OK?”
“Sure, C.B., whatever you want,” Suzi said, her eyes aglow in anticipation of the Ecstasy rush soon to follow.
An hour after the first beeper message went out, the warehouse was packed with high-energy, writhing bodies. Thud – a true man of steel – was now turning away all comers, despite the endless and escalating amounts of sex, drugs, and money he was offered to get in.
After two hours of frantic dancing, the alarm on April’s watch went off. She groped her way through the bouncing, human maze of light-stick-waving dancers in search of C.B. “I gotta get home now,” she told him. “My mother is gonna be coming home soon. I gotta be in bed when she gets there.”
“I know, Baby,” C.B. said. “Just a few minutes and we’ll go. I’m waiting for two friends,” he said with a wink. April knew what he meant. C.B. hadn’t yet made collections from two of his distributors.
In about ten minutes, she stumbled back to C.B.’s car, her clothing soaked with sweat from the drugs and non-stop dancing. “Dolly’s gonna kill me, C.B. I was grounded tonight. You’ve gotta promise to take care of me if she finds out.”
“Don’t worry, Honey, I will. We’re family. No matter what, we’re family. You, me, Wendy, Skank, and Suzi are W.A.R. Skins. We take care of our own.”
Fifteen minutes later, April crawled back through the window of her bedroom and collapsed onto her bed. She stripped off her sweat-drenched clothes, threw them in a heap at the foot of the bed, and climbed in.
Less than two minutes later, she heard the front door open and her mother say, “G’night, Chrissie.” April pulled the covers up to her head and closed her eyes, her back to the door. In the mirror, she saw her bedroom door slowly open. Silhouetted against the light from the living room was the unmistakable outline of her mother’s body. In a few moments, the door closed. Her heart was still racing from the meth, and the sweat was still pouring out. April threw off the blankets and prayed that the air conditioner would kick in. It didn’t. As she lay wide-eyed on her back, her mind raced, and her sweat dripped into the sheets until the sun finally rose.
6. Captain Willie’s
SeaVue Apartments
Right off the bat, Dolly sensed that something was wrong. The sound of the washing machine running at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning was unusual to the extreme. It was totally out of character for April, who was usually still in the sack at noon. Dolly opened the top of the machine and saw that April was laundering her sheets and clothes. Another mystery. Since she turned fourteen, April had to be constantly cajoled, prodded, and nagged to change the sheets. She’d gladly leave them on the bed forever if Dolly hadn’t insisted on changing them once a week. The load of clothes was also a mystery, since April wasn’t any more eager to launder clothes than sheets. Then there was the early hour....
Dolly knocked on April’s door, but there was no answer. She knocked again; still no answer. Gently, Dolly opened the door, expecting April to be up and alert, considering the work she’d already started. Instead, she lay diagonally across the width of the bare mattress, dressed only in panties and a soaked T-shirt. A body-length damp spot covered the center of the mattress. What on earth? Dolly thought. Did she have a heavy period and get everything bloody and clean it up with water? Is she ashamed and wanted to hide it? “Hey, Sweetie, you OK?” she called to April. “Honey? You OK?”
“Yeah, Mamma. Just tired. I want to sleep.”
Dolly sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on April’s shoulder. It was cold and clammy. She gently tugged on her shoulder. “Honey, what’s the matter? You have a bad period or something?”
“No, uh, yeah, Mamma. I’m just tired. Let me get some sleep.”
The feeling of her daughter’s cold, clammy skin alarmed Dolly. She firmly grasped her daughter’s shoulder and rolled her face-up on the mattress. The sight made her suck in her breath in fear. April was pale as a ghost – nearly colorless. The eyes that had twinkled like diamonds when April was an eight-year-old were dull and bloodshot; dark circles under her eyes emphasized her exhaustion. She’d been through this with others at the clubs so many times before.
“You were out partying last night, weren’t you?” Dolly demanded, knowing the truth all too well.
“I’m tired. I wanna sleep,” April mumbled as she rolled over on the bed, turning her back to Dolly.
“I told you not to go out! Where’d you go? Who were you with?” April’s head screamed with pain with each of her mother’s increasingly loud questions.
“I thought you had to work this morning. I was just doing some laundry to help you out. Gimme a break,” April said, and rolled over again onto her stomach.
The phone rang, rang, and rang again. Eventually, it stopped.
“Where were you last night?” Dolly asked again, this time in a louder, more demanding voice.
“No place. Can’t I get a little sleep on a Saturday morning? Is there some new law?”
“Don’t give me any lip, April,” Dolly said as the phone rang again. She knew who it was. She had an appointment with the district manager at 10:00 a.m. to discuss the store’s summer promotional plan. She knew she was going to get grilled on sales statistics, customer traffic counts, and sales trends. She didn’t want to risk her new promotion by keeping him waiting.
“Hello? Hi, Harriet. Yeah, I know what time it is. Tell him I had car trouble, and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Keep him busy. I don’t know, show him how clean the place is. Tell him about the couple who got carried away in the dressing room last week. Give him all the details. He likes that kinda stuff. Make ‘em up if you have to, but stall him, OK? Gotta run.”
“You’re grounded until I get home. Got it?” Dolly barked to April as she raced out the door. “Grounded. Stay here. Inside. No visitors. Understand?”
April rolled over and said nothing, her head pounding like bricks falling on a steel drum. Even the noise of a passing car was enough to tear into her head. There was no danger of her getting out of the bed for the day.
The sales meeting went pretty well, all things considered. Dolly had good numbers to report for sales traffic, amount of average sale, and inventory turnover. “I told the girls to think about the customers as a package deal. You know, see what they bought, and always suggest something else that would complement the sale,” Dolly said.
The district manager had heard every store manager’s success claim a hundred times before. “Give me some examples,” he said.
“Well, for the first-time customers, for example, we always suggest trying flavored sex lubricants,” Dolly said. “First-timers are often a little shy and embarrassed, and they don’t want to admit they’re looking for some of the kinkier stuff. The lubricants are good, clean fun. They only cost a few dollars, but the profit margin is high. Since I took over, lubricant sales are up 37 percent – about $200 extra profit a month – so you can see how well my idea is working.”
“Hmmmm,” the district manager said, looking at the sales-by-category printout. “Yes, I see. Good job. What else have you been able to do?”
“Well,” Dolly said, clearing her mind of her personal problems and focusing
