No luck.
Her apartment was a flight up from a bodega with a dingy yellow awning: the Joyful Food Mart. It was a Friday night, and guys clustered on the street corner, talking loudly. The trash cans on the sidewalks overflowed.
Jule had only lived here for four weeks. She shared the place with a roommate, Lita Kruschala. Today the rent was due and she had no way to pay it.
She wasn’t close with Lita. They had met when Jule answered a listing she’d found online. Before that she had been staying at a youth hostel. She’d used the public library Internet to look for apartment shares.
When she went to see the rental, Lita was offering the living room of an apartment as a bedroom. It was sectioned off from the kitchen with a curtain. Lita told Jule her sister had recently moved back home to Poland. Lita preferred to stay on in America. She cleaned apartments and worked for a catering company, both for cash. She wasn’t legal to work in the US. She took English classes at the YMCA.
Jule told Lita she had a job as a personal trainer. That was what she’d done back in Florida, and Lita believed her. Jule had paid a month’s rent, cash, in advance. Lita didn’t ask for ID. Jule never spoke the name Julietta.
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 her pretty 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.”
“I lost my accent.”
“What?”
“I replaced it.”
“How?”
The guys at the gym where Julietta worked were old. They only wanted to talk about reps and miles, weights and dosages. And they were the only people she ever talked to. Neil, at least, was young. “When I was nine,” she told him, “one day I’d had—let’s call it a bad day. Teacher telling us to be quiet. Yelling at me to be quiet. ‘Shut up, little girl, you’ve said enough.’ ‘Stop, little girl, don’t hit, use your words’—and shut up at the same time. They squash you. They want you to be small and silent. Good was just another word for don’t fight back.”
Neil nodded. “I always got called out for being loud.”
“One day, no one came to pick me up at school. Just—nobody came. The people in the office called and called my house, but no one picked up. This after-school teacher called Miss Kayla, she drove me home. It was already dark out. I barely knew her. I got in her car because she had pretty hair. Yeah, stupid, to get in a stranger’s car, I know. But she was a teacher. She gave me a box of Tic Tacs. While she was driving, she talked and talked, to cheer me up, you know? And she was from Canada. I don’t know where in Canada, but she had an accent.”
Neil nodded.
“I started imitating her,” Julietta went on. “I was curious why she talked like that. She said gaz instead of gas. Aboot instead of about. That’s called Canadian rising, by the way. It’s a vowel shift. And I made Miss Kayla laugh, doing the accent. She told me I was a good mimic. Then we got to my house and she walked me to the door.”
“Then what?”
“Someone was home all that time.”