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Whores on the Hill Page 8


  “Fuckin’ A, man,” the Arsonist said, searching for the fire extinguisher the Tastee-Freez didn’t have.

  The fire did the job quick. The Tastee-Freez was only a shack, four thin cardboard walls propped together. It didn’t take long to turn into a giant fireball. Even the cardboard cutout on the front lawn, the twenty-foot-tall soft-serve vanilla cone, turned into a burning torch, red and yellow flames swirling around the cardboard until, slowly, with a groan, the giant cone tipped over and fell, burning, a crash of yellow sparks and chunks of fire, into the road.

  Juli said the Arsonist stood in the road, smiled, and said, “Well. What can you do?”

  The Arsonist’s parents sent him away to Belgium Military School. That’s Belgium, Wisconsin, not Belgium, Europe. Even though the Arsonist moved only forty miles away, instead of a hundred thousand, it still signified the end of his and Juli’s monthlong affair.

  “Yeah. Don’t feel so bad, baby,” Astrid said, smoothing Juli’s brown bangs off her forehead and reapplying Juli’s eyeliner. “Close your eyes. Just a minute more,” Astrid said. “Utopian ideal, my ass. It’s just another name for women’s work.”

  “I know, I know,” Juli said, picking through the cardboard box containing her makeup tins, her brushes, her jars of gloss. “Oh, look. Frosted Cinnamon Smile.” She fingered the penny tube of lipstick, slipped it in her front vest pocket, and slyly winked. “I really missed this.”

  SIDE EFFECTS

  Astrid was on Ortho-Novum, I took the Minipill, and Juli used a diaphragm but said it slipped at specific angles. Like doggie style or standing up.

  Each packet of tricolored pills came with a folded-up set of instructions no bigger than a dime. If you unfolded it and spread it on the bathroom tile, this is what it read:

  Side effects of the Pill may or may not include: weight gain, depression, nausea, decreased sex drive, blood clots. If you smoke, do not administer the Minipill.

  “The Pill will fix your face,” Astrid told me. So I bought it.

  Astrid’s pills came in a pink, plastic, oval-shaped case. Mine slipped into a plastic sleeve. We carried our pills in the front pouches of our backpacks. At eleven thirty a.m., every day, Astrid said, “Pill popper.” And we swallowed them down with Diet Coke.

  The first time Juli visited the gyno, the doctor said, “And tell me, Juli. You’re in high school. Which one?” When Juli told her Sacred Heart, the doctor smiled. She dipped the speculum into a jar of K-Y and said, “Don’t worry. This isn’t any worse than what you’re probably used to.”

  “Nice bedside manner, right?” Juli asked, patting the little zippered pocket that held her blond rubber cup. “Who cares? I got what I wanted.”

  We didn’t give a shit about side effects. What were side effects, consequences, to us?

  Astrid gained five pounds and had to get Mrs. Portofino, the home ec teacher, to help let out the waistband on her uniform skirt.

  “Shit,” Astrid whispered while Mrs. Portofino licked the thread. She pointed her nose down at the deep V line of her cleavage and laughed. “This sucks. But guess what? I’m a C cup now. Silver lining, right?”

  For a long time, I felt like I was living underwater. My arms and legs felt sluggish as a waterlogged boat. Crying jags, temper tantrums, my emotions swerving like a roller coaster running off the track. “When did you become such a pain in the ass?” Astrid asked. I bit my lip and didn’t answer her. How could I answer her? I had no idea how I had become such a pain in the ass.

  Years later, I take a break from the Pill and it’s like coming up for air, gasping joyful in the brightest light. “So that’s what they call a side effect,” I whisper to myself, almost laughing, and buy a cup of coffee, light and sweet, from a street vendor. It tastes better than anything has in years.

  PAYBACK IS A BITCH

  In December, a few weeks before Christmas, Astrid and I snuck our way into a party in a drab, institutionlike Marquette University dorm. The windowless kitchen and windowless living room served as a nucleus for the suite, with three doors leading off into three narrow bedrooms like routes that mice would take in an experiment maze. The grey brick rooms were filled with smoke and red strobe lights flashing. The college kids were wild, already out for winter holidays, while Astrid and I still had one week of classes left. There was a feeling in the room, crystallized and pointed with danger, like something, anything, could happen.

  “College boys can do it better,” Astrid drawled.

  Everyone had crammed into the warrenlike space, smoking cigarettes with their hands held above their heads for room. Someone kept playing the same Depeche Mode extended mix over and over, the one with the lethargic, monitor beat.

  A tall, slender boy in a wrinkled, pin-striped oxford picked me up suddenly and kissed me wetly behind the ear. He held me close to his chest, my toes dangled above the floor. He raised his hand above the body crush and called to a friend, “Hey, toss me one of them PBRs, fuckface.”

  “College boys,” Astrid drawled, her mouth red as candy and laughing. “Aren’t they crazy or what?”

  We’d been drinking a sickly sweet red drink mixed with Hawaiian Punch that tasted like pineapples and cardamom. Everybody’s mouth had turned a bright, bloody red.

  A boy named Benny Fischer handed Astrid another plastic cup filled with the red pineapple concoction. “Drink this, it’s good for you,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you,” Astrid said.

  She knew him because Benny Fischer and his friend, Tom Capshaw, kept coming around, sniffing at our backs, whispering, “Hey, look. It’s the Whores on the Hill.” They kept trying to touch our hair or slip an arm around our shoulders but Astrid just laughed, shaking them off, slurring her words. “Not in a million, jillion years.”

  Astrid took the cup Benny gave her and gulped. Then, she said, surprisingly, “Dance with me, you slob.”

  Benny slung his hands around Astrid’s skinny waist. He had brown, curly hair down to his collar. He was small, Jewish, and cute, although there was something of the rat in his expression, smiling, putting his nose in Astrid’s neck.

  I stood there and let the party swallow me. I watched Astrid and Benny dance. Benny’s friend, Tom Capshaw, poked his nose through the crowd. He swung into line behind Astrid’s swaying hips and joined in the dance. I sipped my punchy drink.

  It felt like it had always been night and it would always be night. The night would stretch on over one hill and then the other. Night forever. Night at night.

  I felt more than drunk. I felt exhausted, washed out, and, worse, like I was itching from the inside out.

  I shuffled over to the ruined, wine-stained couch and said, “I need to lie down. Please.”

  Three college girls made room for me on the couch. They pulled up their skinny, bare legs and I lay down, curling my knees to my chest. My dreams were fast and feverish. I got caught in a sort of landscape between my dreams and the party. I had a dream that I kept trying to get dressed, that I kept stepping into my uniform skirt, but when I pulled it up, I had overstepped the skirt and pulled it up outside of my body. In my dream, I did this over and over again: step, pull, still naked below the waist.

  I woke up, cottonmouthed, to someone roughly shaking my shoulder.

  “Here,” a kid with acid-washed jeans said. “Go get your friend.” He had sharp, silver braces on his teeth and blue rubber bands snapping between his jaws.

  I propped myself up groggily and said, “Okay. What?”

  I heard a door open and then close again with a sucking, metallic click. I stood up, wobbly, and walked towards one of the blond metal doors. Inside, a bedroom was draped with tie-dyed sheets over the drab dorm walls, hippie style. Everything was in shadow. The room reeked of moldy bong water, like something damp and burnt at the same time.

  “Jellybean?” Astrid asked, sitting up straight. The slant of light from the open door sliced her across the face. I couldn’t tell if it was the shadows that were making everything look wrong or what.
“Jesus,” she said, gingerly pulling her legs out of the tangle of sheets to dangle off the side of the bed. “I was scared you were somebody else.”

  In the slant of light, her white oxford blouse fell open. There were purple bruises, maybe hickies, dotting her collarbone. She stood up, unsteadily, and whispered, “Shit, shit, shit.” She was still wearing her uniform skirt, but it was torn down the middle. Her legs were embarrassingly bare underneath and her underwear was yellow. She held the ripped edges of her torn skirt together with one hand. Her lip was split. She touched it gingerly with her fingers. Her right eye was raw around the edges, the edges a bluish green-black.

  She looked at me, her eyes fearful, ashamed, and tried to smile. “Jesus, don’t tell me.”

  I reached for her hand, racking my brain for something to say. What do you say? What do you do when something like this happens to your best friend? And for a minute, for a brief instantaneous second, I hated her. I hated her for getting her skirt torn, her lip split. I wanted to be anywhere but in that bedroom, reeking of moldy bong water, cigarette smoke, and throw up.

  I took a breath and bit my tongue. “Astrid?” I asked. Her name sounded dry and small as grains of sand in my mouth.

  I walked her to the bathroom. Dirty towels littered the floor. Astrid flicked the fluorescent bulb and blinked in the light.

  “Jesus,” she said. She looked worse in the harsh fluorescents, like someone else, a girl you didn’t want to know with her black eye, torn skirt, ripped and tattered lip. “They’re friends with Barry,” Astrid said. “Can you believe that? Benny and Tom. And they put something in our drinks.” She squeezed my hand. “They said something about Barry’s Beemer. I clawed one of them good. I think I got his eye.”

  I stood there under the bare, fluorescent lights, blinking, asking, “Are you okay? Astrid, Jesus. Do you want to go to the hospital?”

  She eased herself slowly onto the toilet, pulled down her skirt, and checked her underwear. Her tattered eye was turning colors, black, blue, and yellowish. It started to swell like a small Spanish onion.

  “It’s okay,” she said, nervously fumbling at the broken buttons on her shirt. “Nobody fucks with me.” She licked her ruined lip. “I’m okay.”

  I just stood there, tongue-tied.

  Life was like that when you were fifteen and knobby-kneed and you only had a handful of choices. Your world was small and cruel and narrow-minded and breathtaking.

  We gathered our clothes and reached for the door.

  SISTER ST. JOE

  Sister St. Joe was the coolest nun at Sacred Heart Holy Angels. She drove with the windows down, her black veil blowing in the breeze, Fleetwood Mac bleating on the stereo.

  “Rumours is the best album ever made,” Sister St. Joe said. “Tell me I’m wrong. Prove it.” Sister St. Joe sincerely loved Fleetwood Mac.

  Sister St. Joe grew up Catholic in Eau Claire with six sisters and two brothers. All six of the sisters were nuns, God knows why, teaching at private schools across the state, while her two brothers were proper priests. One had a congregation in Sheboygan, the other, Father Phineas, was a missionary in El Salvador.

  She asked us to pray for him every day. Every day, missionaries died over there, attacked by terrorists.

  “El Salvador. Such a pretty name for a dangerous place,” Sister St. Joe said. Sometimes, to herself.

  Sister St. Joe kneeled on the front lawn of Sacred Heart Holy Angels and planted geraniums in the spring, crocuses in the fall. When she gardened, Sister St. Joe took off her habit, the polyester black veil made her scalp itch too much, she said, and laid it in the grass beside her. She looked like a girl again, despite her years.

  “Hey sister. Looking good!” Astrid whistled once from Juli’s old Audi.

  Sister St. Joe put a hand to her Dorothy Hamill pixie cut and shook her fist in the air, like black power.

  “I bet she was wild, once, when she was our age.” Astrid leaned over her desk during homeroom.

  Sister St. Joe caught our whispering, walking up the aisle, and winked.

  Sister St. Joe and the other nuns at Sacred Heart Holy Angels—Sister Rosemarie, Sister Bridget, Sister Eva, and Sister Agnes—baked cinnamon donuts to raise money for Sister St. Joe’s brother in El Salvador. The nuns’ donuts were enormous, buttery, fluffy things known throughout the city.

  On donut day, Sacred Heart Holy Angels smelled like cinnamon and sugar, everything candy coated, the air, the books, the bread.

  Afterwards, we knew boys weren’t lying when they put their hands in our hair and whispered, “You smell so sweet.”

  Sister St. Joe was short for Sister St. Josephine. She said, “Call me Sister St. Joe.”

  “Why’d you pick that name?”

  “It has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?” Sister St. Joe smiled and snapped her gum.

  We had no idea how old Sister St. Joe was. We thought maybe twenty, twenty-one. Who knew? All the nuns, even the ancient ones, seemed ageless to us. Like their years weren’t measured by experience, the kind we knew.

  The week before Christmas, during exams, when Astrid struggled into homeroom after Benny Fischer and Tom Capshaw tore her skirt, she tried to cover her fat, purple lip with her hand, but Sister St. Joe still asked, “What happened? Astrid?”

  “Nothing.” Astrid slouched in her school seat. She touched the bloody corners of her mouth with her fingers, playing lightly with the crack in her pretty lip.

  Sister St. Joe took roll, read the minutes, noting the change in swim team practice and asking for old clothing for the next shelter drive. All the time, watching Astrid out of the corner of her eye. Glancing at the tattered black eye, the bruised, puffy lip, the way Astrid hid herself.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Sister St. Joe said, after the bell rang, while Astrid shuffled the books across her chest, not daring to meet Sister St. Joe’s eyes.

  “Great,” Astrid said. “Super. Thanks.”

  She made as if to squeeze out the door, but Sister St. Joe touched her shoulder, whispering, “Wait,” and Astrid wilted, her face broke, and Sister St. Joe wrapped her arms around Astrid’s shaking shoulders.

  “You are loved,” Sister St. Joe said, holding fiercely on to Astrid and smoothing her twiggy hair. “Regardless of what you think, you are loved.”

  “Stop it,” Astrid cried through her tears. “I mean it. Don’t start. Don’t even try to get into this. Please.”

  When Father Phineas did come back from El Salvador, he showed up with three fingers missing.

  “He came back,” Sister St. Joe said, her voice breathless. “He came back in one piece.”

  If you asked me, I would have to say that depends on your definition of wholeness.

  DATING DISASTERS

  ENOUGH ALREADY

  Don’t even ask about the Benny-Tom thing. That was my fuckup, my dumb, bad luck. At home, I teased my bangs in a sexy fade over my black eye and my mom didn’t even notice for two days. It was only on Christmas, when we were taking pictures around the tree—Padgett, half-drunk already, her, and me—when she stopped to part the hair out of my eyes and said, “Oh, honey.” I told her I walked into a door. And she believed me.

  —Astrid Thornton, 15,

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  SCABIE CENTRAL

  Second guy I slept with gave me what we called a “parting gift.” About a week after our rendezvous, I started waking up in the middle of the night, scratching the crap out of my wrists and the backs of my knees. I thought I just had a rash. Next time I saw my doctor, he said, “Scabies.” I said, “What?” He said, “You have scabies. Highly contagious. Passed on by physical contact or through shared clothing.” Of course, Astrid called me up after borrowing my favorite angora sweater, shrieking, “I have scabies too!” A few days later, Juli was scratching her wrists like the rest of us. Astrid said, “Join the club.” We all had scabies! Can you beat that?

  —Thisbe Newton, 15,

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin
r />   HAIL MARY!

  I was fifteen. Got pregnant and sent to Holy Hill, where the other unwed mothers are kept out of sight for six to nine months. The labor took twelve hours. I remember blood. My baby had blond hair and blue, blue eyes. He was a boy. He smelled like fresh apricots. I never got to hold him. I think the nuns named him after St. Philip, one of the twelve apostles. Not that it matters, but I always preferred the Spanish version of that name. I said, “Felipe.”

  —Sister St. Joe, 21,

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  ONE STEP A HEAD

  It was my third date with this really cute skater. Man, I just couldn’t believe he was going out with me. I was so excited. Well, after waiting for him to finish practicing his latest fakie trick with his friends for three hours, I got him in my car, alone, and I guess I was a little overexcited. I was giving him a blow job and everything was going fine until I felt sorta nauseous. I pulled back for a breather, but the skater pushed my head back down. I ralphed all over him. Embarrassing, yes. But serves him right, you know?

  —Juli Sung, 16,

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  THE ULTIMATE

  Some people say I died.

  —Deb Scott, location unknown

  WHO NEEDS SHORT SHORTS?

  I had a big date with this new hottie, so I wanted to get nice and pretty for him. I fixed my hair, changed my outfit seven times, and Naired it all off like a Brazilian wax. This was the first time I ever Naired and I was running late, so I didn’t get to shower. I just wiped off the Nair with a wet washcloth. We had a great time on the date. Dinner. Movie. Real nice. We were sitting in his car later that night and he decided to take me for a whirlwind trip South of the Border. I said, “Go for it.” It felt great. Until he came up fifteen minutes later and said, “Baby, I don’t feel so good,” with a nasty case of Nair breath. My date got Nair poisoning! I had to take him to the emergency room and tell the doctor everything. I turn red now every time I see that guy.