Footsteps tumbled chaotically from above. Belle burst into the kitchen. “Come upstairs. No one’s here but a couple girls. We’ll do you over, dress you up, just for fun. What do you say? Say yes.”
“Yes,” Marian said. Stanley’s truck could wait. She only had a few more stops to make.
“Good!” Belle dug a bottle out from under the custard tart. Two inches of moon went into a tumbler. She topped off the bottle with water, corked it, nestled it back in place.
Upstairs, Belle pulled Marian along a dark hallway. She shoved open a door into a cramped box of rosy light: a pink scarf over a lamp, pink wallpaper spun through with roses and lilies. Cora lay on her stomach on an unmade bed in a robe, reading a book with her ankles up and crossed. A girl who called herself Desirée was sitting at a vanity in her step-ins, tiny but plump, her face puckered tight like a bud, black hair loose down her back as she brushed it. There was barely room for all of them. Bits of lace and silk dangled like vines from the drawers of a small dresser.
“Whatever shall we do with her?” Belle said about Marian.
They set upon her, had her clothes off in a heartbeat. They were used to nakedness and were not bothered, so neither was she, though they laughed at her for wearing boys’ drawers. Belle took a gulp of moon and handed the tumbler to Desirée, who drank and handed it to Cora, who passed the dregs to Marian, who swallowed them. When she was younger, before Caleb started cutting her hair, she’d often swum naked with him and Jamie, but while that’d had a prelapsarian purity, this felt like a ritual stripping down, an assumption of blankness. She clutched her money pouch against her bare chest. “You think we’re after your money?” said Desirée. “Pardon me while I laugh.”
“I can’t lose it, that’s all.”
“We make our own money.”
“How much?”
“Depends. More than you, I bet.”
Theirs was a form of income Marian had never considered. Gilda, Caleb’s mother, always seemed dirt poor, but who knew how she’d fare without the booze.
“Getting diddies, aren’t you finally?” said Cora. Irish accent.
“Where?” said Desirée. “I don’t see any.”
“They’re there,” said Cora. “Fetch your magnifying glass.” To Marian, she said, “Are you bleeding yet?”
Marian, for all her reading, had no idea what the girl meant, and so it was from a prostitute in a room pink as a block of rose quartz that she learned about the monthly curse, which sounded like a curse indeed, the way Cora told it, her explanation tinged with the horror of lost income. Garbed in a black slip of Desirée’s and an ivory peignoir, in stockings and garters and shoes with a strap and heel, Marian stared at herself in the vanity while the girls brilliantined her hair and powdered her face and kohled her eyes and rubbed in rouge with their thumbs.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not really,” said Belle. “Some girls get terrible bellyaches. And you have to watch out because once you get it, you can get knocked up. You know what that means, don’t you?” Marian knew. “But if it happens, you come see us, and Mrs. Wu will sort you out.”
“Sort me out how?”
“A little too much dragon smoke,” said Desirée, “and a bit of a scrape.” She perched on the vanity, grasped Marian’s chin. “Mrs. Wu used to be one of Miss Dolly’s girls. She started a sideline in keeping everyone out of trouble.”
“But then she got married?” Marian asked, wondering about Mr. Wu. The girls laughed.
Desirée said, “Open your mouth just a bit.” A red lipstick made the circuit of Marian’s lips. Desirée leaned back to inspect her. “Could be worse.”
Marian’s reflection showed a vaguely familiar person. The whites of her eyes seemed unnaturally bright within their kohl moats. Her freckles were lost under paint and powder. Her face seemed both soft and hard, its planes sharp but not yet set all the way. “What do I do now?”
“Now we sell you to the highest bidder,” said Cora, squeezing the bulb of a perfume bottle, sending a fragrant mist onto Marian’s sternum. “Lots of gents out there looking for someone just like you. How old are you anyway?”
“Fourteen and a half.”
“That’s older than I was when I started. You’re a virgin still?”
“How much would I get?”
“You oughtn’t,” Belle said. “Not you.”