to sort of yell, “Have you all found God?”
“Oh, she’s one of them girls,” an extremely orange one said. “You know, what are they called? The Gotsers or whatever? My mom said you all are on that voodoo magic. You ain’t no kind of church. Just act like one to rope ’em in.”
“Do you take long showers?” I asked the orange one.
“Huh?” she said.
“You’re wasting water,” I said. “Don’t you care about the drought?”
“The what?” she said.
The black-haired one spoke. “What’re you trying to do, bring Stringy to Jesus? ’Cause Jesus don’t want him.”
They all doubled over laughing.
I drank a little more. I liked how the action of bringing the cup to my lips could stand in for speaking. The black-haired girl shook her head. “Stringy used to be a methed-out skinhead wannabe. I’d be careful, little girl. The only reason he’s not anymore is ’cause his ass went to jail. You want a jailbird boyfriend?”
“I can baptize you right here,” I heard myself say. I was on autopilot then. I wanted to be asking about Stringy, maybe even asking about their lives, what they did to make money so I could get some new ideas. But the Vern girl in me just kept talking.
“What’s wrong with this bitch?” one of them said.
“You don’t even know him,” I said. “He’s from Popcorn, Indiana.”
They all burst out laughing.
“He’s born and raised in the dankest part of the ’No. His mama’s a hooker at Motel Drive,” the dark-haired one said. “And.” She walked closer to me. She smelled like cheap berry lotion and BO. I wanted to ask why her mother had never told her perfume didn’t cover up stink, that it only makes it worse. I wondered if maybe she was motherless, too, like me, grasping at clues on how to be and failing. “He’s old. Real old.”
I took a deep breath. “He warned me you were a liar.”
The drink seemed to loosen something in me, but at the same time it was taking something critical away.
I went to find Stringy, amused at the sight of my own feet walking zigzags, but then I was picked up from behind and lifted in the air.
God? I wondered. Was I flying up and out of here?
Arms set me down in the bed of a truck and the music swallowed me, rap so fast I couldn’t hear the words, but the beat ran up my legs. I felt only the presence of a man’s body behind me, a thicker man than Stringy. With the music so loud I thought perhaps the man behind me was irrelevant. This was a party. I started to dance. Maybe my mother was dancing, wherever she was, to music like this, taking her clothes off while the men stared at her, and I moved like never before. I felt my own hands run up my body and I pictured my mother my mother my mother. This is what she deserved. To have a daughter drunk at a party dancing in front of all these people to the music of sin.
The man pulled my ass back into the wide low trunk of his body, and my feet came off the truck bed sometimes, and the dancing was a little painful. I started feeling dizzy, up high, and I wondered what would happen if I fell off, would it kill the baby? The baby. There was a baby inside me and I was dancing like a fool. I squatted down and tried to focus on the space between my feet, make the world go still. Hands tried to pull me back to standing and I looked behind me to see a portly guy, shirtless, two sets of tiny footprints tattooed on his chest. Were these the footprints of his children? It seemed appalling. “I’m gonna barf,” I yelled at him, and he backed off, turned and jumped off the truck onto the ground, started grinding up behind some other girl like a dog in heat.
I lowered myself to the ground and looked wildly for Stringy. I sat in the dirt when I couldn’t find him. The Cuba libre came back up and I vomited between my knees and then he was walking toward me. I said, “Why did you leave me?” And he said, “Well, you’re drunk. You like it?”
Did I like it? Did I like my swimming head, my body taken away from me? I never wanted to feel like this, exactly like this, ever again. “No,” I said. “It’s