Whores on the Hill by Colleen Curran

Author:Colleen Curran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430229
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

BLUE CHATEAU MOTEL

Juli lived on the East Side in a stucco mansion from the twenties. The Sungs had four and a half bathrooms, parquet floors, plush Oriental rugs, a black baby grand piano, a Macintosh XL computer, two Ming vases, three rice cookers, a guesthouse over the garage, a black gardener, a cleaning lady every Tuesday and Thursday, and a fourth-floor efficiency apartment with a cooking stove and minifridge that Juli laid siege to on her twelfth birthday, like her own private club.

Sometimes, Juli would lay flat on her back on the white shag carpet. A halo of light would flicker from Juli’s Virgin Mary night-light, her exposed pink heart like a strawberry.

“As the knife punctures your chest, you feel your legs get heavy as wood.” Astrid would rub Juli’s temples while I’d sit sidesaddle, waiting my turn. “Blood fills your mouth. Your heart jerks one last time. Then stops.”

Astrid would scuttle over to Juli’s right side. We’d both slip two fingers, the index and the third, underneath her back. Astrid would arch one eyebrow and give me the nod. We knew what to do.

We’d whisper, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” And again, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

Juli’s skinny, paper-thin body would rise easy under our digits. First an inch off the floor, then two. “Bones,” her father called her. “Bony bones.” We’d get her knee-high, her black as ebony hair touching the ground like pulled taffy, before Juli’d pop open her eyes and whisper, “Oh shit.”

She’d hit the white shag rug with a thud. Laugh and rub her head. “Sorry.”

Bedroom hypnotists. This is what we did for fun when we stayed in. But nights out were a different story.

“Give me the key,” Astrid said. “I stuck it in your purse somewhere.” She teased her bangs with her fingers.

“Jesus, fuck, I’m frozen,” Juli said, her words whispering clouds of breath in the dark, vacant car lot.

The wind picked up our skirts and froze our knees raw. It was a bitter night in January, when the whole world seemed sheeted with ice. The rooms at the Blue Chateau Motel faced a deserted car lot first and then the salted twin lanes of Route 65. Headlights caught the Queen Anne’s lace at the side of the road for a minute and then it was black night again.

“Scared?”

“Maybe. You?”

“What’d you tell your mom?”

“Sleepover. Your house.”

At the bottom of my bag, there it was hiding: a gold key tied with string to a wedge of plastic that read BLUE CHATEAU MOTEL in glittered, cursive script.

Astrid put in the key and turned it, everything was greyish-yellow light inside.

Dejan and his friend Sarge were beautifully dressed. They were always beautifully dressed. Black wool pants, white starched shirts with French cuffs, cuff links, rings on their fingers, open collars, triangles of tan olive skin.

“Son of a bitch, shit,” Dejan said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “We thought you maybe change your minds. Got lost. Get in here out of the cold.”

College boys, Serbian, on foreign exchange semester at Marquette University.

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