Excerpt
The Jills
Chapter 1On Sundays, Jeanine and I got ready for games together. We’d trade off whose apartment we met at. My place had the smaller bathroom, but in my bedroom was a big vanity mirror where we could smear on makeup, outline our lips and eyes with slick crayons, and watch our faces brighten and sharpen without bumping elbows. Jeanine’s apartment had the bigger bathroom, complete with double sinks to clutter with our makeup and appliances, the air growing humid and close from the heat of our curling irons. These were the conditions under which we labored, piling on products until we looked like we were supposed to, until we looked like Jills.
It was better to get ready together. We could laugh and fret through our pregame nerves, we could reassure each other and fix each other’s hair, and exclaim about how hot we were becoming in front of our own eyes. Alone, I was more aware of the shakiness of my hands and the churn in my stomach. I’d been dancing in competitions or on football fields since I was four years old. I loved the fear, I cherished it, but I wanted to share it with another person. It was so astoundingly affirming to meet your teammate’s gaze and see your fear on her face, too. You could fall in love with someone that way, you could fall in love with yourself, by sharing the fear of what you were about to do and knowing you were going to do it anyway.
But today, the only face in the mirror was mine. It was seven-thirty a.m., five and a half hours till kickoff. I grabbed my phone. I’m driving you, right? The screen turned grainy and slick from the foundation on my fingers as I typed. I sent Jeanine a picture of my hair. Do you see this volume? The hair gods are with me today.
I squeezed into my tights and typed again: Are you at your place? Getting a ride from Bobby? Have you been struck dumb by postcoital bliss? My body was alight with adrenaline, energy searching for an emotion as an outlet—annoyance, panic, anticipation, ecstatic glee. Jeanine’s silence was making my nerves collapse in on themselves. I stalled, checking the contents of my monogrammed Jills duffel for the third time, waiting for her to respond. After five minutes there was nothing to do but leave.
When Jeanine went AWOL for a night or a weekend, it meant she was with Bobby Paladino. Bobby had a brownstone in Park Meadow, as well as a condo in Miami. He’d flown Jeanine down there a few times, as well as to Tulum, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and San Marco. Back in February, they went skiing in Lake Tahoe. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d sprinted straight from the airport to a game or practice at the last minute.
On my way to the stadium, I stopped by her apartment, an impressive one-bedroom in a freshly built complex two blocks off Chippewa. The building towered over Main Street near the intersection with Pearl, all faux brick and gleaming windows absorbing the gray morning light. I double-parked and shimmied into the small glass vestibule to lay on her buzzer.
It was a damp fall morning and the vestibule was muggy, like a cooled sauna. I hit the buzzer again and practiced the turn from bar eight of our opening number, teetering on the business-casual pumps I wore to walk into the stadium. The temperature was perfect for dancing, but our hair would be deflated by halftime.
After four turns I teetered to a stop. I looked back at my car, illegally parked. At this point I had just enough time to drive to Orchard Park, navigate tailgating traffic, go through security, and make the winding journey through the stadium’s inner corridors to the Jills’ locker room. Not enough time, certainly, to ride up nine stories to Jeanine’s unit to see if she was in there.
I tried not to be annoyed as I ducked back into my car, gesturing at a massive honking Ford truck to go around me. I almost texted her, Don’t be late or Suzanna will murder you. The word murder glared up at me like a dare. Probably, she was rushing from Bobby’s brownstone at that very moment, her phone tangled in the bedsheets or balanced on the edge of his sink. Or she’d swung home to pick up her uniform and I’d just missed her.
How many nights had I lain awake picturing the various ways in which my sister, Laura, might be attacked or murdered or kidnapped or run off the road or left in a ditch? I’d imagined each scenario in as much detail as possible, in a perverse attempt to protect her from these potential fates—surely they couldn’t happen while I was thinking about them. But I never would have joked about these possibilities or put them in writing. That wasn’t how the spell worked.
Obviously, I understood that the worst could and often did happen, whether you thought of it or not. Still, I erased the text, dropped my phone into the cup holder, and drove. I just didn’t want to have sent it.
The smell of feet and hairspray nearly knocked me over, flooding my system with dopamine. It was four hours to kickoff, and the locker room at Ralph Wilson Stadium was crammed full of Jills.
I stood on the bench to scan the crowd for Jeanine. We got ready in the former referees’ locker room, which featured three walls of lighted mirrors and a row of defunct urinals. Every inch of this tiny space we filled with the glorious mess of girls: tumbleweeds of hair, deflated ribbons of ripped pantyhose, sports bras browned at the armpits, athletic socks stained with blood from popped blisters, hair ties and bobby pins and spilled glitter littering the carpet, the air thick with aerosol. Girls sat at their assigned mirrors or cross-legged in groups on the floor, compacts propped up on the benches, squinting at their makeup—MAC products exclusively, which were provided at a discount from Edges Salon, one of our newest sponsors. They fought over outlets to plug in hair curlers and dryers. They practiced choreography and fussed over hair and eyebrows and emerging zits. One of the youngest girls on the squad, Maria, had brought some ridiculous little instrument, a recorder or a piccolo, on which she was loopily tootling out the notes to our opening number, Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me.” The girls around her dissolved into fits of laughter and begged her to stop, wiping at their makeup. Beneath a muggy layer of jasmine and coconut, the locker room reeked—of dried BO and something deeper, the metallic scent of concealed fluids: blood, urine. The mess, the stink of it, made me dizzy with love and elation. It was the only proof we had of how hard we worked to appear shiny and perfect and effortless. I was so happy to be in this place, with these girls. My unease shrank to a dull twinge and retreated.
I clambered down from the bench and bumped into Lana from Line 2. “Help,” she begged, fanning her face, the false eyelashes drooping from her left eye. “Did I smudge my eyeliner?”
Scattered around her feet was a pile of dropped cotton balls smeared with foundation and mascara. Our required makeup ran when we danced, but substituting other products was strictly verboten.
“Let me fix it,” I said. She pointed her gaze to the floor while I patted her falsies back into place. “Have you seen Jeanine? She wasn’t checked off the roster at the door.”
“Uh-oh,” said Lana. “Think she got held up on the beach with Robbie Richboy?”
“Bobby,” I corrected, as she studied her lashes in her compact mirror. Her face smelled waxy and greasy, like a fresh crayon.
“If she’s coked up at a resort while we’re here in the chicken coop, I swear to God.” Lana said this without judgment; Jeanine knew where to get drugs of all kinds—coke, Adderall, illegal diet pills—and Lana had purchased them off her many times. She snapped the mirror shut and glanced pointedly at the digital clock on the wall above our heads. “I’m sure she’s sprinting across the parking lot as we speak. She’s got exactly twenty minutes before Suzanna starts breathing fire.”
We jumped as Sharrice kicked open the door behind us, brandishing a bag of ice above her head like a trophy. The room erupted in cheers. She emptied the bag into two urinals, forming twin mounds of ice, into which the girls shoved champagne, wine, cans of Diet Coke.
I joined my Line 4 girls—Sharrice, Gina, and Alicia—and took a swig from a bottle of white wine Sharrice handed me. I was overcome by the full-body nausea that preceded every game and wanted to be close to the girls I’d be dancing with for most of the day. After performing as a big group for our opening number, we split into six lines to dance on the sidelines facing the crowds. Together, we five would be sweating and moving the entire game. We moved more than half the football players, who sat around on the bench while we jumped and kicked and swerved for hours on end. My line was, basically, my platoon.
Gina crouched in the corner, elbows propped on her spread knees, forehead wrinkled in discomfort. “Yeast infection,” she muttered in response to my look.
Sharrice was warning Alicia, the rookie of our group, about Steelers fans.
“They’re the ones you have to watch out for. They yell the worst stuff at us.”
“Like what?” said Alicia, as she spritzed a new pair of pantyhose with hairspray, a trick to prevent runs.
“Oh, like names. Or ‘Take your top off.’ They’re also more likely to throw things.”
