“Bonn,” Blanche calls, “did I just hear your electric being switched off?”
I groan. Blanche trots toward the physician’s office. Reluctantly, I follow, feeling like Alice going down the rabbit hole. ’Cept, I know how that story goes. Alice is a foolish, foolish girl. And here I am, acting just like her. All I need is my own Cheshire cat.
Blanche grins at me, teeth and all, and I peer frantically over my shoulder, through the wide storefront window, at Big Bertha. The car practically opens its doors for me to hide inside. I could sit there, all night, like before. Again, a book would’ve been a good thing to bring.
“Not going to happen. Come on,” Blanche says, and grabs my hand, pulling, prohibiting my dreams of escape.
“What?”
“Oh, don’t play coy.” She pauses, looking ’round the quiet room. “This way.”
The corners of the waiting room are dark, the area behind the reception desk even darker. It feels criminal to creep ’cross the empty floor after hours. With the doctor living upstairs, as they normally do, I reckon he gets sick visitors at odd times. But it doesn’t stop this scratchy rawness in my throat ’bout how I should proclaim this as wrong and how the police may be lurking behind this chair, that desk, or in the closet by the window. Officers could come bursting through the panes and restrain me any second.
Sad, they’d say. So much promise and potential going right down the drain.
“Buck!” Blanche’s voice is an octave too high, and I shrink at the noise, going so far as to shield my head with my arms.
He’s sitting on a stool at the end of a poorly lit hall. Everything ’bout Buck—his posture, his clothing, his confident smile—screams gangster.
My muscles tense, my jawline taking the brunt of it. Blanche drags me down the hallway, passing doors to rooms where a doctor would visit with patients.
We stop in front of Buck, and I hold my breath, as if removing the rise and fall of my chest will make me less noticeable.
With scruff hiding his otherwise baby face, it strikes me again how Buck looks older than us, even though it’s only by a few years. Yet here I am, with the drooping neckline, pretending to be someone I’m not … for the money.
I slowly release the last little bit of air in my lungs.
Buck greets us each with a quick kiss—Blanche on her red lips and me on my cheek. I tense again, biting my own red lip and not knowing how to act, not wanting him to touch me.
“It’s hopping tonight,” he says, and grabs the handle of a door, revealing a staircase. He starts down it. Blanche pushes me forward, leaving me no choice but to do the same. I swallow, hard.
She stays on my heels, forcing me from one step to the next, yet time slows to a crawl. Above us, a row of lights hangs from the slanted ceiling. On the walls on either side of the staircase, posters and clippings in an array of sizes date back nearly ten years.
JANUARY 16, 1919, A MOMENTOUS DAY IN WORLD’S HISTORY: U.S. IS VOTED DRY.
My hand slides down the railing to steady myself.
ALCOHOLISM MEANS DEATH TO THE NATION. PROTECT OUR COUNTRY.
My eyes jump from one print to the next.
EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE, ALL ’ROUND THE BLOCK, THE BOOTLEGGERS BE RUSHING BIZNESS AT ALL HOURS OF THE CLOCK.
KEEP OUR MEN PURE. VOTE AGAINST THE SALE OF LIQUOR.
The fact that both Prohibition and anti-Prohibition posters paper the walls makes me dizzy, as if the drinking regulation is one big joke. But I ain’t laughing. I’m struggling to hold on, agonizing over what awaits me below.
“Are these stairs the only way out?” I manage to ask.
Buck’s deep voice echoes up the stairs, “Yup.”
Behind me, Blanche squeezes my shoulder before I have a chance to retreat. The squeeze turns into a nudge and I steady myself with an awkward and noisy step. That’s when the quietness of this stairwell, the physician’s office, dawns on me.
Most would find glamour in its secrecy and exclusivity. Not me. It only makes coming to the speakeasy feel more reckless and dangerous.
Buck faces us, but his focus is on me. “Ready?”
No. But I nod, slow.
“Just do as Mary says and you’ll be fine. She’s the big cheese ’round here.”
“Mary,” I repeat. My knees wobble at the idea of there already being somebody to impress.
Buck grins and swings the door open.
Energy crashes into me. Over the roar of music and voices, I manage to hear Blanche squeal. She grabs the hand that’s covering my chest and pulls me into the juice joint.
My gaze sweeps the cloudy room, and, at first, the details are lost on me. Cigarette smoke hangs in the hot air, stinging my eyes. I cough and wave my hand, straining to see a blur of faces and tables, a dance floor. Chaotic motion catches my eye before a hue of red lights, beaming onto a stage, steals my attention. Three girls wearing mini top hats and equally mini silver dresses sing, the hypnotic music everywhere.
I spot the long bar as we come to it, as if it materializes from thin air.
“Here we are,” Buck says, leaning too close to my ear. “I got to get back upstairs. Blanche, show her the ropes?”
Blanche swings a fake rope, her hip moving with the motion. On anyone else, it’d look embarrassingly pathetic. On Blanche, it’s sexy. Buck eats it right up, whistling.
My head swirls as Buck returns to the door. I’m still not sure how I got from there to here.
“Isn’t this the bee’s knees?” Blanche asks.
“The bee’s knees…” I repeat, fully knowing and understanding the expression, but too befuddled to do anything but repeat the sayin’.
“Hey!”
I jolt toward the sound. A girl with dark, short hair mans the bar. She drops below it, straightens again, holding a deep green bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“You here to work? Or gawk?”
“Work!” Blanche trots toward her, lifting a partition in the bar’s tabletop, which stands in her way.
I pass through, grab it from her, holding my breath and closing my burning eyes as I slowly lower the partition. What am I doing here?
I open my eyes and am met with a sly, cool smile from the other side of the bar. It belongs to a boy with slicked-back hair, wearing suspenders over a light-blue shirt that brings out his eyes. Not high school age, but he can’t be much older, by the looks of him. Handsome.
He smirks. “Say—”
I flee, not allowing myself to fall victim to what he says next, and rush to Blanche’s side.
“Like you did last night,” the dark-haired girl says, midsentence, to Blanche. “And you…” She surveys me, taking a puff from her cig. “You’re no better than furniture right now. Why don’t you start by clearing the tables?”
I stare at her like she has multiple heads.
“You go out there.” She points with her cigarette-wielding hand to the cluster of four or five tables. “You bring the glasses back here. Think you can handle that?”
I nod.
“Good,” she says, gently patting my cheek, the red tip of her cig coming dangerously close to my face.