Dani stood naked in front of the full-length mirror. Even she thought her five-foot, one-hundred-pound frame looked ridiculously small. She turned her hip to examine the trail of star tattoos that snaked down her torso. They started at her shoulder blade, arched down across her lat muscle, curled around to the hump of her ass, crossed over her hips, dipped inside her pelvic bone, and finally ended at the top of her inner thigh. Each star in the trail meant something to her. They were her salvation.
She was the only daughter of a preacher. Not just a preacher, a fire-and-brimstone, hell-hath-opened-up-its-gates-and-summoned-the-wicked-upon-us preacher. He warned his parishioners every Wednesday and Sunday that the devil had plans for them if they didn’t take up God’s plan, and God’s plan included a lot of praying, a lot of donations to his church, and a lot of private time with the women of his congregation.
When Dani was fourteen, she had the misfortune of interrupting one of her father’s private sessions with the wife of one of the deacons of the church. A week later, she was sent to Christ the Son’s Training School for Our Anointed Daughters on the coast of North Carolina. They promised to turn unholy, promiscuous young girls into proper servants of Jesus. Dani didn’t even know what promiscuous meant when her mother told her that’s where she would be sent. She would remain there until her father was satisfied she was obedient in the eyes of the Lord. Then and only then would she be allowed to come home.
It was her first roommate at the school who’d told Dani what promiscuous meant. Colleen Appledale was her name, and the two girls became immediate friends. They studied the Holy Word of God together by day, and shared all their unholy desires and fantasies at night. Dani found herself far more fulfilled by the profane than the pure. Over the years, the girls helped each other explore the sinful side of life. They frequently managed to escape the grounds of the school late at night and demonstrate to the boys and men of the local town just exactly how unholy they were. They called themselves everything from the Anointed Sluts of Jesus to the Wicked Stars of Christ. One night, after sharing six shots of tequila with a local tattoo artist named Chester, they’d both branded themselves with their first star. The rest of the stars appeared over the next weeks and months.
Dani forgot about Baptist Flats. She forgot about her parents. She forgot about the god she had been sent to learn how to serve. Dani wasn’t just living in sin, she was living it up in sin.
Everything was one big party until Colleen woke up nauseated three mornings in a row. On the evening of the third day, instead of sneaking off to a bar, they hitched a ride to the next town and purchased a pregnancy test at a chain drugstore.
They spent the rest of the night back in their room bawling their eyes out and holding each other when the test revealed that what they feared was now their reality.
“My daddy is gonna kill me,” Colleen had said.
Dani had heard stories of Colleen’s father’s legendary temper many times from her roommate. She knew that Colleen was afraid that her father would literally kill her. That’s when Dani suggested something she never thought she would. It was a radical idea even for a rebellious teenager. “He doesn’t have to know.”
Realizing what her roommate was suggesting, Colleen sniffed back a tear and asked, “Where?”
“There’s a clinic in town…”
Colleen shook her head emphatically. “Place is always surrounded by protestors. Some of them are bound to be from the school. They’d catch us and call my daddy. He’d kill me twice. Once for getting pregnant, and again for trying to rid myself of it.”
“We’ll go down to Wilmington then.”
“How?” Puddles of tears had built up in the corners of Colleen’s eyes.
Dani thought for a moment and then said, “The bar. We’ll get Chester to take us. It’s probably his baby anyway.”
Colleen looked horrified. “Don’t call it a baby…” She lost herself in thought and then said, “It could be Chester’s. Maybe. What if he wants to keep it? You think he might?”
Dani hesitated and then shook her head slowly.
“Yeah, probably not.”
The next night the girls snuck out again and enlisted the help of Chester the tattoo artist. He convinced them that going to Wilmington wasn’t the answer. They’d have to ditch school. Even with him driving, they wouldn’t be back until well after dark. The school would send out a search party, the girls’ secret would most likely be discovered, and what about the money? Abortions weren’t free.
As they sat panicked on their barstools, Chester gave them an alternative solution. He could have a woman he knew meet them at his tattoo parlor that night. She’d taken care of a few girls at their school. It was a simple procedure. The girls wouldn’t miss a second of school. Chester would trade out a tattoo to pay the woman. It was the least he could do since there was a better than good chance he was the father.
Colleen readily agreed. Dani had her doubts. She expressed them to Colleen, but the terrified teen was more frightened of facing her father’s fury than she was of terminating a pregnancy in the back room of a tattoo parlor.
The woman was tall with a curved spine that gave her the appearance of a hunched over fairy-tale witch. But she wasn’t. She was kindly, reassuring. There was no need to worry, Colleen was in no danger. She was so early in the pregnancy that having a mole removed would have been more bothersome.
Colleen lay on the table where she had received dozens of star tattoos. With Dani holding her hand, the woman began. Fifteen minutes passed. Each minute was filled with shrieks of pain. When the woman was finished, Chester carried Colleen to his car and drove the two girls back to their school.
Dani helped her friend crawl through their dorm window and put her to bed, a bed she would never leave.
The school used its connections in the community to have Colleen’s death attributed to a burst appendix. She was the second girl to die from the malady in ten years.
Dani was assigned another roommate. The new girl was intolerably pious. Dani saw no reason to remember her name, for they wouldn’t be roommates long. There was the matter of Chester that the last remaining Wicked Star of Christ had to deal with.
She snuck out of her room as the sanctimonious new girl protested. She would turn Dani in, but it didn’t matter; Dani didn’t plan on returning. She made her way to Chester’s tattoo parlor and convinced him he owed her one last star. She removed her jeans and panties and lay on the table where Colleen had been butchered by the kindly fairy-tale witch. She stared at the heavily stained tile ceiling while Chester applied the star tattoo at the very top of her inner thigh.
When he was done, he grinned and said, “Damn, girl, I’m boned up something crazy. I’ll throw in a little extra work there on the back of your neck if you let me get into that pretty little thing.”
“Colleen’s name?”
“Sure, sweetie. Colleen Applewood right across the back of your neck.”
“Appledale.”
“That’s right,” he said, unbuttoning his pants.
Dani stopped him. “The tattoo first.”
He dropped his shoulders and sighed. Reluctantly, he had Dani turn over, and he inked her with Colleen’s name. When he was done, Dani examined the tattoo with a handheld mirror in the bathroom.
Chester scanned her from head to toe. “You’re about the finest little thing I’ve ever seen come through that goddamn school, Dani Savage. I swear to Christ you could be a fucking porn star.”
Dani turned to him. “Am I prettier than Colleen?”
He clucked out a laugh. “Poor old Colleen doesn’t hold a candle to you.”
“Didn’t.”
“What?”
“You said ‘doesn’t hold a candle.’ Colleen’s dead, remember?”
He nodded. “ ’Course I remember—”
Dani lurched forward and smacked Chester on the side of his head with the handheld mirror. Momentarily stunned, the tattoo artist stepped back and shook chunks of glass from his hair. He growled and rushed the girl he thought could be a porn star and beat the consciousness out of her.
She woke up in a hospital bed with her uncle Otis standing at her side. He explained that her mother had sent him. Dani’s father had refused to let anyone in his family near her. “You’ll live with Jeannie and me,” Uncle Otis had said.
And that’s how it came to be that Dani owed her life to her uncle Otis. The god she had been sent to find at a boarding school on the ocean found her in the home of her aunt and uncle. He didn’t demand to be worshiped or obeyed or feared. This god simply existed and watched over her in the warmth given to her by Otis and Jeannie Royal.
She took her GED and got a job at the local slaughterhouse. It was a miserable job that she didn’t just hate; it haunted her. The constant squeal of the pigs transported her to the tattoo parlor where she’d held Colleen’s hand and listened to her friend be tortured.
On her twenty-first birthday, her uncle invited her to join his police force. He did it to keep an eye on her, and she took the job to pay him back for his kindness. She had every intention of putting in at most a year, and then leaving for someplace that was as far away from Baptist Flats as she could get.
As much as she wanted to shoot some of the folks, it turned out that she liked police work, all one hundred pounds of her. Not only that, but police work liked her. Baptist Flats was a small town full of hard-drinking apocryphal Christians with two primary employers: the slaughterhouse and a corporate tobacco farm in the flatlands. The hard labor and boredom made it a breeding ground for domestic violence. Maybe it was her size, her good looks, or her guts, but whatever it was, she had a knack for defusing volatile situations.
Still examining her star tattoos and flipping through the misspent days of her youth, a loud banging came at her door. It was a common occurrence given her place of residence. She lived in a motel at the back end of town that catered to drunken clientele who used the rooms to sleep off their overindulgent ways. Idiots always knocked on her door thinking they’d locked themselves out of their rooms.
“Wrong room!” Dani shouted. She squirted lotion in her hands and proceeded to rub it on her arms.
“Open up, little deputy!”
She stopped rubbing in the lotion. It wasn’t a drunk looking for his room, it was a mistake she’d made shortly after moving in with her aunt and uncle and taking the job at the slaughterhouse: her old supervisor and boots-up buddy, CJ Bollin.
“Dani! Open up!”
“Go away, CJ,” she said, searching for her robe.
“Open up, goddamn it!” He banged on the door louder.
She located her robe on the back of the bathroom door and quickly put it on. “I swear to God, CJ, I will shoot you in the balls if you don’t go away!”
He kicked the door. “Goddamn it, Dani! All I want to do is talk!”
“That ain’t happening.” She retrieved her service revolver from the room safe and slowly moved to the door.
“Seeing you in your costume done something to me. I forgot how damn fucking fine you are.”
“You’re drunk.”
He fell into the door and propped himself up with his shoulder. “I just want to get back to what we had, Dani. I just want a chance to get back to that. That’s all I want.”
“CJ, I have my gun in my hand, and I’m running out of patience.”
“I messed up, baby. I should’ve never let you go. I want to tell you how pretty you are and how much I miss you. I ain’t gonna try to fuck you, I swear. If things go that way, it’ll have to be all your doing.” He slid down the door and sat on the concrete walkway.
“The only way things are going to go is me castrating you with my .38 if you do not vacate the premises in ten seconds.”
“I did love to fuck you, though. Goddamn.”
“CJ! Leave now!”
“I ain’t never leaving you again…”
His voice started to falter. Dani pressed her ear to the door and sighed in relief when she heard him snoring.
She made her way to the bed and sat with her back against the faux headboard, cradling her revolver in her hands. She woke up at daybreak in the same position, relieved to find that CJ had awakened at some point during the night and left without incident.