehold.

  “You think you know? About sex? Love? You and your friends?” he asked, staring down the long ribbon of the road. “Fine. You tell me. You tell me what you know.”

  I opened my mouth to answer. What did I know? I knew boys were a fast, heady high, that some boys tasted like salt, others like a piece of fruit. I knew sex was like a dance, like shuffleshuffle-step. It was our way into the world, Astrid, Juli, and me.

  “Go on,” my dad said. “Tell me. Tell me what you think you know.”

  Farms beat by the windows, red barns and blue silos, stitched together by cross-tied wooden fences.

  “You don’t have a clue, sister. Believe me, you have no idea,” my father said. “Nobody does.”

  My father pulled up to the curb in front of my mother’s Colonial. I got out, slammed the door. The sky was gunmetal grey. My father dragged his flashy car out of the suburbs for his town house downtown.

  In the morning, I got up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Banged around the kitchen for breakfast. Burned toast.

  “What?” my mother asked. “You’re not speaking again? Great.” She punched my shoulder. “Knock yourself out.”

  Astrid and Juli sent a suspension care package filled with Hershey’s chocolate bars, fashion magazines, Cadbury eggs, Mad Libs booklets, and condoms. “You know,” Astrid wrote on the note. “For when your mom lets you out of the house again.”

  I dialed Devin’s phone number just to hear his muffled “Hello?” before I gasped and hung up.

  I was sitting at the kitchen window waiting for the water to boil when Sister St. Joe pulled into the driveway in the nuns’ rattling station wagon. She cut the engine off halfway through Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” and flipped her black veil back like a rope of hair. She rang the doorbell and put her mouth to the door, saying, “Thisbe, it’s me.”

  I opened the door and just stood there.

  Sister St. Joe kicked her orthopedic-looking nuns’ shoes at the wall and said, “Just give me a second.”

  I stepped out onto the front porch. It was spring, but still blustery. The ugliest month of all in the Midwest, when everything’s brown, sucking mud.

  Sister St. Joe eased herself down on the front ledge. She spread out her black skirts to kick her heels against the brick
wall.

  “You know there’s a plant in Borneo that smells like rotting meat?” she asked. “That’s how Mother Nature works. The awful smell attracts flies, I suppose. Pollination. Whatever. Or did you know there’s a deep-sea frog that gives birth through its back? Hundreds of those little tadpoles swimming through the sea. Of course, there’s always veil-tailed guppies. They eat their young. Mine, the nuns took him.”

  Sister St. Joe watched me from the corner of her eye. She ducked her chin to her chest. My hands trembled at my sides like fish.

  “So what did I do? I took my vows,” she said and tried to laugh. “Isn’t that funny? A laugh? I thought that would fix it. I thought I had to, you know, as a penance.” She lifted her black skirt and fanned it out at her sides.

  Sister St. Joe stared off into the distance and suddenly I could see it, the shadow of Deb Scott in her, the doe eyes, the set jaw. I wondered how I never saw it before.

  “Life surprises you sometimes,” she said. “What you will and will not become.” She took a breath, and then another. She zipped her pearl-drop crucifix back and forth on its silver chain. I sat down beside her, rested my head against her black shoulder.

  Something in my throat tore loose. I felt a sob rise in my chest. I thought about Astrid, Juli, and me, flying fearless down the long, winding ribbon of the world, for what?

  “But you know what I’ve been thinking lately?” Sister St. Joe asked, wiping the dampness out of her eyes. “The Peace Corps. Guatemala maybe. I could build some nice houses, don’t you think?” Sister St. Joe flexed her muscles and winked.

  We sat there on the porch and cars drove past. I listened to her breathing, the girl, the legend. Sister St. Joe surprised me by nicking her fingers under my chin. She raised my head, parted the strawberry blond bangs out of my eyes to ask, “So, tell me. Is Deb Scott dead?”

  I tore my face loose from Sister St. Joe’s grip and stared at her, those feral eyes, darting across the map of my face, searching. She was still wild, still desperate, still perched on the verge, and looking to me for answers. What could I tell her?