Young and Out for Glory

“Yeah, they deflowered some freshman, straight Almost Famous-style,” buzzed a small freckled freshman to her murder of gothy friends.

Across the hall a football player dished, “It was a gang bang with a married guy, a bus driver maybe.”

A nearby cheerleader corrected him. “No, I heard it was a gang bang with that kid with the mullet. He fucked all three of them.”

It was just another Monday morning at Wentzville Holt High School, and the hallways were alive with chattering of the weekend exploits of The Whores on the Hill.

Collette Queen was proud of having fucked thirty-eight dudes before she had reached her seventeenth birthday. She even kept a list of their names in the composition notebook that she carried with her everywhere. Marla Farrell boasted possessing “the ability to take it in the ass with grace.” This talent was confirmed by enough guys for it to be considered fact. I was nicknamed “The Destroyer” because of the number of hearts I’d sunken my teeth into and spit back into the faces of their previous owners. I owned three t-shirts and a bracelet that featured my nickname, and I wore them often. Collectively, we made up the clique that the kids at school called “The Whores on the Hill.” They thought they were being clever, maybe cruel.

What most of them didn’t know was that it was exactly what we wanted. What they never realized it that we were the first ones to call ourselves “The Whores on the Hill.” What most of them still don’t know is that Whores on the Hill is the name of a book, our hands down favorite, and we were out to make it our life story. To us, Whores on the Hill was never just a novel about ruthlessness or promiscuity; to us, it was a manifesto. I would like to think that we were trying to embody a different breed of female, one unafraid to dominate, unafraid of her sexuality, unafraid of living however she pleased.

If nothing else, we were all suckers for the self-mutilation of carving our own names into the rumor mill, week after week. Like cutters slicing into their own flesh and watching wounds morph into scabs and then into barely recognizable, ever-fading scars, we compulsively fed fresh tales of our exploits to the hungry hallways of our high school. We watched how they changed over time, with each telling, and eventually saw them fade away. We never tried to set a story straight. There was no reason to. The more muddled the details are, the easier a story is to deny. Eventually, the past got lost in a wild tangle of what he said and what she said, and no one knew what to believe about us. I’m still not sure what I believe.

Astrid Thornton, Juli Sung, and Thisbe “Jellybean” Newton made up Colleen Curran’s fictional clique in Whores on the Hill. Astrid was the bold leader, Juli was her brilliant, yet melancholic, sidekick, and Jellybean was the newcomer ready to be corrupted. We fell in love with these characters and their salacious endeavors at Sacred Heart Holy Angels, an all girls’ Catholic high school in Milwaukee. Marla was our Astrid; she had the same fearless ferocity and flowing locks as the lead Whore. She was also equally mysterious. I was one of her best friends, and I still never felt like I quite knew her. Collette convinced her manager at McDonald’s to let her change her nametag to “Juli” instead of “Collette” and talked up her fictional Asian ancestry whenever she got the chance. With her pin-straight black hair and her tiny stature, she passed for half-Japanese. I was Jellybean, the quiet, somewhat naïve narrator. Though I was the oldest of the three of us, Collette and Marla both had me beat in terms of experience. Upon joining the Whores on the Hill, I had only slept with one person, a boy who I dated for over a year. However, once I was under their influence, this soon changed.

Collette, Marla, and I spent hours getting dressed up with hopes of running into any remotely attractive males. Most of the time, we congregated at Collette’s house. She had the biggest room, and her parents forced her to keep it semi-clean. Though, after our ritual of trying on every outfit in Collette’s walk-in closet and flinging unsuccessful ones onto her queen-sized bed, her room always ended up looking less than tidy. Not to mention, it was likely that by the time that we were ready to go, heaps of makeup and hair products would spring up in front of each of the three mirrors in her room. This was a problem if Collette’s mother came downstairs while we were getting ready, as this usually meant we would be doing some straightening up before we were allowed to leave.

Mrs. Queen was not a particularly large woman or a particularly fit woman, but something in the tone of her voice told me that she would successfully maim our high school’s running back, if she ever found out he crawled through Collette’s bedroom window late at night. She was the kind of mother who loved her kids so much that she would rip a tongue piercing right out of her daughter’s mouth, insisting, “You’ll thank me for this when you’re older.” Even if Collette’s room was clean, if Mrs. Queen came down while we were hanging out, it typically did not bode well for us. On one occasion, the three of us elected that it was a good idea to attempt to pierce our nipples with safety pins, since none of us were old enough to get it done professionally. When Mrs. Queen walked in on the three of us sitting topless on Collette’s bed, she immediately accused us of “experimenting” and banned Marla and me from the house for a few weeks. By a stroke of luck, she was too shocked by our partial-nudity to notice the telltale safety pins lain out on her daughter’s bedspread.

Even if Collette’s room was clean and Mrs. Queen did not catch us during any potentially compromising moments, she might not have allowed us out of the house if our appearance did not pass her inspection. Collette, Marla, and I would creep upstairs in fishnets and Sacred Heart-inspired schoolgirl skirts, green glitter eye shadow and black eyeliner smeared out to our temples. As we entered the kitchen, we would come upon Mrs. Queen’s cold brown eyes, which always looked black when she glowered at us from behind the counter. We would try to casually slip by, knowing that she would never make it that easy. More often than not, we were sent sulking back to Collette’s room: our ripped tights were too tacky, our skirts were too short, our shirts too low-cut for her Martha Stewart-esque taste. It wasn’t long before we figured out that we could pass these inspections by dressing in conservative decoy outfits and changing into our real eveningwear in Collette’s car, far away from the Queen house.

For the most part, our planning only went as far as getting dressed up and getting out of Collette’s house. We always had goals of seducing handsome males, but this meant hunting them down; the ones that we knew from school never seemed to be quite up to our standards. They were too immature, too quiet, too pimple-faced, too conceited, too tall, too short, too inexperienced, or too taken. This meant that the three of us continuously staked out the Mid River’s Mall food court for handsome strangers. I am unsure why we continued to go back to this location, since in all of our time as The Whores on the Hill, I cannot recall a single example of a time when we came upon even semi-attractive prey anywhere near a mall. We realized that the food court wasn’t making for good hunting ground, but none of us were sure what to do about it.

We decided to change our entire strategy. Instead of getting ready and sleeping over at Collette’s house under Mrs. Queen’s constant surveillance, we would stay at my house, where there was virtually no adult supervision. My mother worked long hours at the makeup counter at the mall and drank herself to sleep whenever she got home. My stepfather drank Jim Beam from the time that he woke up in the morning to the time that he passed out in the garage in the evening. He also took lots of naps in his “office” in our basement throughout the day. Mrs. Queen was either aware of this by mother’s intuition or by neighborhood gossip. She was always more suspicious of me than she was of Marla. She knew Marla’s mother better, and Marla came from a large Christian family.

Though, I can’t help but believe Mrs. Queen’s distrust of me was more personal. I was never a practiced liar, like Marla, and talking to adults, in general, made me uncomfortable; it was rare that I got so much as a friendly “hello” out of my caregivers. I didn’t fare well in Mrs. Queen’s afterschool chats, which were really more like interrogations. I would freeze and look to the tile floor for answers when she asked if I had learned anything at school.

In order for Collette to be able to stay the night at my house that night, she had to resort to tears and threats of suicide. Mrs. Queen did not crack until Mr. Queen overruled her. Typically, Collette’s father would retreat to his office when these sorts of arguments began to get heated, as I’m fairly certain that he was just as afraid of Mrs. Queen as I was. On this rare occasion, however, Collette was able to rope him in with her lamenting. He was miraculously able to get his wife to drop the entire argument, simply by saying that he thought that Collette should be allowed to go. With Mrs. Queen’s long anticipated “okay,” we were finally free. Collette tried not to grin too wide as high hopes of debauchery paraded through her head. At my house, anything was possible.

My room looked nothing like Collette’s. For starters, it was about half the size of her room, with no connecting bathroom. The most noticeable difference between my old abode and Collette’s was likely the shocking mess that was my living space. Had Collette’s room ever looked like mine, Mrs. Queen would have murdered her in cold blood. However, I could probably count on one hand the number of times that the adults living in my house had seen my room, so this was not an issue for me. My room was on the farthest side of my family’s finished basement. The door had a sad hole where a doorknob had once been, and the door itself often fell off its hinges. Under a six-inch blanket of clothing, papers, and other miscellaneous items, few people ever laid eyes on my carpet. I had a naked full-sized mattress in the middle of my room. I kept my blankets and pillows in my closet and slept there because I was focused on turning my mattress into a giant doodle pad, rather than sleeping on it. There was mismatched furniture everywhere: a stain-spattered coffee table near my bed, a few dressers with drawers missing against the walls, a large office desk in the back corner that was constantly tipping over, and two or three overturned chairs scattered about.

The night started off with a lot of promise. The three of us spent some time changing clothes and preening before we took some pictures to commemorate the evening. We mused over the pictures we’d taken of ourselves on my digital camera for a few minutes, while discussing how great we looked. We could have been sisters, if you didn’t know us. We all had the same milk skin, the same feral, painted eyes, and the same dyed-dark hair. There were slight differences, of course. Collette’s body was an amazing optical illusion. Somehow she always had a lot of cleavage showing, though I know for a fact she didn’t have much to show. Her height and her small upper-half camouflaged her childbearing hips and gave her the appearance of a tiny, cinched waist. There was something catlike about Marla. She had brown almond-shaped eyes, a sly smile, and a delicate nose. I was the most voluptuous of the three of us. There was no hiding my breasts, not that I ever tried to. My hair was long and unruly. As a middle schooler, the other kids called me “Mufasa” because of my voluminous blonde mane. When I dyed it black in high school people joked that I’d changed into Scar. We wore a lot of black, but we were also the first girls at our high school to wear sundresses. Innovation was one-tenth of the idea, but the rest of it was about attention. We wore combat boots to school with old Winter Formal dresses and looked good doing it. About once a week we dressed ourselves in punk Catholic schoolgirl chic, inspired by our favorite book. None of us were really Catholic, but just the same, we hiked up our plaid skirts and layered on rosaries and cross necklaces that Collette had stolen for us from the Christian store next to the mall.

Once Collette’s mom granted her a night of freedom, we set to work mapping out plans, which we hoped would ensure our chances of getting laid. Marla was the one who created most of the plans. She was dating a junior she’d met through my ex, and we were supposed to meet up with him and a few of his friends after he got off from work at Target at eleven. If this fell through, the plan was to hit up a house party. There was nothing brilliant or profound about our plan, but it was a little better than usual. After getting ready, we all got into Collette’s blue Saturn. Mostly, we drove around with the windows down and the music up. Occasionally, we would stop at a gas station, where Collette would sweet talk an attendant into selling her cigarettes, even though she wouldn’t be old enough to buy them legally for two years.

Sometimes, we went to Wal-Mart or Sally’s Beauty Supply to inconspicuously shoplift beauty products while musing over what shade to dye our hair next. Stealing always made me nervous, but Collette did it so effortlessly that my tensions were quelled. If I was ever hesitant to take something, she would have it, secure, in her purse for me, before I could bat an eye. We stopped by Sally’s, and as we walked in the store, a new product behind a locked glass case immediately stole our attention. It was a professional piercing kit, which came with a piercing gun and several different sizes of earrings, going for the yellow sticker sale price of $64.95. Though our hearts were set on it, it seemed all too likely that we would have to be over eighteen to be allowed to purchase such a treasure. Collette and I held our breath as Marla asked the cashier if she would get the piercing gun out of the case for her. The cashier looked up from her copy of Cosmopolitan and nodded, heading towards the glass case.  She took it out and handed it to Marla, without question. Collette and I crowded around Marla and beheld the wonder she held in her hands. It was easier than it should have been. Collette happily paid for most of it. Marla and I may have contributed the contents of our wallets, but that would’ve most likely amounted to less than $20.00, combined. Collette was the only one of us to consistently hold a job; even if it was at McDonald’s, she always had spending money. We were all excited about our new purchase but agreed to put off using it until later that night. Until then, we continued to pass the time by driving around aimlessly.

Before ten o’clock even rolled around, we ended up back in my room. We sat on my graffiti-coated mattress sketching on the white patches with colored Sharpies and listening to The Cure. Marla was perpetually text messaging. By 10:30, she reported that the cops had already broken up both of the house parties. As our lead whore gazed at her phone, Collette shrugged. “House parties are lame, anyway. Any slut can get fucked at a house party.”

       Marla half-smiled. “My boy will be off work soon, anyway. He has friends with their own apartment in Camden. Much better than a high school house party, no?”

        “My thoughts, exactly, Pretty,” said Collette, working on outlining her black script with purple. She had written: “Everything was jazz and magic.”

Marla sat up to take a look at what she had scrawled. “Why am I the only one with chicken scratch boy handwriting?” She had written: “Whores, not bores,” in a crimson attempt at calligraphy. Collette smirked at her effort.

        “It’s just because it’s a mattress,” I said, in attempt to console her. “You have to get used to writing on it. It’s weird.”

         Just as I was putting the finishing lime green touches on “I am young and out for glory,” Marla’s boyfriend called to tell her that he was too tired from work to hang out. After a disappointed moment of silence, we frantically started going through our phonebooks, hoping to find someone who could salvage the night.

        “What about Collin Melville? He’s always eye-fucking me in biology.”

        “Maybe Marcos? He’s kind of sleazy, but hey.”

         “What do you think Dylan Smith is up to? He’s probably stoned. Whatever, I’ll text him anyway.”

      It went on like that for a while, until Collette uttered the name that turned the night around. “ Patrick O’Neil?”

        Marla perked up. “Isn’t Patrick O’Neil a virgin?”

      “Oh, definitely. He never talks. Have you ever seen him with a girl? He only hangs out with his brother,” I said confidently.

            Patrick O’Neil’s virginity was infinitely fascinating to us. It added yet another layer to his mystery.  Patrick was a sophomore. He had jet-black hair with sideburns that I have yet to see anyone else pull off. His eyes were a shocking green that stood out against a paper white face. He was one of the better-looking boys at our school, but also one of the most introverted. I sat next to him on the bus for two years, and every time I heard him speak I nearly fell out of the seat with shock. When he did speak, whatever he said came off as either brilliantly insightful or extraordinarily witty. Collette, Marla, and I had attempted to befriend Patrick before, but he mostly seemed to hide behind his older brother, John. John was always cracking jokes or telling stories. He resembled a paler, slightly less hairy version of Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but by the time he was a junior, he had managed short-term and probably sexual relationships with at least three girls that I knew about.

         Collette, Marla, and I discussed the mysterious allure of Patrick O’Neil and began slipping off our faux schoolgirl attire and trying on clothes that we picked up off of my floor to keep us entertained. The night was going nowhere, and I was searching for my satin robe to sleep in, but just as I found it, someone, I don’t remember who, it may have even been me, boldly suggested a joint effort to deflower our school’s side-burned enigma. Somehow we all agreed that this would be a good idea. Maybe we were all too tired to think it through, or maybe we were all too hungry for the recklessness of being sixteen to care.

Either way, before I knew it, I was on the phone with Patrick, telling him which house was mine and which window to climb through. Collette flung herself onto my mattress laughing hysterically. Her ass hung out of my mom’s eighties homecoming dress as she rolled towards the wall to make room for Marla, who fell down beside her playfully shouting, “Deflower the kid!” She had on a child’s sheriff vest, complete with a star-shaped badge on the breast and fringe lining the bottom. I dove between my friends, giggling and almost slipping off of the mattress.

There was little discussion of how we would orchestrate this deflowering. Almost as an afterthought, Marla came to the realization that Her boyfriend would be unhappy about her participation in the event. Because we knew better than most that sex is a secret that is never kept, she couldn’t have much involvement if she wanted to keep her boyfriend. However, a role opened up for her when Patrick O’Neil climbed through my basement window followed by his older brother. Immediately, she feigned hunger and demanded that John be her companion on a midnight excursion to Wal-mart for donuts. With suspicious reluctance, John complied, and they vanished out the same window that the O’Neils had just entered through.

Collette, Patrick, and I went into my bedroom. Patrick sat down on an unstable wicker chair near my dresser and looked curiously at the ceiling of my disaster living space. No one spoke, at all, Patrick, because it was his nature to be silent, and Collette and me, because we were unsure what to do now that we had the virgin in our lair. Collette and I were both standing awkwardly, looking at each other, and then at Patrick. Eventually, I made a move towards Collette. My hands shook as I unzipped the obnoxious turquoise dress. I began pulling the old dress off of her, and she just stared, wide-eyed breathing heavier than usual. Collette shuddered when she was completely exposed but regained her composure quickly. I slipped out of my robe, and we closed in on Patrick. He raised his eyebrows and his eyes widened as Collette began kissing his neck, and I started undressing him. We dragged him to my mattress and continued to kiss him, mostly because we hadn’t made any kind of plans about where to go from there. I think that we both assumed that at some point passion would take over and things would unfold naturally, but nothing like that happened. It was all clumsy maneuvering to avoid doing what we had originally set out to do. Eventually, Collette stepped up.

Rather than stick around and gawk at Patrick as he ungracefully lost his virginity to my best friend, I slipped my robe back on and crept upstairs. A pang of self-disgust hit me in the stomach, but I passed it off as hunger. John and Marla were sitting at my kitchen table having donut holes, cookies, and chocolate milk. The first thing that John said to me when I walked into the kitchen was: “So where’s mine?”

Marla raised an angry eyebrow at his remark. I poured myself a glass of chocolate milk without answering.

“It’s cool,” John said, in response to our silence. “ Patrick’s real happy about this, I’m sure. Great way to start out, ya know? Deflowered or whatever.”

I drank my milk and put my glass in the sink. I maintained my complacency, though my nausea had only gotten worse. A few quiet minutes passed before Patrick and Collette came upstairs.  Patrick plopped down on the couch and sighed. His brother immediately sat down next to him and began badgering him about the past hour’s events.  Patrick didn’t say a word, just gave a satisfied smile and a tired shrug.  

Marla hugged Collette, and Collette poured herself a glass of chocolate milk. I asked, “What happened to that piercing gun?”

Marla answered, “I think it’s still in your room.”

Collette said, “I think it’s a great time to pierce things.”

“Me too,” I agreed. “Lots of things.”

So, Marla let me squeeze her hand as Collette pierced both of my ears three times. The loud click of the gun made me jump. Then, we pierced my nose.

I couldn’t tell how badly my ears were bleeding until Collette held up a mirror to my face and asked softly, “Look okay, Jellybean?”

By this time, the pain in my stomach had subsided; it was almost as if I couldn’t feel anything at all. The throbbing in my ears and nose seemed muted. I nodded to Collette, as I glanced slowly from the red oozing from my ears to the pink shock of inflammation that spread across the right side of my nose. It was almost as if I was looking at someone else in the mirror, someone I didn’t recognize. I closed my eyes, and the numbness sweeping over me felt better than anything that I could have felt at that moment.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed that the O’Neils left, had John not made it a point to say, “See you again when it’s my turn.” We never hung out with them again after that night.

Once they were gone, Collette, Marla, and I went back to my room. Marla wrapped herself up in a blanket and fell asleep on the floor. Collette and I doodled on my mattress until the sun started to come up. I got us a blanket from my closet and fell asleep huddled next to Collette, staring at the last quote that she wrote on my mattress that night. In black cursive it said: “No heroes, no love, no glory.”