Whores on the Hill Read online

  —Father Flynn, 42,

  Sacred Heart Holy Angels, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  ARIES MARCH 21–APRIL 20

  Once, on a dare, I let Billy Sneed put it in for maybe five whole seconds. But that doesn’t really count, does it? He’s a forward for the Fenwick Fighters. Built like a train wreck, that guy.

  —Quinn Catherine, 15,

  Sacred Heart Holy Angels, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  TAURUS APRIL 21–MAY 21

  I don’t like to talk about it. But I was eight, okay? And she was eight. We were at summer camp. Gross, all right, I know! Okay. Jesus.

  —Barry Buford, 16,

  Fenwick Preparatory, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  GEMINI MAY 22–JUNE 21

  Oh for fuck’s sake. Why do you want to know any of this anyway? Does it matter? Will you believe me then? Even if I can put it into words, the mystery, the movement of it? What can I tell you that you don’t already know? Or that you will need to figure out on your own? What kind of truth can I give you, when nothing can be said for certain? I’m telling you, why should I even try?

  —Deb Scott, location unknown

  CANCER JUNE 22–JULY 23

  After the night we broke into Sacred Heart Holy Angels, I knew I needed to lose my virginity fast. My first time was crummy, but I wasn’t expecting much. It was with Little Tuna. It hurt and the condom broke, I think. Little Tuna wasn’t exactly cool about it. He pulled out and panicked, swearing, “Son of a bitch. Just my luck.” Astrid says sex feels awesome, spectacular, like bright lights and everything. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what she’s talking about, for real. I’ve done it two more times, once more with Little Tuna, and then with a skater, which was better, but no flashing disco lights or anything like that. I’m not saying it’s bad. I just don’t understand what the big deal is all about. I listen to them breathe. Sometimes, when everything’s black, I feel like I’m touching all the shadows with my mouth, exploring all the holes in the universe. I’m looking. I’m trying to figure it out.

  —Thisbe Newton, 15,

  Sacred Heart Holy Angels, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  GAY-ISH

  Some of the girls at school were gay-ish. Meaning they held hands, slipped their arms around each other’s waist, kissed with tongues, all openmouthed.

  “Dykes,” Astrid joked. Although we played, pushing at the girl rules, too.

  “It’s such a turn-on for guys,” Astrid said. “Come here. Just a little kiss. I’ll show you.”

  It was late November and we were sitting on the front stoop of the Coffee Trader, wet leaves on the sidewalk and everything smelling like fire. The Coffee Trader was closed on Mondays but we forgot.

  “Don’t.” I shrugged my shoulders and Astrid’s hand dropped. She playfully swatted my knee.

  “You scared? Honestly.” Astrid looked sheepish, laughed, and stared at her steel-toed Doc Martens. “Just relax.”

  I was wearing a new shirt: baby blue Swiss dot with princess sleeves and red bows. At home, I double wrapped a silver-studded belt around my waist and thought it looked punk rock. But now I felt like Pollyanna. What was I thinking? Princess sleeves. I pulled the flap on my white pleather jacket tight to hide it.

  “You look sweet.” Astrid stared at the street. I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She tore open a packet of cigarettes with her teeth, spitting the cellophane from her lips. “You’re blushing,” she teased.

  The wind blew leaves down the street. One of those nights. The end of one thing, the beginning of another. It felt like my life was starting, just to be near Astrid now. When three months earlier, did I even breathe?

  Early Christmas lights twinkled from the shop windows. The Coffee Trader was on Downer, the Bleecker Street of Milwaukee. Cobblestone sidewalks, head shops, street vendors selling anklets with silver bells, the popcorn man on the corner, and of course, our favorite, the Coffee Trader. Just sitting on the curb, we felt different. Bohemian and city wise.

  “Come on. Let’s go to Eclectic Eleanor’s. See who can find the ugliest tie-dye.”

  Astrid pulled me up by the wrist and dragged me down the street. I slipped my arm around her waist and rested my fingers on her jutting hip bone. She smelled like vanilla and white flowers, daisies, maybe, and something else.

  At Sacred Heart Holy Angels, girls who were gay-ish practiced on each other. Like Trina Sinclair and Barbara MacIntyre. They made out in the courtyard at Holy Angels, licking each other’s faces for attention, until the nuns filed by like ducks, clucking, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . . what’s going on here?”

  Or Beth Hamilton and Mary Greenhorn. They were in love. Making moon-eyes at each other during chemistry. Leaving notes in each other’s lockers. They went everywhere together, linking pinkie fingers. Beth, a big German girl in braids, and Mary, just a whisper of a thing, hair so blond it was almost white, like satin. When Mary started dating a Fenwick basketball player, Beth wailed openmouthed and slammed Mary’s locker with her fist.

  There were fights. There were trysts. There were stories. About Marybeth Fischer, the senior girl, who seduced and teased a freshman for so long she went crazy. Got sent to Dorothea Dix for six weeks and still wrote Marybeth Fischer long, gushing letters signed, “Your Sugar Baby.” She dotted all her i’s with delicate, curly hearts.

  Mainly, it was just crushes, fleeting romances you caught like a cold and got over in a week. Everybody fell in love a little bit with their girlfriends. Until they got boyfriends.

  After Astrid and I stopped in every shop on Downer, after we pawed through tie-dyed T-shirts, dusty album covers, and silver knuckle rings, Astrid yawned, “Let’s call a cab.”

  A burgundy-colored Buick pulled up to the curb half an hour later with a big black guy behind the wheel. We slid into the patchouli-scented backseat and peeled out of downtown, flying down the freeway, past cornfields, cross-tie fences, and blue silos. Astrid stuck the blond, wheaty end of a braid in her mouth to wet it. She eyed the dark, shadowed taxi driver, who kept watching us in the rearview mirror. She fingered his laminated name badge hanging over the back of the front seat. His name was Genghis Khan.

  “Genghis Khan, can you believe that?” Astrid whispered. Genghis Khan’s eyes looked watery and brown, like an animal’s, in the rearview mirror. His black hair stood out around his head like a smoky corona. Astrid got a shy smile. She looked at me, winked, flipped a leg over my waist, and was suddenly sitting on my lap.

  It happened so fast I wasn’t even sure what she was doing. Astrid darted down over me, quick, she brushed her lips against my lips, electric as a brush fire. Perfume like Dentyne chewing gum and menthol smoke from her mother’s cigarettes. She exhaled and kissed me lightly. “Breathe into my mouth,” Astrid whispered. “Like this.”

  “Astrid.”

  “Come on. It’ll be funny. For Genghis.”

  Astrid put her arms around my neck and kissed me slowly, first, just the heat of her lips, buzzing, then tugging my lips, the fruit of her tongue, the rush of her, the heat. I breathed into her mouth. She breathed into mine. My body, incandescent under her touch.

  Astrid’s hands slipped up the front of my shirt fast. Then one of her hands took mine, pulling it up and under her blouse. Her breasts were loose, soft and full as pears in my hands.

  I watched the driver watching us in the rearview mirror. And then I watched us in the rearview mirror, seeing what he saw: Astrid’s bony spine bending over me, my fingers inching up her back, the flash of a pink tongue and sighs. Astrid arched her back, slid her hands under my breasts, and kissed my neck.

  “Go on,” the driver said, his voice high as a girl’s. “Go ahead. All the way.”

  Astrid kissed me and held me fast. Her tongue filled my mouth. Her hands pulled me up. Everything went black, like the back side of the black night sky.

  We jerked over a bump in the road and Astrid was laughing, still sitting on my lap, but leaning back, flipping around to get a good look at Genghis Khan, going, “You ca
n let us out here.”

  We tossed our crumpled bills over the seat and ran, the taxicab still rolling to a stop, Genghis going, “Wait, girls, wait,” the both of us laughing and running for the George Webb diner on the corner.

  Across the street, we stopped and held each other for laughter. I picked a piece of blond hair out of Astrid’s eyes, leaned close just to breathe the musty, menthol smoke of her. For a minute, I wanted to kiss her again. I asked, “So?”

  But Astrid just laughed. “Don’t go all lesbo on me, okay?” she said and charged ahead, her blond braids trailing behind her. “I was just playing.”

  I took in a breath of late fall air, stung and a little bit surprised. It was the mirror, that much was clear. It was about the mirror, about Astrid in the mirror. Still, I loved her anyway. Whether that meant I was gay-ish or not.

  “Come on. What do you say?” Astrid pulled me by the wrist. “We’ll sit at the counter and drive the boys crazy. Yeah?”

  We ran for the George Webb on the corner with our heads thrust back, our chins pointing up at the blue sky, enormous and painted with clouds. We laughed and chased each other down the street, certain that we could take flight and soar into the air, if only we wished it.

  POOR THING

  Even though she was built like a truck, like a 747, a lineman, a killer, a big, bad bruiser of a girl, everybody called her Poor Thing.

  “Poor Thing,” Sister St. Joe whispered after chemistry class, watching Poor Thing waddle down the hall, her uniform skirt cinched around her waist like an oversized rug.

  Poor Thing hid her face with owl-shaped, tortoiseshell glasses. She wore thick, grey hoodie sweatshirts that emphasized her porcine, pear-shaped caboose. On cold days, she stuffed her hair under the cotton hood and yanked the strings tight. Most of the time, her face looked like a bag of loose, dirty laundry.

  “And then, he said . . . Wait a sec. Is somebody in here?” Quinn Catherine asked, leaning against a sink in the girls’ bathroom. Taliferro Moss checked the stalls.

  “It’s just Poor Thing. And who’s she going to tell?”

  Only I was in there too, hiding, with my legs up.

  “Okay. Where was I? Oh, right. Barry said, ‘Astrid? What about that trash? I’m just asking you to the movies.’ ”

  Poor Thing carried a pink brush with white, plastic teeth in her backpack. At lunch, she sat alone, one long Formica table all to herself, attacking the frizzy, brown snarl of her bangs with her brush to pass the time.

  “She has a glandular problem,” Poor Thing’s mother explained to Mrs. Noelle, the lunch lady. “Keep her away from the macaroni and cheese. Absolutely no carbohydrates. Capisce?”

  Poor Thing stirred a bowl of wheatgrass and anise with a plastic spoon. She pressed the white plastic teeth of her brush into her forehead, raking across her pimples, leaving neat, linear rows of red, bloody pinpricks in her path.

  “Poor Thing,” Juli said, rolling her green apple back and forth on the Formica with the ball of her hand. “Why doesn’t somebody get that girl some Retin-A?”

  If she played field hockey, we would have called her The Destroyer. High-fived her in the hall, maybe. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Because Poor Thing didn’t make a single sound. Ever.

  Poor Thing slipped into her classes—Spanish II, home ec, chemistry—on her soft-soled Chinese slippers like a bit part in her own solitary, silent film. She pulled back a steel metal stool without making one screech. She tucked her worn, North Face backpack underneath the steel spokes, carefully, soundlessly. Then laid her books flat on the lab table, her pencil case beside them, her pink, plastic brush that she touched, nervously, while Sister St. Joe went over the periodic table.

  “Think of it this way: He Lies Because. Helium, lithium, beryllium . . .” Sister St. Joe tapped each elemental symbol with the end of a long, tapered pointer.

  “Lithium, I’m on that,” Juli said, laughing. “No, seriously. I’m not kidding.”

  During Astrid and Barry’s brief love affair, he liked to drive all three of us down to the lake with Astrid riding shotgun, me and Juli in the backseat, sharing a beer. Sometimes they held hands. She ruffled his permed kinky locks with her blacked-out fingernails and whispered, “Handsome.”

  We drove past the Miller Brewing plant, the Coffee Trader, the Oriental. We circled the streets, listening to music, to Barry going, “See this? My watch? Timex. Nice, right?”

  One afternoon, we caught Poor Thing coming out of the White Hen. “Get a load of two-ton,” Barry said, pointing at Poor Thing cinching the strings on her smoke-cloud hoodie. We watched her unwrap a Snickers bar and stick almost half of it in her mouth.

  “Poor Thing,” Astrid said.

  “What?”

  “Her. That’s Poor Thing. We go to school with her.”

  “You call her that?” Barry asked, smiling.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Hey,” Barry called, rolling down his window. “Poor Thing! Poor Thing!”

  We’d never really called her that to her face. Poor Thing just heard pieces of it, whispered, following her around like a shadow of her own largeness.

  When Poor Thing heard it, the sound of Barry’s voice barking at a stoplight in front of the White Hen, she cupped the side of her face like she’d been actually slapped. Then closed her eyes, like she could erase it, pretending.

  “You’re such an asshole,” Astrid said.

  Barry smiled, bit Astrid’s cheek, and said, “You know you love it.”

  Later, a few weeks later, when Barry stopped calling, Astrid couldn’t believe it. She called his house twelve times a day, his older brother Stan always answering the phone and stammering, “Uh, yeah. Okay. I’ll give him the message.”

  “I think he’s really busy,” Astrid said at first. “You know, with his college applications. And whatever.”

  Juli and I said, “God, assholes, boys. He’ll call you.” I couldn’t tell her about Quinn Catherine and Taliferro Moss in the bathroom. I just couldn’t.

  Astrid held fast to her lie until we were sitting at the front windows of the Coffee Trader, sipping on lattes, watching the people walk by on Downer Street when we caught sight of Barry and Quinn Catherine, trudging fast through the snow for the Downer Theater. They walked past the dark windows of the head shops and art galleries, past the popcorn man on the corner in his little red wagon with the burning gasoline light. We watched Barry tuck his permed, kinky head in the wind, watched him nudge his face next to Quinn Catherine’s perfect blond pageboy and whisper something in her ear.

  Astrid stopped stirring the foam out of her latte, she just stopped, still as a bird, and stared. We watched Barry flip Quinn by the shoulders and slap her back against the brick wall between the Cuban deli and the florist’s stand. We watched Quinn Catherine’s mouth open, surprised, a pink slash of color in the white street. We watched him kiss her, gasping. She clasped her arms around his neck, put her fingers in the tight, wiry curls by his neck. Astrid said, “I don’t motherfucking believe it.”

  She skipped school for a week.

  “I’m fine,” Astrid said when we called her. “I’ll be fine. I think I’ve got the flu or something. I’ve got this pain in my stomach. But I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Really.” She took a breath, sighing. “But can you believe that fucker stole back his Fenwick pin? Must have done it last week or the week before. Right out of my bureau drawer. He didn’t even have the guts to ask me.”

  Astrid’s mother answered the door at three p.m. on a Saturday afternoon.

  “Astrid’s still sleeping. Maybe you could come back later? Or tomorrow?” she said, shuffling in her Muklukked feet. “Astrid’s always been, how do you say, a little high-strung? Poor thing.”

  At school, Poor Thing silently slipped down the hall. She even had a trick where she took five full minutes to open her locker, we knew, we watched her, so that it wouldn’t make a sound.

  “What a joke,” I said. “What a gas. What’s she trying to do? Make herself a
ghost?”

  “She doesn’t get it,” Juli said. “Nothing ever changes. It’s already too late. Even if she does disappear. Poor Thing.”

  There were others, girls like her, but Poor Thing was the saddest, the worst.

  AMERICAN BEAUTY

  Quinn Catherine. Something about Barry’s love transformed her, changed her into the girl we’d all slit our wrists to become. She had that model thing, but she was younger, her dress was still tartan. She rose like an angel, a star, a cloud of magic around her. She wore Barry’s desire, his longing glance, like a cashmere scarf she could wrap around her neck, brush against her skin just to feel the softness. She took our breath away, the newness of her, the force.

  “Quinn Catherine,” Astrid almost cried. “Can you fucking believe it?”

  Quinn Catherine had always been pretty, but now her pale, white skin almost glowed. She drew her eyes with cornflower blue liner, both inside the lids and out, like some famous actress. She ruffled her blond rooster bangs, sprayed up and set like a flower upon her forehead. She smiled, lazily, the even line of her teeth like a string of pearls, perfect, and set. Quinn Catherine even smelled different than she had before; a strange, ethereal perfume of rose hips and oranges followed her wherever she went, down the chalk-dust halls and in the marble-tiled girls’ room.

  Everybody noticed.

  Quinn Catherine won a scholarship to the state’s debate championship; she snagged the Juliet lead in the school play; the principal’s assistant, Mrs. Slaby, even asked Quinn Catherine to read the morning’s announcements over the PA system. “For the pleasure of your voice,” Mrs. Slaby said.

  My God, even in her talking, the beauty of it, the knowing.

  Now, every morning, besides having to suffer Quinn Catherine and Taliferro Moss catcalling, “Whores, Whores on the Hill,” before class, we had to listen to Quinn Catherine’s mellifluous voice urging the entire student body to bring canned goods for the food drive and coaxing us through the Pledge of Allegiance.