Whores on the Hill Page 4

Astrid took my hand, then Juli’s. We danced in front of the fire, moving our hands at our sides, raising our arms above our heads. Astrid’s fingers looped around my wrist like a bracelet, like a leash leading me into a circle with her and Juli. Juli’s black hair fell in sheets between my hands. We were laughing, dancing. Astrid moved her hips, then we moved ours. We danced close to the flames, felt the heat of the fire at our backs. Astrid, Juli, and me danced together, danced for each other. We lived for each other, breathed for each other, protected each other from where we were headed, which none of us knew.

  “Look at you,” Astrid said, smiling. “Look at us.” We closed our eyes, dancing, letting the football players into our circle, then shouldering them out again. Clouds coiled around the stars in the blue-black sky. The moon burned white. We were happy. What else could we want?

  And then I was high, like a string being tugged by the moon. My feet didn’t seem to touch the ground.

  The boys stood behind us in a row, just smiling, laughing. They reached out a hand to try to touch us, but we just laughed, danced. How could they hurt us? How could they touch us, I mean, really? When it was always just Astrid, Juli, and me?

  Barry edged up behind Astrid, swept her honey-colored curls off one shoulder and bit her neck. “Hey Bright Eyes,” he said. “I want to tell you something. Here. Over here.”

  Astrid fingered the black Anarchy pin on her pink tie and smiled. She whispered, “I’ll be right back.”

  “Sure you will.” Juli smiled.

  Barry put his paw on the small of her back and steered Astrid towards the shadows of the birches. The dark woods swallowed them whole.

  Juli and I danced.

  “Look at you,” Juli said.

  “No, look at you,” I answered.

  Afterwards, I held Juli’s hair while she vomited on the beach.

  “Don’t tell Astrid, okay?” she asked. She sat on the sand and picked at the thin, threadlike scratches ribboned up and down her wrists.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “Know what my dad says?” Juli asked. “He says identity is the crisis of adolescence.” Then she rolled over and put her face against the cool wet sand. The water rolled up and broke in waves, a thousand silver fillings, against the shore.

  The next afternoon, we smoked behind the Virgin. “What happened with Barry?” Juli asked.

  Astrid ducked her head and said, “It’s personal, okay?” She zipped her Virgin medallion on its silver chain and smiled at me, daring. “Besides, you wouldn’t know the first thing about what I’m talking about, would you Jellybean? Or would you?”

  CHEMISTRY

  We experimented on the third floor. Safety goggles and rubber gloves. The covers of our textbooks read: “Chemistry and You.”

  Sister St. Joe, the youngest nun at Sacred Heart Holy Angels, the one who wore her hair cropped short in a Dorothy Hamill pixie cut, taught all the hard sciences: physics, biology, and chemistry.

  “Contrary to what the church will tell you, it’s a crap-shoot. Sex, I mean,” Sister St. Joe said. She was so petite, she barely cleared the podium. She wore a silver crucifix around her neck with one perfect pin-sized pearl in the middle. “The mayfly only lives for one hour. Roman snails do foreplay. There’s a female fly that sucks out the body content of the male after sex.”

  The chem lab stretched the length of two rooms on the southern wall of the top floor. All windows, overlooking the cornfield behind the school first, then the soldiers’ cemetery just behind it. We sat at ancient, slate-topped lab desks on wobbly, black vinyl stools.

  One time, Catherine McKenner wiped sodium chloride into her eye by mistake and Sister St. Joe hustled her over to the emergency eyewash, quick. “It burns,” Catherine cried. There was danger here, slight, but still.

  We knew the rules of the scientific method: hypothesis, procedure, observation, analysis, conclusion.

  Astrid ran from the chem lab to the physics classroom after school. Slamming doors and laughing.

  “You like to be chased?” Barry asked when he pinned her against Sister St. Joe’s desk. “Tell me. You like this? You wanna be scared, little girl?”

  When the wind blew, the third floor of Sacred Heart Holy Angels howled, like it was possessed.

  “Faulty valves,” Sister St. Joe always said. But we knew.

  There were rumors, stories of a girl. Juli saw her first. Juli got stuck with a locker on the third floor, the worst floor, farthest away from everything, and on top of that, it was haunted.

  “I saw black hair, a worn tattered skirt, over there, by the trophy case. Her fingers just about to touch the glass,” Juli told us. “Next minute, just cold wind and nothing.”

  We laughed it away, thinking Juli was just zonked on Xanax.

  Flat country like that, you’re laid bare to the elements, cracked open like a broken egg. Stalks of wheat, three feet high at least, flattened by the cold. Everybody jawing about windchill: “Feels like ten below with the windchill.” How do you not start to see things?

  Once you have a hypothesis, you have to prove it. Our procedure: a covert operation in mid-October. At least we thought it was.

  “Goddammit, can you give me a hand here or something?” Astrid asked, laughing, hitching a leg up on Barry’s shoulders and reaching for the ripped screen hanging off the home ec room at Sacred Heart Holy Angels.

  “Easy there. Watch it,” Barry whispered to his friend Big Tuna, a hulking defensive end with a shaggy ponytail. “You better quit looking up my girl’s skirt, asshole, or I’ll clobber you with my shoe.”

  Big Tuna’s younger brother, Little Tuna, a short, wiry-haired kid in a flannel jacket, stood in the wind and laughed into his hand, coughing, “Dick.”

  He caught me staring and winked.

  “All right, almost there.” Astrid lifted her arms above her head and slipped through the window. We watched the soles of her shoes disappear. Juli followed, then me.

  Barry and the Tunas shivered and blew on their hands. They came through the window with a crash, like knocked-over trash cans, tearing the screen in half.

  “Oh shit.”

  “Ssshhh.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I think I tore a tendon.”

  “Ssshhh. Come here. Come on, this way.”

  Astrid pulled a black Maglite out of her blue suede satchel and led the way.

  The school moaned in the night. The cafeteria smelled like macaroni, apples, and burnt hamburger grease. Red lights flickered at the ends of the halls from the EXIT signs. We walked, single file down the linoleum tile.

  “Here,” Astrid whispered, cracking open the door to the stairwell. “All the way to the top.”

  The heavy footsteps of the Fenwick boys echoed through the stairwell.

  “Hey pretty girl,” Little Tuna said, reaching for my hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Thisbe,” I answered, warming to his touch but terrified, slipping my hands inside the pockets of my zippered sweat-shirt. “But everybody calls me Jellybean.”

  “Jellybean, then. Okay. Does Jellybean like tuna sandwiches?” he asked, laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  Little Tuna had brown curly hair down to his plaid shirt collar and braces on his teeth. Still, he was cute. He laughed and whistled, just a whisper of a tune that echoed down the stairwell. I thought I always wanted to meet a boy who could whistle a clean, handsome tune.

  “Ssh,” someone said.

  “You know, the Pabst mansion is haunted. Hell, yeah,” Big Tuna said. “Those crooks, you know they did lots of shady shit to get that rich. Can’t sleep now. That place is supposed to be crawling with ghosts. Chains rattling. Ladies in white. Shit like that, everyone says.”

  We loved bringing boys to Sacred Heart Holy Angels. Because it was the only place in that whole city that we knew. It was the only place that felt like ours, more than our houses. And we loved bringing a boy inside that place that knew only girls.

  We liked to
make him walk the halls with us. Show him the library, the gymnasium, the chapel. Tell him, “We eat lunch here. And this is my locker. This room, number 307, is where I sit, in the second desk next to the window there, at two thirty in the afternoon. This is where I am.”

  Because we wanted him to know our world. And it was better then, in the days ahead, when it was just girls, girls. When there was nothing to hope for in the middle of the day. You could sit in your second seat by the window, look out into the hall, and look at the place where your P.S. 100 boy, your foreign exchange student, your linebacker from Fenwick rested his hand against the wall, right in the center of that green tile, and how his fingers were brown and slender and you thought, I need to touch his hands. I will die if those hands do not touch me tonight. And these are the things we needed to get through in a school full of girls.

  “Here we go, this way,” Astrid said, gesturing with her elbow, the dark kind of lightening in the glare of her Maglite, black to black-grey.

  The third floor stretched before us, a long strip of linoleum flanked by lockers and a narrow stretch of glass cases, holding several shelves of dusty, crumbling memorabilia from Sacred Heart Holy Angels. We pressed our noses to the dusty glass and Astrid trained her light on the shelves. Cheerleading trophies, sepia-toned photographs, girls with beehive hairdos and white, prissy gloves. Pom-poms, yearbooks, diplomas, two graduation tassels—one from each school, purple and yellow for Sacred Heart, green and white for Holy Angels—hanging quiet and covered in dust.

  “What’s that?” Little Tuna asked, pointing to a door with an orange KEEP OUT poster taped to the glass window in it.

  “Goes up to the bell tower over Sacred Heart. It’s locked up tight,” Astrid said. “But Jellybean’s dying to get up there, aren’t you, sweets?”

  I didn’t even have to say it and she just knew.

  Little Tuna touched my earlobe with his thumb, his mouth a flash of silver. “You like adventure?” he asked, running his finger from my ear, along my jaw, to my chin.

  “Sure,” I said, bolder. “I mean, I think.” I caught his longing glance and held it.

  “Okay, somebody tell me,” Big Tuna griped. “What are we doing here again?”

  “Juli saw a ghost,” Astrid whispered.

  Juli nodded, biting her nails to the quick. She jumped when the stairwell door slammed behind us.

  “Hey gorgeous,” Astrid said, linking her arm through Juli’s. “Gimme a nine-letter word for lewd.”

  Juli, with her serious, sphinxlike eyes, chewed on a nail, spit from the corner of her mouth, and whispered, “Salacious.”

  Little Tuna winked and slipped one finger, shyly, around my pinkie finger while we walked down the hall. His touch was warm and steady. I caught my breath. Little Tuna whistled again, a long, lonesome tune.

  “Ssh,” Astrid hissed. “The nuns live right there.” She pointed to the doors off the hall that led to the nunnery. None of us had any clue what the nunnery looked like inside, since none of us had ever been there. We imagined crucifixes, pictures of the Virgin Mary and her son, a sacristy with the nuns’ personal stash of Eucharist wafers. Who knew what they had in there?

  “So,” Barry said, pigeon-stepping down the hall. “Tell me a ghost story then.”

  Astrid thumbed her broken, frizzy curls behind her ears. “Here, this is where Juli saw her.” Astrid threw her blue suede satchel on Sister St. Joe’s desk. We filed in behind her.

  “Hey, this looks just like our chem lab,” Big Tuna said, pointing at the table of elements over the chalkboard, the bony skeleton gaping in the corner.

  “Yeah, but is yours haunted?” Astrid asked, lighting up a Kool, smiling in the match light. “The story goes: There was a girl from Sacred Heart. She was a senior. Her fiancé went to Germany or Saigon or somewhere like that. He came back in a box draped with an American flag. They buried him right there, out back.” Astrid tapped on the window, pointing to the soldiers’ cemetery, where row after row of perfect white headstones rolled up and over a grassy hill like a punched lottery ticket. “She went crazy with grief. Hung herself right here. But never left Holy Angels. She watches him from these windows.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Juli muttered. “I heard there was a fire.”

  “Car crash. Drunk driving. On her way to White Dinner. Her pretty white dress ruined.”

  “Heartbreak, suicide.”

  “Oh fuck. You know, whatever.” Astrid sighed.

  Everybody knew a piece of this story. Even our chaste lady nuns, the ones who’d never, not even once in their lives got laid, had been telling us about it for years: the haunting of Holy Angels. This story, our story, the same story. The details might change, but the plot held fast: a girl had died; still she never left Sacred Heart Holy Angels.

  “Ssh.” Astrid held a finger to her lips. “Listen. Just wait a sec. Can you hear that?”

  We caught our breath and listened to the school settle in the dark. Wind yanked at the gutters, the ripped screen slapped against the bricks. Faulty valves. There was a rustling, like whispers.

  Little Tuna tugged my pinkie finger, whispering, “Here.” My face flushed with fire, but it was happening, it was starting, how could I stop it? He shouldered his way into the utility closet, quietly, quickly, pulling me with him, his chest pressing against mine, his hand on my arm, on my neck. Little Tuna closed the door with the backs of my shoulder blades. His mouth found my mouth fast. I bit his lips. He filled my mouth with his tongue. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t think about breathing. The darkness took us. I felt like I could do anything in the dark and no one would know, no one could tell.

  He slipped his hands under my shirt, thumbing the skin of my stomach, his hands darting fast for my small breasts. He pushed my back up against the glass in the door. I looked up and saw a row of white lab coats swaying on the racks above us like ghosts.

  He kissed me and held me fast. The skin of my body felt like a field of flames, blowing north, blowing south, depending on the direction of his hands. He pressed his body, the bulge in his jeans against mine. I pressed back. We played our bodies that way, like pieces in a puzzle, arranging and rearranging.

  I put my hands in his short, kinky hair and smelled his shampoo. Behind us, in the chem lab, I heard the tinkling shatter of glass breaking and Barry’s laughter. “Butterfingers.”

  Little Tuna slipped his hand in my painter jeans and I backed up, surprised, choking on air. “Wait,” I said, but he swallowed up the words with his mouth, hungry. His hand slipped fast between my legs and up. I closed my eyes, blinking back the shame. “Wait,” I whispered, but his hand was warm and gentle. I started to feel something, something foreign and new, spiraling out from where he was touching me lightly, spreading out like a heat rash, like a fox fire, across my skin, but everything stopped, slammed shut, when Astrid banged on the door, whispering, “Jellybean, please. Now. We gotta hurry.”

  Little Tuna pulled his face back from mine. He wrapped his hands around my hair. He whispered, “We’d better go, Jellybean.”

  I opened the door, shaken. The glare of Astrid’s Maglite burned my eyes.

  “Come on,” Astrid said. “Hurry.”

  Juli, Barry, and Big Tuna were already crashing down the hall when we skirted out of the chem lab. A door slammed and Astrid turned her face back to me, lit with danger, high off it, opening her mouth and shouting, “Run!”

  One of the nuns stood in the hall in a long, white nightgown, waving a flashlight up and down the floor, like a light-house beam moving over the linoleum and across the lockers, calling, “Get out. Get out now. I’ll call the police.”

  We ran breathless, down the hall, down the stairs, down the linoleum. For a second, I thought I saw something. Something standing in the shadows, underneath the red EXIT sign. Black hair, winding like a sheet. Pale, white face. Dark jagged mouth, turned down. I stopped in midstride, paralyzed. I don’t know, maybe I saw nothing at all, just one of us, a reflection in
the window.

  “Come on, Jellybean. Move it.”

  Down we went, down the stairs, down to the cafeteria, down and out the window, through the trees, slipping through the pale night, cutting through the cornfield with explosions in our veins and our hearts kicking up a dance in our chests.

  We stopped, huffing, just at the edge of the soldiers’ cemetery. Little Tuna’s fingers pulled at the loop on my painter jeans. His teeth found the flesh behind my ear and sank into it.

  “Hey Jellybean, candy cane,” he said, “I’d like to pick you up and take you home with me. Put you in my closet, save some of you for later.”

  I laughed, skirting out of Little Tuna’s grasp, laughing and running with Astrid on one side of me, Juli on the other.

  “You look different,” Astrid said, panting.

  “Yeah?”

  We ducked and ran, dodging through the narrow rows of corn for the white gapped teeth of the headstones in the soldiers’ cemetery, laughing and screaming like the wind on the first night of winter, like the earth turning its back on the sun, finally now, finally ready for a whole new season.

  QUIZ: ARE YOU A WHORE ON THE HILL? HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE A LOW-KEY LOSER OR HOT AND HELL-BOUND

  Go ahead, grab a pencil.

  Your curfew is eleven o’clock sharp. At 11:02 p.m., you’re

  hopping into bed and pulling your Star Wars sheets up tight.

  dry heaving in the bushes behind some kid’s house.

  shakin’ it with the foreign exchange hottie like you just don’t care. His name is Sven. Tell him your name is Natasha.

  At Metropolis, you see your hot crush talking to some State-Fair-hair girl with a fanny pack and Kangaroo sneakers. You

  break-dance over and blurt, “Hey you guys, what’s shakin’?”

  make out fiercely with nearest available guy, now!

  lick faces with your closest girlfriend. That’ll get his attention, guaranteed.

  Under your knickers, you go

  granny pants with crusty rotted-out elastic. Hey, you’re on The Rag. Enuff said.

  pretty white panties, aka Elvis Presley style.