Whores on the Hill Read online

  Q.: What’s your name?

  A.: Like, Astrid Thornton, duh.

  Q.: Where do you go to high school?

  A.: Where do you think, Jellybean? Jeez. What is this?

  Q.: What’s in your backpack?

  A.: Clairefontaine notebooks. I only use Clairefontaine notebooks. One fountain pen, one of those mechanical pencils. Shiseido eyeliner in Black Dog, a strawberry Lip Smacker. A pack of my mom’s Kools with three cigarettes left. So don’t ask to bum any.

  Q.: So, favorite article of clothing?

  A.: My steel-toed Doc Martens, easy.

  Q.: What tape’s in your stereo right now?

  A.: Histoire de Melody by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s, like, really old and stuck there. He got banned for having his daughter sing about sex. He’s so dirty. I love Serge Gainsbourg.

  Q.: Favorite food?

  A.: Wheat Thins and Oreos. Maraschino cherries, chocolate.

  Q.: Right. Favorite place to shop?

  A.: I like them all. Limited, Express. Although I prefer Outback Red to Forenza. Benetton to Outback Red. You know. The Thrift . . .

  Q.: Idea of luxury?

  A.: A whole pack of cigarettes and a full tank of gas. My girls riding shotgun, all of us crammed together.

  Q.: Favorite thing to do when not at school?

  A.: Coffee Trader: just sit at the bar and look. Dancing at Metro. Driving around, listening to Erasure maybe. What else is there, you know?

  Q.: What did you do Saturday night?

  A.: Drank Amaretto and rolled down the hill with Brian Parker. I got grass stains all over my skirt and my mom wants to know where from.

  Q.: If you were to visit an analyst, what would it be for?

  A.: Anxiety of influence. Hmm.

  Q.: Hardest lesson you’ve had to learn?

  A.: Everything you see ain’t always what it be.

  Q.: Sexiest thing on a man?

  A.: Hands. They get me every time. I can’t even look at a man with little girlie hands.

  Q.: Greatest wish?

  A.: That my mom will leave my stepdad, Padgett. Meet somebody nice. Somebody who isn’t always grabbing at me with those greasy fingers.

  The phone rang. “Hold on a sec,” Astrid said and rolled over on her bed. Her mermaid’s hair hung past her shoulder blades almost to the striped canvas belt looped through her army shorts.

  “Chinese Panda Restaurant,” Astrid answered in a ridiculous Chinese accent, her syllables slurred. “Hey, we were just talking about you.” She mouthed the word “Van” and rolled her flashing, navy-colored eyes. She played with the silver medallion of the Virgin she kept around her collar.

  I wished I was Astrid so badly, sometimes the want almost escaped me like a sigh. The power of her, the force. Her angular catlike face, the nest of her twiggy hair. Just to be near her, my skin went electric.

  Astrid slept in a four-poster bed under a white cotton coverlet. Her mother kept a pink satin quilt at the foot of Astrid’s bed for very cold nights. The pink, puckered satin moved like water beneath my fingers. Her walls were plastered with The Clash and Violent Femmes posters left behind by an older sister who moved to Madison for college.

  Astrid’s rancher was small, tinier than Juli’s East Side mansion and even my mom’s new Colonial. Instead, Astrid’s house was tucked away on the shabby side of Wauwatosa, where guys propped up their cars on cinder blocks in the driveway and most of the women slung coffee for a living or worked in nail salons. Astrid’s one-floor rancher was comfortable and sloppy, like a college apartment, with her stepdad Padgett snoozing on the couch in his underwear. But Astrid preferred Juli’s luxurious third-floor pad or hanging out at Metropolis, Coffee Trader, even the George Webb, so we were hardly ever there.

  “Yeah, see you then,” Astrid said and then hung up the phone. “Okay. Where were we?” she asked, flipping her braids next to her breasts and giving me her bare, expectant face.

  Q.: Bad habit?

  A.: Biting my nails to the quick.

  Q.: Admire in somebody else?

  A.: Wait. Okay. A good sense of humor. Fashion sense. Confidence. You know . . .

  Q.: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

  A.: My Roman nose. I’d nip it and turn it up at the end like yours.

  Q.: Perfect guy. In your opinion. Describe.

  A.: Jean-Paul Belmondo from Breathless. In the bedroom scene, his ruined boxer face. That guy from Duran Duran, not the singer. All that rooster hair and his shirt open.

  Q.: Describe your dance moves.

  A.: Swedish dancing ABBA girl. With a little John Travolta on the side.

  Q.: Best book you’ve read this year?

  A.: Plato’s The Republic.

  Q.: On your bedside table?

  A.: A pink typewriter. Midol. A bottle of mineral water, always. You can guess the rest.

  Q.: How would your mom describe you?

  A.: Full of potential. Needs a haircut. But what she really thinks is, like, Jesus, she talks.

  Q.: If you could have one superpower, what would it be?

  A.: I’d like to fly.

  Q.: That’s it?

  A.: That’s right. I’d like to fly.

  THE CHURCH OF DEB SCOTT

  Before us, there was another.

  Deb Scott sniffed modeling glue. She ate speed. She smoked hash instead of cigarettes. Deb Scott was the ultimate, the über, the super badass bad girl.

  Astrid and Juli talked about her all the time. All the girls from Sacred Heart Holy Angels did.

  “Deb Scott got caught in the track shed, shagging a kid from Fenwick.”

  “She Frenched Father Flynn in his car once. Just to freak him out.”

  “Deb Scott boosted a pickup truck once and cut clear across Shumacker’s field. Drove a crop circle right into the corn. Three thousand dollars worth of damage. I’m serious. For real.”

  “Deb Scott didn’t roll up to school until twelve, or sometimes two. Teachers never said a peep, they were so scared of her. She’d claim anything and they knew it.”

  The boys Deb Scott dated from Fenwick were legion. She picked up stragglers from the Southside, roughies, mean-looking cuties with mohawks. She loved them and threw them away. Nobody ever got a handle on Deb Scott, never for long.

  Deb Scott rode in Corvettes mostly, or a dented Monte Carlo. Sometimes, she tied her books onto the back of a blue Norton with a leather strap. Off she sped into the black night, her arms tethered around some boy’s braided waist, playing with his belt buckle, touching him. That’s what they said.

  Deb Scott smoked hash outside the Virgin in between classes. Girls would climb onto the heating vent in the library to watch Deb Scott sneak outside to the Virgin Mary statue. She parted the shaggy black curtain of her bangs and took little whisper hits from the hand-rolled hash she carried in her backpack. She wore a wristband with silver spikes in it and didn’t give a fuck.

  “Deb Scott was so bitchin’,” Astrid said, lifting two strands of black rosary beads off her neck and twisting them around her wrist. “She wasn’t scared of anything.”

  “Deb Scott was in Dorothea Dix. For eating glass. Can you believe that?” Juli told us.

  “Duh,” Astrid said. “It was just the hash.”

  “But you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “Oh, who knows what I wouldn’t do?” Astrid asked, winking.

  “I heard she dated a married man, once,” Juli said. “Some rich guy who wouldn’t leave his wife. Deb was pissed as shit.”

  Rumor had it Deb Scott skipped town with a Hell’s Angel once, made it all the way to Chicago before the cops collared her panhandling on Michigan Avenue and sent her packing again. Girls say she snuck backstage after a Prince concert once and actually met the man in purple paisley. They went into a room, locked the door, and didn’t come back out again.

  Imagine.

  “I’d almost eat glass for Prince,” Juli said, and we all fell back laughing.

/>   Deb Scott danced late nights at Metropolis with her skinny white arms over her hair. She gave a guy head during the middle of a midnight movie at the Oriental. Deb Scott spun herself in circles in the middle of the night at the all-night diner, like, out of her mind.

  “Quinn Catherine’s older sister saw Deb Scott at a party once,” Juli said. “She said Deb Scott sat on a ratty couch with a rowdy crew from Fenwick. They poured fixative onto an old flannel and held it to Deb Scott’s face. When they pulled it away, Deb Scott’s mouth turned red like she’d been punched.”

  All of this, five, six years before our time, when Deb Scott went to Sacred Heart, when there were two all-girls’ schools in Milwaukee instead of one. Deb Scott took on Holy Angels on the hockey field, running with her hockey stick raised over her shoulder, screaming, “Charge!”

  By senior year, Deb Scott started skipping class in the afternoons. Then she’d go a day or two without bothering to call in. People said they saw her around town. In the bathroom at Metropolis, tonguing the barbell in some guy’s ear. Four a.m. at the George Webb diner, sitting at the counter by herself, knotting her black bangs together. “One thousand miles of bad road,” the older girls said. “That’s how she looked.”

  And then, one morning at the beginning of winter, when the streets turned white from salt, Deb Scott didn’t show for school. The girls who watched her waited at their peeping perch in the library but there was nothing. Just the wind picking up drifts of snow and swirling it around the Virgin’s bare feet.

  “Just like that, Deb Scott was gone. Nobody knows where,” Astrid said while lighting a Kool.

  Somebody started spray painting. First the brick wall of the sacristy. Then the windows to the gym. Always outside, on the walls of Sacred Heart Holy Angels, in an embarrassing, public way. DEB SCOTT’S DEAD, it read, in a crazy, cursive script. DEB SCOTT’S DEAD, everywhere on the walls of Sacred Heart. Until Fritz, the walleyed janitor, painted over it with a roller and a can of weatherproof paint. “It took three coats,” he said. “Son of a fucking bitch. You know?”

  “Deb Scott isn’t dead,” Astrid said. “Never.”

  Astrid worshipped at the altar of Deb Scott. Gave alms to Deb’s memory. She tore her skirt as short as Deb Scott’s, ratted her hair like Deb Scott’s, ran fast, maybe faster, than Deb Scott, the baddest of all the bad girls. Astrid believed in her name. The Deb Scott she knew was flying cross-country on the back of a roaring blue Norton. Deb Scott of the black hair. Deb Scott of the blue smoky eyes.

  DEB SCOTT’S DEAD, the graffitied walls said.

  AND BARRY WAS HIS NAME, OH!

  Fenwick Preparatory was our brother school. They went to class downtown, where the streets were narrow and close, in a brick building with yellow iron fire escapes snaking down the front of it and the sides. We hardly ever saw them, until late September when Astrid met Barry.

  Astrid said, “Barry’s got a deviated septum. Or he had one. Now it’s just a kind of scar. I think it’s sexy.”

  “Barry’s arms are the size of telephone poles. Big, just how I like them.”

  “Barry’s got practice.”

  “Don’t laugh. Barry calls me ‘Sexy Sexerton from Sexville.’ I said don’t laugh.”

  “Barry called last night.”

  “Barry lives on Lakeshore Drive. You’ve seen it, that monster Georgian with gardens all the way down to the lake. He says he throws a kegger every spring. He wants us all to come.”

  “He bit me. Right here.” She thumbed a purple hickey on her shoulder. “Ouch,” she said. “But, like, not really.”

  “Barry says Ronald Reagan is a fucking corporate pawn.”

  “He’s got this voice, Jesus, whispering in my ear like Mickey Rourke or something. I’m serious as all get out.”

  “Barry said, ‘You’re an emotional cripple. But otherwise, yeah, you’re cool.’ What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “He doesn’t like smokers. He says girls who smoke have sexual problems.” Astrid paused and lit up a Kool. “What a bunch of BS, right?”

  “I don’t think Barry would like this blouse. It’s too frilly Prince.”

  “He hasn’t called. Why hasn’t he called?”

  “We saw Goonies last night. I have no clue what happened.”

  “Barry drives a baby blue BMW with heated seats. He lets me play with the radio while he’s driving.”

  “Barry said he likes Fenwick. That he wouldn’t want to go to school with girls. ‘Too distracting,’ he said. And then we made out till we fell asleep.”

  “Barry’s Italian-German, I guess. Although his mother’s always making casserole.”

  “He chews Clorets.”

  “He says, ‘You make me wanna do something bad.’ ”

  “Barry’s dad is a vice president at Miller Brewing. You know what I’m saying: cash-ola.”

  “He’s a wicked kisser.”

  “Look. Barry gave me his pin,” Astrid said, sliding into Juli’s lemon-colored Audi and pulling open the flap on her army jacket. There, poked through the red cotton of her zippered hoodie, was Barry’s brass Fenwick pin shaped like a flaming torch.

  We said, “Wow, no shit.”

  When we did finally meet him, Barry was standing in a parking lot in front of the 7-Eleven with all his Fenwick friends. He wore a Fenwick letterman jacket, white leather and red boiled wool, over plain old acid-washed jeans. He had his big, beefy arm fitted around Astrid’s neck like a vise.

  “The way she talked about him, I thought he’d be, I don’t know, like a god, you know?” Juli whispered.

  “What’s so special about a Fenwick linebacker with a perm?”

  Later, Astrid called and said, “Barry does this thing. Where he lies across me, all his weight like a ton of bricks, and goes, ‘This is a drill. Okay, I’m dead. You get out from under me.’ And I can’t. I can’t even breathe. And I love it. Crazy, whoa.”

  BARRY’S TEA BAG

  Two weeks after Astrid met Barry, we stood at the mouth to the Fenwick football field, in white oxford shirts and skinny pink ties.

  “Like Adam Ant and his band,” Juli joked. “A riot, right?” We listened to the marching band play oompah music.

  “Gets them in the mood.” Astrid lit the tip of a Kool from the butt of another smoke.

  From the gate, all we could see were the backs of people in hoodie sweatshirts sitting in the bleachers. And then, every once in a while, a handful of guys in red jerseys and white helmets running left, then right, like zigzag arrows across the night.

  “Boring,” Juli yawned. “So homosocial. All that punting. And the pileups. You know what that’s all about.”

  We never went to football games. It was a matter of pride. But Astrid wanted to see Barry. So we waited outside the football field instead, buying cotton candy from the concession stand, sitting on the hood of a yellow Mazda and listening to the game in the dark.

  “Here they come.” Astrid’s eyes lit up like a fire. The Fenwick Falcons trotted past us single file for the showers— Phillip, Todd, Tyler, Barry—all of them jogging through the maze of cars, the hoods hunched over like beetles’ wings. The lights went black on the football field and we sat grinning in the shadows.

  “Hey girls.” Barry’s tight curls peeked out from the plastic cage of his red-and-white striped helmet. “Wait up. We’ll be right back.”

  Football players only knew the same places: Kopp’s Custard, the Taco Bell drive-through. We sat in the backs of their cars and let them drive us to the East Side, to a place they knew where a sandy bluff jutted out over the lip of Lake Michigan like a landing strip, hidden from the road by a line of scrappy pines. They made bonfires from windthrown branches, and by the time we got there the fire was already soaring, all that wood thrown together like a pile of limbs. An oversized boom box perched in the sand played an unpleasant mix of White-snake, Van Halen, and Air Supply. I sat with Astrid and Juli on a cross-tie a bit higher than the fire. We drank wine coolers and watched the Fen
wick boys eat their takeout.

  “Gimme one of them burgers. I’m dying over here.”

  “Hey scarf-face, slow down. Save some for the ladies.”

  “Who? What ladies?” a snout-faced linebacker laughed. When Barry tackled him, swept his shoulders into the dirt, the both of them grunting, the jokester squealed, “I’m kidding!”

  The football players made me nervous, reminded me of Brett Smith from Thomas Aquinas, his big, handsome face. Those boys were so large, they couldn’t help but crush everything around them.

  “I think tonight . . . Barry and I will . . . you know,” Astrid whispered to us, blushing in front of the bonfire.

  We sipped our wine coolers and walked around the patch of grass. The football players gulped their PBRs in one swallow and crushed the cans on their foreheads like some kind of fake-looking magic store cans.

  “Like a mating ritual,” Juli snickered. “It’s not so bad if you think of it that way.”

  We circled the bonfire and felt the heat on our faces.

  “Hey Red,” one of the forwards said. “I’d like to dip my tea bag in a little girl like you.” He was a big bruiser of a boy and when he came up behind me to put his face in my neck, his breath smelled like cheese. He tried to grab my elbow, to pull me close, but I jumped, spilling my pink drink all over his letterman jacket.

  “Jesus, girl, the leather.” He swatted me away.

  “Just be cool,” Astrid hissed.

  “I hate football players,” I whispered back.

  “Don’t embarrass me, okay?” Astrid asked, her wide, navy-colored eyes all serious.

  The Fenwick Falcons rushed one another’s chests like bucking goats, they drank their PBRs and roared in the moonlight. A wide receiver passed out mushrooms. We put them in our mouths and chewed, their bitterness dark as dirt. I laughed with my head back and my teeth felt white as stars.