WHORES ON THE HILL

The second time Juli tried to die, she didn’t call me afterwards. She didn’t call because Astrid was gone and never coming back now.

The ambulance swung into the parking lot after we rushed the doors of Sacred Heart Holy Angels, crying, trying to get inside. But it wasn’t until two in the morning, until all that was left of Sacred Heart was a chunk of smoldering, burning beams and broken floors, that the rescue crew found Astrid and Sister St. Joe, lying at the bottom of an air shaft in the basement of Sacred Heart Holy Angels. They had fallen forty-two feet down an air shaft that neither of them could see, running across the roof in the dark.

Sister St. Joe was found unconscious with a broken pelvis and a cracked wrist. But Astrid was pronounced dead on arrival. Father Flynn administered the last rites, he got down on one knee in the dirt and debris of Holy Angels to cross Astrid’s forehead and lips with holy water. The rescue crew put her body in a black, oil slick bag with two handles on it and carried her out of Sacred Heart.

Juli and I watched from the parking lot, hysterical and shivering in our ugly, torn dresses. Sacred Heart stood before us, water running from her cracked and open doors. It was like the world stopped for us, shut down after all that screaming, like the clocks inside Sacred Heart Holy Angels.

Juli and I, blank eyed and numb, gave statements to the police. We rode in cop cars downtown, answered questions, told them about Grubb and Jerome, gave our fingerprints with ink, and were ordered not to leave the state.

Juli’s father took her home from the police precinct. He tucked her into bed. Left a Valium on her nightstand. But it wasn’t until the morning after the Sacred Heart fire that he found her, tucked away in her closet as if for sleep, for a nap, like she used to do as a little girl. Only she had gotten sick on herself, on the old, frayed nightgown with the white scuzzy lace. Juli threw up in her sleep, unconscious, her stomach full of the prescription pills her father had given her, the Xanax, the Valium, the Trazodone, all the pills she had hoarded, storing, saving up just for that moment.

“Look at me, repeat customer,” Juli said when I came to visit, alone, during Dorothea Dix’s visiting hours on Wednesday afternoon from four to six.

Juli sat on the same green vinyl couch, her legs tucked up underneath her jutting, narrow chin. Her black shoulder-length hair sat in snarls on her shoulders. Her eyes were red and rubbed raw at the edges. There were no scratches on her this time, no gilled, mouthed cuts. This time, what was really eating at her, at me, was getting her from the inside out.

“It’s gone,” I said, fighting the tear in my voice, kicking the skinny leg to the coffee table. “All of it. Astrid.”

Dr. Whitmeyer, the county coroner, ruled that Astrid’s death was accidental from the fall. Her injuries included cuts and bruises of the liver and spleen, four fractured ribs on the left side, and a broken leg. At least, that’s what her mother said, bent over and sobbing at the funeral. The parlor reeked of old roses and burnt instant coffee. I didn’t stay long. Astrid’s pale, platinum hair was dressed and tamed upon the pillow, someone had wrapped a mother-of-pearl rosary I’d never seen before around her wrist. It was like looking at another girl, from another world. How could that be my Astrid?

The fire ravaged the school, taking out twenty-five classrooms, the cafeteria, the chapel, the new language lab. Water buckled the floors and shot through all the wiring. Every window in the east wing was destroyed, broken out.

The firefighters dispersed seven hundred and fifty gallons of water per minute when they fought the fire, all their equipment was up to code, they even called in the fire departments from Pewaukee and Cudahy counties too, but it still didn’t do any good. The Sacred Heart building was antiquated, the fire chief said, filled with dust and dirt and old floor polish. Once the fire got going, he said, they couldn’t stop it.

All the Sacred Heart girls were transferred to Fenwick, which went coed quick. The priests had wanted to combine the schools for years, but the nuns kept holding out, keeping to tradition, the singularity of the sexes.

Every paper in town said the fire was incendiary in origin. Grubb and Jerome were ordered to stand trial as adults for the fatal fire. They pled guilty to receive reduced sentences, three years and four years each, respectively.

Even if Sacred Heart had been reopened, I probably would have been expelled for my role in the fire. Juli too. Her dad sent her to Trinity Day School over on Laburnum, while I transferred to Milwaukee West, the public school three blocks over from Sacred Heart, where I wandered the halls in oversized sweatshirts and baggy pants.

I met Juli sometimes for coffee at the Trader. She seemed better, on the whole, except for certain weaknesses. She’d say, “Astrid? Please, let’s not talk about it.” She’d push a Percocet towards me from across the table, saying, “Here. Ssh, I won’t tell.” Then she’d pop two into her mouth, swallowing them dry and with a wink.

When Sister St. Joe was released from the hospital, she didn’t transfer to Fenwick either. She traded in her black veils for the khaki shirts of the Peace Corps, plus a one-way ticket to Guatemala. She sent me a postcard once with a picture of a brown-skinned girl wearing a paper crown on it. On the flip side, she scrawled in a square, I have a blue house with a yellow door in the middle of the jungle. Now I know how to lay a foundation and thatch a roof. I think Astrid would approve. XOX—DBS.

I kept to myself at Milwaukee West. The other kids pointed at me for a while, whispers followed me, I heard pieces of it, “Whores on the Hill,” murmured behind my back, but eventually, like everything, it went away. Without new stories to feed it, the legend dried up, which in a way, was worse.

Sometimes, I circled the weed-eaten blocks and walked past the condemned face of Sacred Heart Holy Angels. It reeked of the sweet-sour smell of burnt paper, melted glue, and charred plastics. Sacred Heart stood before me, torched by fire, her face broken and dehorned, the shell of a girl.

How I missed those days at Sacred Heart, that world! Where everything felt new and promising, the world bright and bare and mysterious with possibilities, almost within my reach.

Senior year, I thought I saw Astrid, once, one fall afternoon when the light from the setting sun hit the glass windows of Milwaukee West, when the light turned the lockers to flames and everything had that smell, the smell of fall, the smell of death, like leaves burning, like coffee roasting, like a new life, a darker, more dangerous life, was just about to start.

Down at the far end of the hall, I saw a slight girl with honey-colored hair pulling curls out of the collar of her jacket. I watched her from the back. For a second, I thought it was Astrid and my mouth went dry, my hands trembled at my sides. I almost called her by name, “Astrid,” relieved, so relieved after all this time of waiting, that finally, she’d returned, like Lazarus, back from the dead, back to us, back to me, my girl Astrid.

But when the girl turned around, I saw her face, her shaggy eyebrows, and her Polish nose. All the air went out of me. It wasn’t Astrid. It would never be Astrid. It was just some foreign exchange student who had wild, wheat-colored curls spilling down her back and a tight, pinched-up face. That’s all.

At graduation, I stood in the street with the other kids in my class. All of us wore white, the girls and boys both. We threw our white square hats to the wind with the gold tassels spinning.

Afterwards, I slipped into the school bathroom, where two girls leaned over the sink towards the mirror, fixing their faces. I took off my graduation gown and stuffed it in the trash, watching the girls speak to each other through their own reflections, swabbing their eyelashes with mascara.

“Let’s go to that bonfire after the ceremony and dance.”

“Do you think Peter Torch will make out with me or what?”

“Your face looks fierce.”

There was drumming in my ears. I stared at my reflection. The bones in my forehead. The freckle in my lip.

When the blond-haired girl raised a tube of red lipstick to her mouth, I reached out and took it.

“Hey,” she said. “What’s the story?”

Reaching up with a shaking arm, I drew across the gilt glass, first in small, block letters, then bigger, wider, as I got into the rhythm. Off in the distance, kids cheered. Girls danced. I wrote in a loopy, lassoed script, scrawling across the glass: THE WHORES ON THE HILL WERE HERE.