These Women Page 8

  First Dorian, now Kathy. It’s like the world wants to drag Julianna back to the day the cops turned up asking questions about her babysitter—what she was wearing, what time she left the house, who she hung out with, where Julianna thought she might be going. She put me to bed, Julianna told them. Like always. Put her to bed after letting her listen to the hip-hop station her parents hated and watch an R-rated movie on Cinemax. Put her to bed, blew her a kiss from the door—sleep tight, princess. And then what? The cops wanted to know. That’s when one of them stupidly showed her the photo before his partner could slap his hand down. Julianna saw Lecia’s dead eyes behind the plastic bag pulled tight over her face, swollen like she’d been under water, her lips pale and cracked, a choke collar of blood on her neck.

  Coco’s making faces in the mirror, trying to figure out what she wants to look like tonight.

  “Maybe I’ll just go back to serving drinks,” Julianna says.

  Coco raises an arched eyebrow. “Girl.”

  They both know that Julianna’s just talking out of her ass. Because minimum wage plus the shitty tips from guys who want to save their money for the Fast Rabbit’s real action can’t hold a candle to the cash you can make working the bar’s back room. Lap dances and a whole lot more.

  “I don’t need it,” Julianna says.

  “The money? How come you don’t need the money?”

  “There’s places I could go I don’t have to pay rent.”

  Coco purses her lips in disbelief, shakes her head, then leans into the smudged mirror propped up on the dresser and starts in on her makeup.

  “What?” Julianna says. Because there are ways. She could move back in with Derrick or Dom. Crash with them for a bit. But that would only last until one of them decided she needed to earn her keep and she knows how that would go, a few “dates,” followed by the inevitable return to the Fast Rabbit or somewhere like it.

  Then, of course, she could go home. She’s not like some of these girls who burned their bridges, got thrown out, or didn’t have families in the first place. Julianna’s got a house—not too far away. She’s got a bedroom and a place at the dinner table should she want.

  She dips her long pink pinkie nail into the baggie, takes out a half-moon of white powder, and sniffs—a motion so swift and practiced it’s like it didn’t happen. The drugs hit her with the dull, unsatisfying punch that comes after a night of partying when her body is already so ravaged and buzzed that llelo only makes her aware of how fucked up she is and how much she wishes she’d slept. She takes a sharp inhale, trying to heighten the effect so she doesn’t have to double dip.

  She drums her nails on her thighs and taps her toes. Home. Home. Home.

  “Home,” she says.

  “How’s that?” Coco asks.

  “Nada,” Julianna says. “Nothing. Nothing.” She drums her nails harder. Taps her foot faster.

  “Jujubee?” Coco says. “If you’re gonna keep sniffing that shit, you better quit your twitching. Unless you want me to kill you first.”

  Julianna opens the bag, dips her pinkie in again. Another swift inhale and she tucks the bag back into her bra. Why the hell shouldn’t she go home? She doesn’t need this crap—doesn’t need to get higher, to get dressed only to get undressed at work, to pretend she’s doing this shit—all this shit—until something better comes along.

  “Keep up like that, you’ll be out before work.” Coco checks the time on her phone. “There’s, like, eight hours before you get off.”

  Julianna folds her nails toward her palms to stop her tapping. “Maybe, just fuck it,” she says.

  Coco’s drawing a set of cartoon eyebrows over her tweezed ones. “Fuck what? This isn’t some more shit about Kathy?”

  Julianna lifts her phone, covers her face.

  Click. She catches Coco leaning closer to the mirror, her head cocked to one side, admiring her handiwork by giving herself a don’t fuck with me look. Coco swivels around at the sound of the camera and mugs for Julianna.

  Julianna’s already put her phone away.

  Her purse is open on the couch, stuffed to overflowing with wipes, lotions and potions, things to make her look prettier or less tired, things to make her feel better or worse, depending. There’s a scrap of paper, too, torn from a copy of Los Angeles Magazine that Julianna read in the waiting room at Planned Parenthood last week. She takes it out, unfolds it.

  “You ever heard of some dude called Larry Sultan?”

  Coco looks as if she’s really thinking about it. “The dude with the sick purple car who hangs at the Easy Time?”

  “No,” Julianna says.

  “The motherfucker looks like a sultan of somewhere-the-fuck.”

  Julianna looks at the paper in her hand. It’s a photo of a photograph—a woman, clearly a porn actress, between takes on a shoot. She’s wearing a cheap satin robe and white platform heels too high even for Julianna and her crew. She’s walking away from a skanky-looking pool. Behind her are four gnarly boxer dogs, visible ribs and knots on their skin, all bowed down like they’re praying. “Boxers, Mission Hills, Larry Sultan.”

  She holds out the scrap of paper to Coco. “What do you think of this picture?”

  Coco turns from the mirror and squints across the small room.

  “I think that bitch is fixing to get gangbanged.”

  Bitch. Gangbanged. There’s no skill to running someone down.

  “But what do you think of the photo?”

  “It’s whatever,” Coco says. “It’s not, like, fucking art.”

  Julianna folds that paper away. So how come it’s hanging in a fucking museum? she doesn’t say. What she does say is “No way I’m fucking some Z-list ballers tonight for any amount of cash.”

  Coco fumbles in her purse for the tin of mints. “A teaspoon of sugar?”

  Julianna waves her off.

  “Guess you’re not planning on paying rent next month.”

  “Mind your business about what I’m planning.”

  Coco points her eyebrow pencil at Julianna’s bra strap. “That shit’s messing you up.”

  Julianna taps the baggie in the cup of her bra, feels it stick to her sweaty skin. “It’s not the shit.”

  “What then?” Coco’s leaning in close to the mirror, still painting a face over her face.

  What then, what? Julianna wants to ask. Who isn’t messed up doing what we do, seeing what we see? Partying to pretend that none of it matters. Acting like there’s no difference between us and that posse of USC sorority chicks rolling into that South Central house party like they had a right to be anywhere, do anything.

  “Who you think did Kathy?”

  “Kathy was a straight-up street ho last I checked. You and me, we do classy,” Coco says.

  Street ho. Corner bitch. Crack whore. Names. Ranks. Distinctions. Anything to make yourself feel better, make yourself feel higher up.

  Ask them, Jujubee and Coco are dancers—exotic dancers, private dancers, stick-their-hand-down-your-pants-and-make-you-feel-better-about-yourself dancers. That’s what they are. They’re not back-alley girls—all-the-way girls, do-anything girls. They’ve got limits. At least that’s what they say.

  Coco walks over to the couch and takes Julianna’s hands. “Get in the shower. Then I’ll make your face. I’ll make you pretty-pretty Jujubee.”

  Julianna lets herself be pulled to her feet, led to the bathroom, pushed inside. She turns on the water but leaves the door open while the shower heats up. Coco’s back at the mirror. She’s put on music, swaying her wide hips, popping out her round butt as she polishes her makeup. She finishes her lips—a cartoonish bow that nearly doubles the size of her mouth. She tips her head to one side and gives herself her sexy gangster pout once more, testing out the strength of her armor. Then her face falls, her eyebrows and mouth sag, her cheeks droop. The exhaustion and anger and frustration break through. She closes her eyes, stays like that—resting, hiding. Julianna pulls out her camera.

 
Click.

  2.

  IT’S ONLY ONE NIGHT OF NO SLEEP, WHICH ISN’T THAT BAD. It’s been worse. One night—you can think your way around, put yourself outside your fatigue, separate yourself from yourself so you can get through it. The drugs help. That’s exactly what they do—split you in half.

  The music at the Fast Rabbit helps, too—loud enough that it doesn’t exactly matter what you say, more how you say it and how you look when you do. It’s a Monday so the crowd is thin but committed. Julianna recognizes several of them. She’s doing her best, making eye contact but not intruding. Her game isn’t up in your face. She’s the kind of girl who makes the guys come to her, let her know what they want. But it’s not working and Julianna’s been spinning her swizzle stick round and round her Midori sour alone. Her energy’s bad—that’s what Coco tells her. She needs to lighten up. Coco pulls out her breath mint tin. “Freshen up?”

  Julianna points at her bright green drink. “I’m good.” She pulls out her phone, busies herself like she doesn’t need this.

  There’s a man in the corner near the back door sitting alone at one of the high tops. He’s large, light-skinned, with a mustache and thinning hair. He’s got his arms folded over his chest. He’s been staring at Julianna with eyes that are either wild with drink or just wild. He looks hungry and angry—like the world owes him.

  “Who’s your friend?” Coco says.

  Julianna casts an eye over her shoulder. “No friend of mine.”

  “Now you’re picky as well as bitchy.”

  “He’ll come if that’s what he wants,” she says as Coco stalks off to find someone to buy her a drink. She pulls out her phone and turns her back on the guy.

  She scrolls through her photos, finding the snaps of girls last night. Marisol splayed on the couch. Coco ashing a cigarette into the sink while Sandra bumps and grinds her from behind. Sandra searching for a song on her phone. Rackelle coming in the door. She rewinds the night, so the ladies sober up, the apartment gets clean, the night grows young, and the party has yet to begin.

  From across the room she can feel the man staring at her.

  She tosses her hair and rounds her shoulders, lowers her head over her phone.

  Tap, tap, tap back to a week ago when Kathy was still alive. Tap, tap, tap through a week of parties and people and cruises up Western. Tap, tap. And there centered on Julianna’s screen is a photo she doesn’t remember taking—Dorian framed in the window of Jack’s Family Kitchen.

  Julianna had stepped out to the street to smoke. She knew it would annoy Dorian but the woman didn’t own her. Anyway, she needed something to chill her nerves and erase the taste of food she hadn’t wanted.

  She’d looked back and seen Dorian staring at her, her face full of that longing Julianna can’t stand, that need for Julianna to be Lecia or to pretend to be Lecia or at least not to be the person she’s become, to be some little girl she can take care of, freeze in time. In the split second that Dorian had looked away, Julianna had pulled out her phone. Click. Dorian in profile, slightly blurred behind the smeared glass window. A lonely woman eating breakfast.

  She stares at the picture on her phone—the first time she’s looked at it since she snapped it. With Dorian’s face angled the way it is, Julianna can’t see the need, the frustration. Can’t hear the questions and the silent demands.

  Like Lecia, Dorian must have been beautiful. Unlike Lecia, Julianna guesses she never knew it. But Lecia, she sure knew. Julianna loved to tag along when her babysitter went to the corner market, listening to the men catcall from their cars, and the locals whistle from their porches. She stood next to Lecia, a shy but proud smile on her face when the guy at the carnicería refused to take Lecia’s cash or slipped her something extra with her order. Like some of Lecia’s glow rubbed off on her—like she was part of the package in her knockoff Disney T-shirts and rubber sandals.

  Julianna’s eyelids flutter. Her head nods back. And for a moment the music is gone, the lights are still, and both Julianna and Jujubee are sucked into the past, standing next to Lecia on Western, three men leaning out of a souped-up sedan telling Lecia to jump in. Lecia’s about to pull away from her. Julianna feels Lecia let go of her hand—

  “You good?”

  The bartender’s got a hand on her wrist, pulling her back to the bar.

  “Good like gold,” Julianna says, sliding off the barstool.

  The bartender gives her a look that says she’d better get it together. Which is exactly why she’s headed for the bathroom—a pick-me-up to drag her back to the present and keep her gliding along.

  Everyone’s eyes are on her as she goes. No way to deflect attention, no way to hide as she walks right down the center of the Fast Rabbit. She locks the bathroom door behind her. She pulls out the baggie and her keys from her purse. She does one bump. Then two. Then one more for good luck. She leans toward the mirror, checking her nostrils. She inhales deeply, drawing the ammonia burn high into her sinuses. She pops her eyes wide, staring at the woman who stares back. She’s fucking beautiful is what she is.

  She checks her makeup—her lips, eyes, a little more bronzer on her cheekbones sending them sky high. She puckers, blows herself a kiss. She tosses her hair—makes it loose and wild. Then Jujubee unlocks the bathroom door, leaving Julianna behind.

  The Fast Rabbit is her runway—the show is her. Fuck all those other girls trying too hard. Fuck Coco and her attitude. No one gets attention like Jujubee. At the bar she spins around so she’s leaning back on the rail facing out, her gaze flying over the customers—Come and get it if you dare.

  And in no time someone does. A thirtysomething dude who tells her his name is Carlos and Where you been hiding all night? Jujubee winks, draws her finger down his jawbone.

  Came out just for you.

  Carlos signals to the bartender and Jujubee points at the back room. You want these to go, right?

  And just like that she’s leading Carlos across the bar, his hands on her waist as she carries their drinks.

  Dean is guarding the door as always. He reads Carlos his rights—only things you can do back there are exactly what the lady says you can do. Then he tells Jujubee the third room is empty.

  She takes Carlos to Room 3, pulls back the curtain to reveal a space not much bigger than a half bath. She pushes him into a chair, lets him have a sip of his drink. Then she goes to work. The thing is—guys always want everything even if they don’t know it. You have to guide them, teach them, make them open their wallets wider.

  Dance for me, chica.

  There’s a knob in the wall that raises the music loud. Jujubee makes it near deafening so she needs to press her lips into Carlos’s ear to be heard.

  How you like it, baby?

  She doesn’t need to wait for a response because it’s already on. He reaches for her breasts, but she wags a finger at him. Not so fast.

  She disappears into the music, pulls it around her like a large velour blanket in which she can wriggle and writhe. She straddles Carlos, bouncing on his lap. She feels electric, invincible, in control.

  She’s down to her panties—teal and lacy. And doesn’t it feel good to be free of her clothes, to be moving, her arms and legs exposed, her belly tight? Doesn’t it feel good to be Jujubee?

  It’s Jujubee who undoes Carlos’s belt.

  It’s Jujubee who reaches for the zipper of his pants.

  It’s Jujubee who takes out his wallet to cover this additional expense.

  It’s Jujubee who uses her mouth and hands until Carlos is collapsed in his chair.

  It’s Jujubee who tells him to get himself together because the night is young and she has work to do.

  It’s Jujubee who strides back out to the bar, tipping Dean on the way for keeping guard.

  It’s Jujubee who takes her place at the bar, facing the room again. Come and get me, she says.

  She owns this place. She owns everyone except for the man still sitting alone at the high top in the back, glaring
at her like she’s just cheated on him. She gives him a smirk, waves him away. I don’t need you, she says.

  He only stares harder. His eyes burn angry.

  She rubs her thumb across her index and middle finger. All it takes is money, baby.

  Another guy approaches—young, soaked in cheap cologne. He smells like a taxicab. It could be worse, Jujubee thinks as she tells him, “Don’t you smell fine?”

  He’s never done this before, it’s clear. His boys are cheering him on from across the bar. He wants to talk money but that’s not how it works. Deals are made in the back. She takes his hand. “We’ll work it out.”

  But before they leave the bar, there’s a palm on the guy’s shoulder, yanking him back. “Sit down, niñito.”

  The man who’d been sitting at the high top puts himself between the kid and Jujubee. Up close, Jujubee can see that one of his eyes wanders.

  “He wouldn’t know what to do with you,” the man says.

  Before Jujubee can object, the younger dude has slunk off to his friends.

  “Let’s go,” the man says. “I want to see the show.”

  “Buy me a drink,” Julianna says, then takes him toward the back room.

  Dean holds the door open for Jujubee and her new customer. “Things are picking up.”

  The man pushes past him with a grunt. He doesn’t want to be led. Jujubee follows him into one of the curtained rooms.

  He takes a seat. “Dance.”

  Jujubee turns up the music. The edge is coming off the coke—the moment when you are still on the shit but becoming aware of its transience. The awful realization that the drugs can’t carry you forever. She should do a little tick, but it’s too late, because this guy is staring at her and she knows she has to start moving.

  And she does. The same routine as last time, but this time it feels just that—routine. She’s going through the motions and it shows. He pats his lap, telling her to sit.