Hello Girls, page 7
Her stomach balled up as she realized a couple of the suits she’d brushed aside were still tucked up at the corner of the box.
She’d made a mistake. That had to be what he was looking at.
The light flicked off. The closet door closed.
Was he messing with her?
She stood on shaky legs and moved toward the slatted doors of the closet. The bedside light was still on. Her father was sitting up in bed, looking at his phone.
Winona waited there for him to glance at the drawer, to sense her betrayal.
She waited until he set his phone down. She waited until he turned the light off, and still she waited as he lay down. Waited until he went to sleep, and then waited some more.
When she was sure he was really out, huskily snoring in a way his vanity never would have allowed him to fake, she slowly, quietly slipped out.
There was no point in putting the keys back now.
When she made it back to her room, she was exhausted and exhilarated and more than anything, hungry. But something was still holding her back. One last shackle.
She slipped the Cartier bracelet off and set it on her dresser.
She was hungry for the world, and she was going to have it.
Starting with a 1969 Alfa Romeo.
Eleven
Zero Dollars
There had to be money in Marcus’s stash.
Lucille hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it when she’d gotten home—how easy it would be, in one fell swoop, to get Jay Algren, Mall Cop, away from their house, away from her and her mom. She just had to remove the problem. Physically.
No drugs? No cash? Marcus wouldn’t be able pay his supplier, and he’d have to deal with the consequences himself.
And maybe Lucille could take back what he owed her in the process.
It was laughable, how quickly Lucille found it taped up underneath the sofa. It was the literal first place she looked. After she’d gotten home, she’d lingered by her bedroom door for what felt like an hour until Marcus had finally gone into his bedroom. The second she heard his door click shut, she was there in the living room, hands under the couch, and she’d made it back into her bed with the ziplock bag hidden underneath her shirt before he’d even started the car.
Under the covers, she examined it by phone light. Molly. Coke. Pills she recognized. Pills she didn’t. She snapped a photo, then ran a reverse image search.
Roofies.
Oh my God, Lucille thought, fist pressed to her mouth. Is he selling them? Is he giving them to girls? But there wasn’t really a difference between the two, was there?
She shook the bag again to shift its contents. There wasn’t a single cent inside it. Either Marcus had a secret bank account—he was old enough to not need a parent’s approval to get one, he could’ve been putting it away for years—or he immediately spent every dime he made. Or he had a different hiding place for his cash.
But the Pryce house was small, and Lucille couldn’t think of anywhere else she didn’t see all the time (the linen closet? The pantry?), except Marcus’s room, which he kept locked. Her mom let him get away with it. He’s an adult, Lucy. He needs his private space. Never mind Lucille’s bedroom—no lock, crooked hinges, her things easy come, easy go.
Lucille turned her phone light back onto the baggie. Rattled it. Grinned.
Even if she couldn’t do anything with Marcus’s stash (she definitely wasn’t going to sell drugs), she could take it. Take away his livelihood. Stop him from hurting other people. Other girls.
It was good enough for now.
As she turned off her flashlight, her phone began to ring in her hand. When she saw the name on-screen, her stomach dropped. “Winona? What happened?”
She was so sure what her friend was going to say, so terrified to hear her crying about whatever Stormy had done to her, that she couldn’t register what Winona actually said until she repeated it. “I’m at the door, Luce—come let me in!”
Lucille kept her phone to her ear as she ran down the hall, heart now lodged in her throat. She swung open the door, expecting blue and purple skin, blood flecks, snotty streaks, tears, horror, pain—everything she imagined on a daily basis since she’d come to care about Winona.
Instead Winona was standing in the doorway with her cheeks flushed, her once-long hair lobbed off at the chin but just as conservative-chic.
But there was something about the New and Not Quite Improved but Laterally Transformed Winona that unsettled Lucille.
It was the fresh scab across her neck, a place no one without a very territorial cat could expect an injury.
“We have to go. We have to go now, Luce. I have the car—the Romeo—we need to get out of here before Stormy finds out I’m gone.”
Lucille knew better than to ask questions when her best friend was shorn and bleeding on her front step. “Let me pack a bag,” she whispered. “Two minutes. Promise.”
Thank God her mom slept like the dead.
She left Non inside the front door and ran to her bedroom. Marcus’s baggie went into her duffel, first thing, and then she tossed in the next few things she thought of: toothbrush, charger, two pairs of off-brand Keds. Everything on her dresser. A bunch of cutoff shorts and tanks, a tangle of glamorously ugly Cliffside apparel, her Members Only jacket.
She dragged her bag down the hall. “Where are we going? Chicago?” she asked.
“Vegas,” Winona said, leaning against the wall for support, and Lucille saw then that she was shivering. Blood was seeping out of her cut, dripping down the line of her neck.
Gently, Lucille led her friend into the kitchen. “Straight there? No Chicago? Non, I don’t know if that’s a good plan—”
“Stormy bought us a condo in Chicago,” she said as Lucille dabbed at her neck with a napkin. Lucille blinked at her, confused, and Winona clarified. “Not us. Him-and-me us. Twenty-four-hour Stormy surveillance.”
“With a side of physical abuse.”
“He’ll be my jailer.”
Lucille grabbed another napkin. The cut wouldn’t stop bleeding. “And Northwestern?”
“I have three months to figure it out. But I—I don’t have another night I can spend in that house.” Winona swallowed. “I know we don’t have any money. But we don’t have any time to fix that.”
“How much do we need?” Lucille echoed. “Four grand? Here, hold this. Put pressure on it.”
“Four grand,” Winona said.
Lucille looked at her for a long minute—the splatter of blood, the figure-skater bob, the steel in her eyes—and then she turned to look desperately around the kitchen, as though a bouquet of cash might have been delivered while her back was turned.
They were quiet for a long minute. Lucille thought she heard a cough from Marcus’s room, and tensed. We need to go, she was about to tell Winona, but her phone pinged in her pocket with a text. She knew it was probably Chaxton, but her nerves made her pull it out anyway.
Where are you, it read. I miss you baby. Last night until the cams get fixed at work. We could do an-y-thing u like.
He was persistent. And inconsistent (You? u? Which was it?) and gross and oh my God, there might be a way for us to fix this problem.
“I’m ready,” Lucille said. “But there’s somewhere we need to stop first.”
“Fine,” Winona said, walking to the door. “Good—anywhere.”
Lucille hoped she really meant that.
Twelve
Zero Dollars
This was a bad idea.
In the course of Winona Olsen’s life, she’d had plenty of those, but she’d never followed through with any of them. She hadn’t skipped class to go stalk the filming of her favorite Food Network show when they came to town, or given herself a secret stick-and-poke tattoo the night Lucille did her own inked sparrows, or cheated on her physics tests (once she’d accidentally looked over at Lucas Graywater’s paper and when she saw what he’d written, she knew for certain that he was right, and still left the question blank out of guilt).
Winona Olsen had never even had bangs!
Stormy didn’t think they would suit her face.
Taking the Romeo was her first true rebellion and even that had been as simple (and legal?) as taking the spare key to Grandfather Pernet’s front door out from under a mat, and the keys to the garage and car from the drawer in the writing desk just inside the foyer.
But now Lucille was looking at her with a raw-edged excitement, hissing under her breath like the world’s best snake-charmer, “This will work, Non,” and Winona wanted to follow through.
She had to follow through.
She couldn’t go back.
Going back would mean death, if not literal, something worse: a death of the soul. She thought about the old black-and-white Twilight Zone episodes she and Lucille sometimes ad-libbed over when Glenn had them playing on mute at the Cliffside. A group of strangers awakening at the bottom of a deep pure-white vault, with no chance of escape, only to discover after twenty-some minutes of planning and persevering that they were nothing but toys at the bottom of a child’s box.
If she went back, that would be her life.
They’d already called Chaxton. He was in, which was probably the biggest indicator of how deeply, thoroughly, wholly bad this idea was.
“We park the car two blocks back,” Lucille went on. “It’s nothing but old warehouses back there. People who won’t talk to cops. We’re in and out. He gives us a head start, then hits the panic button, and when the cops show up, we’re long gone and the description he gives is a two-hundred-pound man with a snake tattoo.”
She wanted to do this, but they had to be smart. “What about our shoes?”
“Babe, if you want to rob a gas station in your Louboutins, that’s your prerogative, and I support you.”
“So the cops show up, and Chaxton describes André the Giant, and then they find these two sets of tracks back through the old industrial district. Size eight Louboutins and size seven and a half Keds. What then?”
“Excuse me,” Lucille said, bumping Winona’s foot with hers. “But the designers at Target would never forgive me if I didn’t point out that these are not Keds.”
“Luce,” Winona chastised. “Be serious. We have to consider every possible thing that could go wrong.”
Lucille arched her eyebrow. “Which means that you’re considering it, period.”
Winona felt—in a distant, scientific way—startled to realize that she was more than considering it. Her grandfather’s stolen (really, more like “borrowed”) car was already parked out front, after all. “Shoes,” she said again.
The smile faded from Lucille’s slightly crooked mouth. She thought for a moment. “Oh my God,” she blurted. “It’s perfect. It’s so fucking perfect.”
Sometimes they were so used to being in each other’s heads that Lucille forgot Winona wasn’t literally telepathic. “What, Luce?”
Lucille opened the hall closet and picked up a pair of Air Jordans. “Babe, put your Louboutins in the trunk.”
Thirteen
They brought ski masks, but that was more for fun than anything else.
Fun?
What the hell was Winona thinking? You didn’t rob gas stations for fun.
And yet, there she was, in the dead of the night, dressed like a cartoon bank robber and driving a red convertible with a trunk full of loot. Neither of them had spoken since they pulled away from Lucille’s place, probably because the stupidity of the idea was starting to set in.
Winona was 99 percent sure they weren’t going to go through with it.
They would get there, she kept telling herself, and park between the old ketchup factory and the old shoe factory, and they’d stare each other down until they both exploded into laughter.
You thought I was serious! Lucille would scream.
You thought I would actually go along with something that crazy?
Winona drove slowly, giving either of them ample opportunity to give the ruse up.
Why weren’t they giving the ruse up?
She was parking.
They were getting out of the car, shakily locking it behind them. Their eyes met over the top of the car. Lucille gave a half smile. Winona returned it. Thank God, she thought.
Then Lucille pulled her ski mask down over her face and led the way.
Winona pulled hers down and followed. She felt numb, or maybe like she’d left her body. Like she was very drunk and watching a movie, slurring out, Yeah, right, that would never happen in real life.
She would never be tripping through a craggy, asphalt wasteland at two-thirty in the morning wearing Lucille’s brother’s shoes.
They walked the way they’d driven: slowly.
Not slow enough. They were emerging from the gnarly range of trees behind 7-Eleven into its cluster of Dumpsters.
“Lot’s empty,” Lucille whispered.
Winona looked her in the eyes; maybe it was the ski mask, but she saw no sign of laughter in her friend’s face. “Are you ready?” Lucille whispered.
Winona’s stomach and her heart were on two very different trips. The former wanted to vomit, but the latter was thrumming, You’re ready to get out. You’re ready to be free. You’re ready for life.
The fact of the bird-shit-stained gas station in front of them barely factored into it. “I’m ready.”
Lucille squeezed Winona’s shoulder, then reached into her sweatshirt pocket for the water gun she’d brought. “There’s no going back.”
“Promise?” Winona said.
She pulled out her own plastic gun and ran through the dark lot into the ghastly glow of the convenience store.
Fourteen
Zero Dollars
When Lucille rehearsed this whole scene on the car ride here, ran it through in her head, the lights in the 7-Eleven were pink neon, and she slipped through the front door like liquid, Winona at her heels, and there was a song playing, too loud, like in a commercial, something dance-y, electronic. Maybe Winona made Chaxton put all the Haribo Gold-Bears in a bag while Lucille took on the cash register. Maybe that was when the music got louder. In her imagination, the stickup was Day-Glo, or hyperreal, because even though Lucille was the one driving this thing (even if she didn’t have her hands on the literal wheel), it felt like a dream to her.
I didn’t say goodbye to my mom, she thought wildly as the bell on the door of the 7-Eleven chimed, as the two of them stumbled inside. Has she called? I should call her. Winona and I could leave tomorrow—I could just pick up some milk and Cheez-Its and Non could take me home—
“This is a stickup,” Winona sang out, like she was in the chorus of Hello, Dolly! again.
Lucille couldn’t see. Her mask was twisted a little to the left, and as she fumbled to right it, she saw (thank God) that the store was empty. Empty, and poorly lit, the freezer doors all dark except the one closest to them: frozen pizzas.
I could just get a pepperoni and take it home—
Why was she thinking this way? Your mother doesn’t care about you, she told herself firmly, and in the end she’ll be happy you got out. You can make your own rules. She could come visit! She’d love Vegas! She’ll forgive you. You’re fine.
Fine.
“I’m over here, Luce,” Chaxton was saying. “It helps if you point the gun in the right direction. And if it isn’t, like, bright purple with dinosaurs on it.”
She swung her head around until she could see him through the eyeholes of her mask. Chaxton Smith: his parents had balanced out the workaday last name by naming their son after a sneeze. Chaxie, his mom called him, on the one night he persuaded her to come to his house for dinner (takeout Chinese, the Detroit Lions on the television). He still lived with his parents; he’d “tricked out” their basement with a pair of pinball tables he’d bought broken and secondhand, which he was perpetually in the middle of fixing like they were a pair of Camaros.
Most things about Chaxton made Lucille want to get out her own toolbox, but she wasn’t in the business of fixing people. Or at least she knew a lost cause when she saw one. There was no conceivable mold she could pour Chaxton into that would improve the raw materials. If you gave him a corporate job and threw out all his cargo shorts, Chaxton would still be Chaxton, and the only good thing about him would still be this: he was built like a fitness model and had tan, freckled skin that was always warm to the touch, and if he wasn’t talking, Lucille could pass a happy few hours in the back of his truck. He sort of wanted to marry her, which was sad if she stopped to think about it, but Lucille refused to let herself pity him. She’d always sort of wanted a Dalmatian, but you didn’t see her crying about that, did you?
“This is a stickup,” she said to Chaxton, and he mouthed back, You’re so hot. “Empty the drawer.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll put the money in the bag.”
“Oh,” Winona said. “Right. Put the money in the bag.” She tossed it at his head, and he caught it one-handed. It all had to look real from at least the outside windows: Lucille had seen enough cop shows to know that other businesses had cameras, and they might be able to catch a (blurry) shot of them from a distance.
“After this, what are you guys doing?” Chaxton asked as he pulled stacks of bills from the register. There wasn’t ever that much in a business like this—two hundred dollars tops; the rest went to the bank each morning—but “not that much” was still more than what they currently had. Which was “nothing.”
It was taking too long. Lucille’s eyes kept straying to the big front window of the 7-Eleven, to the headlights of cars driving by. The two of them in all black, in plain sight, like a pair of girls in bad Halloween costumes.
“Why?” Winona asked Chaxton. “We’re not, like, sticking around.”
“I need to pick up my sixty-seven dollars,” he said. One-third: that was his take. “I can’t have it in my pockets when the police get here.”
“We’ll Venmo you,” Lucille said, too fast, and she realized that what she was looking for out the front window wasn’t the police, or a pair of unlucky strangers, but her mom. Or Stormy Olsen. For someone to swoop in and drag them home by their hair. She was losing control. “The cigarettes, too, Chaxton.”
