Some evenings, Lita’s friends were over, speaking Polish and smoking cigarettes. They made stewed meats and boiled potatoes in the kitchen. Those nights, Jule put on headphones and curled up on her bed, practicing her accents from tutorials online. Sometimes Lita stepped into Jule’s room with a bowl of stew and gave it over without saying anything.
Jule had arrived in New York by bus. After the boy and the blue slush, after the strappy heeled shoe and the blood on the sidewalk, after that boy had fallen, Julietta West Williams had disappeared from the state of Alabama. She’d left school, too. She was seventeen and didn’t have to finish her education. No law said she had to.
She might have been okay staying put. That boy did live, and he never said a word. But then, if she’d stayed in town, he might have spoken up. Or he might have retaliated.
Pensacola, Florida, was only a couple hundred miles away. Jule got hired to work for cash at a storefront gym in a strip mall. The owners didn’t ask their staff to be certified trainers. They jacked their boys up on steroids, and everything was less than legit.
Julietta put guys through workouts every day. Bouncers, thugs, bodyguards, even a few cops. She worked there six months and put on muscle. The boss owned a martial arts place a mile away, and he let her take classes there for free. Julietta rented a week-by-week motel room with a kitchenette. She bought a laptop and a phone, but other than that, she saved her money.
Lunch hours, she often walked a ways down the road to the shopping mall. It was a high-end place with fountains and flagship stores. Julietta read in the airy bookshop, window-shopped thousand-dollar dresses, and tried on makeup in the department store. She learned the names of the classiest brands. She reinvented herself with powders, creams, and glosses. Her face looked one way one day, another way another. She never spent a cent.
That was how she’d met Neil. Neil was a slim guy in a butter-colored leather jacket. Now and then he spent an afternoon hanging around the makeup counters, talking to girls. He wore custom Nikes and spoke with a Southern accent. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he had a white baby face with ruddy cheeks, sideburns, and a gold cross around his neck. The type of guy who was too loud in the movie theater and always bought a big popcorn.
“Neil what?” Julietta had asked.
“I don’t use my last name,” he answered. “It isn’t as pretty as me.”
Neil was in business. That was what he said when she asked what he was doing at the makeup counters: “I’m in business.”
She wondered where that phrase came from. Was it a Pensacola phrase, or from somewhere else?
She knew what he meant.
“You could earn a lot more than you do now, working for me. I’d treat you so nice,” Neil told her. It was the third day she’d talked to him. “What are you doing for money, pretty baby? I can see you’re not spending any.”
“Don’t call me pretty baby.”
“What? You’re gorgeous.”
“Do you seriously get girls to like you, calling them that?”
He shrugged and laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
“You got some stupid girls, then.”
“I have nice girls, that’s what I have. They would show you how it goes. The work ain’t hard.”
“Right.”
“You’d stay clean. You could get some pretty clothes. Sleep late every morning.”
Julietta had blown him off that day, but Neil had been back around the makeup counters a week later. That time, he asked so politely that she let him buy her a burrito from a fast-food place in the mall. They sat at a dinky table by a pool of water.
“Guys like women with muscles, you know,” Neil said. “Not everyone, but a lot of guys. Those types like to be bossed around. They want a girl built like you, who won’t let them call herpretty baby.Do you know what I mean? I can get you very good money from a certain type of guy. Very, very good money.”
“I’m not walking the streets,” she told him.
“It’s not the streets, newbie. It’s a group of apartments with a doorman and an elevator. Jacuzzi bathtubs. I’ve got a guard who patrols the hall, keeps everybody safe. Listen, you’ve got it tough right now. I can tell, ’cause I’ve been there. I came from nothing, and I worked like hell to get a better life. You’re a smart-mouth girl; a beautiful, unusual girl. You’ve got a bangin’ body that’s nonstop muscle, and I believe you deserve better than what you got going on. That’s all.”
Julietta listened.
He was saying what she felt. He understood her.
“Where you from, Julietta?”
“Alabama.”
“You sound like you’re from up north.”
