GOD GRANT ME

Sometimes, it could not be avoided, we wished we were anything but the Whores on the Hill.

“Public school. Milwaukee East. Milwaukee West. I don’t care where,” we said. “I’d give anything to go anywhere but here.”

We envied the girls in frayed jeans, the ones who wore their bangs feathered back in sweeping wings, who carried their books across their chests and walked to Milwaukee West, six blocks down the hill from Sacred Heart.

“Look at them,” Astrid said when we circled the squat, beetle-shaped public school. “Stupid wankers.”

This is how we coveted other girls. It was a practice we picked up from reading teen magazines, where all you wanted was to be anything but yourself and how you are.

Even though she didn’t say it, Astrid wanted to be half of the Friar twins. Miranda and Melinda Friar weren’t only identical twins from Singapore, they were also confirmed child prodigies on the violin and cello, respectively. They played with the Milwaukee Symphony, traveled to Berlin for the string consortium, and even performed a live set on the local NPR station where they were described as “the String Sisters.”

Astrid betrayed her envy with teasing: “Look out, girls, it’s the String Sisters going to class.” And in the cafeteria, “Hey, the String Sisters are eating cheese.” In morning meeting, “Yessss! Look at the String Sisters playing their strings. Where would we be without the String Sisters?”

The String Sisters had black hair that separated into silk sheaths when they walked. Clear, jade bracelets clinked on their wrists. The String Sisters wore only the finest wool cashmere sweaters, they carried their books in imported Italian bags. Astrid found out where the String Sisters bought their cable-knit thigh-highs and bought three pairs for herself, in red, blue, and black.

We watched them all. Keeping score, in our heads. “I like her hair. Her pointy heels. Her blacked-out fingernails. The raven-head charm she wears on a silver chain around her throat.”

We watched, lazily, through a haze of Astrid’s cigarette smoke: Jessica Carlisle, the singer and songwriter, who carried her guitar into the Coffee Trader on Wednesdays; Helen Ross, the Thomas Aquinas junior who modeled for Seventeen in her spare time; the punked-out lesbian chick who worked the counter at Organic Express and flexed her muscles when we asked; the picture of Joan Jett that Astrid kept hanging in her locker.

Of course, we all wanted to be Deb Scott, the baddest of bad girls, even after somebody graffitied all the walls with DEB SCOTT’S DEAD. DEB’S DEAD.

Even little Becky Tribble, the freshman with the brain tumor—Juli wanted to be her. Just for a minute. “Well,” Juli admitted. “It’s just all the attention. And the flowers alone. To know you are loved like that. I mean, in your lifetime.”

“God, pathetic much?” Astrid laughed.

But Juli just stood skinny in the hall, staring at her combat boots, swaying slightly.

“Juli, hello?” Astrid snapped her black shellacked fingers.

Juli’s eyes popped open, surprised, like the blank, eggshell stare of the starved. “What? Okay sure,” she said. “I mean, what?”

This is before we were women, this is how we became women. By comparing, weighing, and contrasting what we could and could not become.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Sister St. Joe said. “Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”

“Rock on,” Astrid said, knocking fists with Sister St. Joe until the young nun blushed.

Sister St. Joe had another saying. She whispered, “Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.”

Which, of course, we didn’t understand. Until, like most things, it was much too late.