I took a breath, pictured the wad of bills that Peaches had pulled from her purse. The shoes, the tight dress. “Look Des, I’ve saved a little bit, pawning stuff at Zeg’s and all. It won’t cover everything. But I know what we need to do. I think we’ll be okay.”
Before I could change my mind, I told her about Tom slipping me his number, about the offer he had made. I knew it was our only chance, but still I waited for her to put her hand out, to say no. To tell me I was too young. That she’d handle it. That I should go back to school in the fall. I was always waiting for her to show me something that looked even a little bit like protectiveness.
Instead, she squeezed my arm, excited. “Well, what are you waiting for, Miss Clara Voyant? We don’t have any time to lose.” I felt another one of the phantom flies creep along my shoulder. I rubbed at my skin, shook my hair off of my neck, and still I felt it. My ankle. My earlobe. My left eye.
“What’s the matter with you?” Des asked. “You keep twitching.”
“I don’t know. Nervous, I guess.” It took all my willpower not to rub at my chest as the sensation crawled across my collarbone.
I found the paper with Tom’s phone number on it in the back of my dresser drawer. I wondered what it had meant, that I saved it at all. Surely another girl would have thrown it away—had I sensed this coming? That one day, sooner than I could have thought, I’d be desperate enough to call? Des handed me her phone, and while it rang I prayed he wouldn’t answer. For a moment, I let myself think I was safe, but he picked up on the fourth ring.
“It’s Clara,” I said. “From Atlantic City?” My voice was a pitch too high. Des shook her head. I tried again, swallowed the lump in my throat. “Remember me?”Better, Des mouthed.
“Hold on a minute,” he said, and I listened as he muffled the receiver. I tried not to picture who he was stepping away from.
“Well, this is a nice surprise. How are you, my dear?”
“I’ve been thinking about our date,” I said. “About what you said. I’d like to … to stay over with you.”
“I’d like that, too. I suppose I might be able to slip out of town, for a last-minute business trip, if you know what I mean.”
“Great,” I said. Des nodded at me, encouraging me to go on. “I need to make one thing clear first. This is going to be … an investment.” That was the word Des told me to use. “After all, there’s only one first time for everything. If you know what I mean.”
He let out a small groan, like he had just had a taste of something delicious, and I felt the goose bumps rise on the skin of my arms. “Oh my goodness. Well. Whatever you need. I’ll let you know where, what room, as soon as I book.”
An hour later the text came through: a hotel name, and a room number with a winking face. We would meet on Tuesday—three days away—at 9:00. Des lifted the screen for me to see, threw her arms around me, and whooped. I wasn’t happy or afraid. Instead, an eerie calm slid into my gut, where the anger had been.
That night I put the purse on my nightstand. I would have liked it, if I hadn’t known where it had come from. If it didn’tmake me feel nauseated to picture it on the side of the road—what road? God, why hadn’t I asked?—and what it meant that it had been abandoned.Maybe she got mugged, I told myself. It happened often enough. Des said the girls at the club all carried mace or pepper spray, because thieves targeted strippers, waitresses, bartenders. The ones they knew would have cash. After all this with Tom was over, I would try to find Peaches again. Ask her where the bag had come from, how many days it had been since she found it. Maybe whatever Peaches had to say wouldn’t lead me anywhere. Maybe whatever had happened to the bag was the betrayal the cards had said to watch out for. But something told me it was deeper than that. Me, Peaches, Lily, Julie Zale. And that it wasn’t over yet.
I KNEWthat girls bled the first time, but it hurt so much that it felt like something must have gone wrong. That kind of pain could not be normal. But when he asked if I was okay, I told him I was fine, tried to shape my grimace into a smile. I wouldn’t have believed me if I were him, but that was the thing about people—they wanted to believe whatever was easiest to accept.
Afterward, I was surprised at how small the bloodstain was, on the sheets. The pain—and what had caused it—had seemed so much bigger than that. I knew it was strange to feel disappointed, but a part of me wanted to see those sheets soaked in blood, something I could point to and saythat’s what they did to me.Tom and Des and my mother and the clerk at the desk who had handed me the key to the room, the woman who asked what floor when I got on the elevator, and pressed the button for me on the way up. Zeg, when he bartered with me for some stupid trinket I had lifted and made me take less than half of what he would sell it for. The bartenders and waiters who never even asked for my fake ID. The man who only had twenty bucks leftin the wallet I stole. The girls at the spa who wouldn’t let me in to read people’s cards. This whole failing town and its closed casinos, its empty parking garages, the ocean and bay that hemmed us all in. I wanted a sheet bloodied enough to make everyone see how wrong it had all gone.
I slipped out of the room when the first hint of sunlight came through the blinds, my purse filled with the bills Des had told me to ask for up front. I hadn’t slept at all and my body felt light and drifty, like I was moving through a dream, but the bones of my face ached. A housekeeper trundled her cart down the hall and looked at the ground as I passed. In the elevator down, I saw myself reflected in the gold panel of buttons—my eyes dark with smeared makeup, my face pale, my hair too bright against my skin. I was wearing my dress and heels from the night before—I hadn’t thought to bring anything else. I thought of Peaches and her little mesh slippers, and the way her face changed when she took them off and tied those straps around her legs. As I cut through the floor, a woman eating a Danish at a slot machine looked up at me and sneered as I passed.Whore, she was thinking.Hooker, slut. A dull throbbing had replaced the pain between my legs, and I tried to tell myself that when it went away, I would be able to forget everything that had happened the night before, the way you come back into yourself once a headache releases its grip. But I knew it wasn’t true. I would never be able to forget how he looked at me. Not with hatred or horror or desire, but like I wasn’t even there at all.
I waited for a jitney underneath a banner advertising a poker tournament—It’s July, Summer is just heating up—and was relieved when I got on that it was empty. My skin felt feverish, and I leaned my face against the window’s cool glass until we arrived at the Tropicana and I could walk back to the shop.
On my walk, I passed a telephone pole with Julie Zale’s picture stapled to it. The photograph had become faded, the ink ran in the rain, like mascara tears sliding down a face. The paper wastattered and peeling away from the staples. I wondered about her uncle, back in Baltimore now, probably. Jumping at the sound of the telephone. Peeking in Julie’s old room to admire her trophies on the wall, the track medals hanging from nails above her bed. I was sick of thinking about the girls I would never be: treasured, adored. The girls from middle school, sipping their vodka and lemonade, flipping their hair. That was how their wholes lives tasted—a combination of pink lemonade, vodka, and strawberry-flavored lip gloss—everything for them was sweet and exciting. Julie still smiled out from her photograph. I reached out and ripped the poster, shredded it until the paper was confetti in my hands. I watched the pieces blow down the street, and a coldness moved into my body. How stupid I had been to think that my visions and my tarot cards could get me anything. The world wanted things from me, but they weren’t insights or answers. It didn’t matter who I was, or what I might be able to see. Look at how it happened with Tom—I had a glimpse of who he was, and still, I ended up underneath him while he drove himself into me, biting my lip to keep from crying out.
I had given my savings to Des for the back rent, and now with the money she had and the cash from Tom, we nearly had enough to cover what we owed. But in another month another rent check would be due. In three, four months, another eviction notice on the floor.
When I got home, Des was sitting in the kitchen. She must have been thinking the same thing—how the bills would continue to come, the demanding envelopes stamped in big, bold lettering. I already knew what she was going to propose. I had opened up a door that I couldn’t walk back through.
LILY
WHAT DID I DO, WHENI wasn’t working? My days off were lazy and without purpose. I couldn’t remember when I had ever had so much free time. In high school, I’d loved dragging a chair down to the beach and setting it up at the water’s edge so that the waves washed over my feet, but I had done that once so far since I’d been home and it felt like a mistake. I remembered why I’d avoided visiting my mother the past four years: everywhere I could see my father. I looked out to the jetty and saw him there, standing barefoot on the cold rocks and casting his line out into the ocean. He’d taught me how to hold the other end of a drag net, the two of us stepping in time in the shallows. We picked the flopping minnows from the black netting and plopped them into our bait bucket, and I felt the pulse of the little fish in my hand.
One good thing came out of my boredom: I had taken up drawing again. I found myself sketching these images from my girlhood—the minnows gasping on the shoreline, bright shocks of seaweed that washed in on the tide. I liked making the loose scribbles, the meditative act of slowly, through line and shape and shading, distinguishing what something was versus what it was not.
Across the street from our porch, where I was sitting with a pencil and notebook in hand, an older woman backed her long silver Cadillac into the driveway. I’d seen her before, in passing—gathering the morning paper in her giant sunglasses, swaddled in a navy bathrobe—but we hadn’t spoken.
“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” she called. “Could you help me lift this?” I crossed the street, blood rushing to my head from laying still for too long. “Thank you so much! I just bought all of these plants and someone at the nursery helped me lift the bag of potting soil into the car, but I didn’t even think about what it would be like to lift it out again. I don’t know why they only sell this stuff in fifty-pound bags.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but even I had trouble heaving the bag out of the trunk. I used to go to exercise classes almost every morning in the city, but I had fallen out of shape quicker than I wanted to admit. “Where should I put this?”
“Oh, inside the garage, please, dear.”
I dropped the bag and shook my arms to relieve the strain.
