1.
CLICK.
There’s Kathy sitting on a dirty leather couch with the stuffing popping through. There she is, leaning back, arms thrust out like she’s beckoning the world, turning that couch into her throne. There she is, five years younger, skin good, hair sleek, skirt so short you can quick-glimpse her red thong. There she is—cigarette in one hand, glass of something, maybe Hennessy, in the other. There she is, wildcat eyes, snake mouth. There she is frozen in time, preserved perfect, in five megapixels.
It was Kathy the Ragin’ Cajun who first took Julianna downtown and showed her the bars and illegal clubs just off Olympic, who introduced her to the man who said Julianna was pretty enough to model, the man who promised he’d turn her into South L.A.’s Cindy Crawford. (He didn’t know, and Julianna didn’t tell him, she liked the other side of the camera.) It was Kathy who helped Julianna get her first job—waiting tables at Sam’s Hofbräu, which turned out not to be a beer hall but a strip club. It was Kathy who encouraged Julianna to try out dancing, encouraged her to get onstage. Kathy who turned Julianna into Jujubee.
Jujubee is a nice name when you’re high. Nice to say quickly. Nice to call out across a club. Nice to let buzz around inside your head. Nice to tell the guy who wants more than a lap dance. It’s a nice name that allows you to escape who you really are—a name that allows you to do things that a Julianna wouldn’t do.
A few years after Julianna started dancing at Sam’s, Kathy took a turn into a rougher line of work. Tried her luck on the streets instead of the bars. She said she needed more cash for her habit, her kids, her brother locked up somewhere, and his kids. And she and Julianna went their separate ways.
It’s been twenty-four hours since the news rolled down Western that Kathy was dead up in an empty lot on Twenty-Seventh Place. Julianna had been getting ready for work at the Fast Rabbit when she got a call from Coco who’d heard from Reyna who’d heard from Marisol who’d heard from Sandra whose mom worked at Moon Pie Pizza a block from Twenty-Seventh, so it had to be true. Kathy had her throat slit, was suffocated and tossed. The news was like a punch in the stomach—so hard and fast it knocked Julianna to the couch. More than a day later she still hasn’t left the apartment.
She hasn’t slept and it’s coming up on evening again. It started as an informal wake for Kathy—a gathering of Coco and the rest of the girls who’d been taken down to the Seventy-Seventh the night Julianna wound up at Southwest and was surrendered to Dorian. (And how the fuck Dorian had turned up at that particular moment is a mystery Julianna can’t quite puzzle. The woman has a knack—she’ll grant her that.) The girls swarmed the apartment where several of them crashed from time to time. They’d told Julianna since she’d escaped being locked up, the llelo was on her. And in no time Rackelle was there with the goods. Then it was two A.M., then four A.M. Then most of the girls had gone home or gone to bed. Only Julianna stayed awake.
The sun came up a lifetime ago and now it’s already sliding away. A whole day has unfurled on the TV. The winds started a fire up on Mulholland that is sweeping down the hills near the Cahuenga Pass. People had to drive through a tunnel of fire on the 405 to get to work—the sky black with smoke, the hills lava red. The pictures on TV looked like something from Mars—an alien invasion. Julianna thought she’d been tripping.
At noon Coco emerged from her room—her bleached hair wild around her heart-shaped face, making her look like a mama lion. When she saw Julianna sitting on the couch, tearing up the last baggie, she made a tsk tsk sound like a teacher at the Catholic school Julianna hadn’t much cared for. “Chica, you’re taking it hard. When was the last time you even talked to Kathy?”
It had been a year at least. Maybe more. But Julianna didn’t tell Coco that. And she didn’t tell her the real reason she was unwilling to lay off the shit and take something that would make passing out inevitable.
She might not have actually seen Kathy’s body, trash strewn and contorted, bloated and blue, but she couldn’t shake the image. It would be there if she slept. It would be there no matter how long she stared at that tunnel of fire on the 405. But instead of coming clean about what was bugging her, she’d just asked Coco how much cash she had because she wanted to call Rackelle to come back with more shit to get her through the night.
Coco found some grubby twenties and told Julianna to tell Rackelle to bring some Molly as well because if she was going to work the back room at the Fast Rabbit, she sure as shit was going to get high so it didn’t half matter whose hands were where and what her mouth and the rest of her was doing all night.
It’s been a few hours since Rackelle made the delivery and all Julianna wants is to get up, get clean, go anywhere else. But by early evening she still can’t move, pinned to the couch by Kathy’s death.
She yanks her purse open and digs out her cell phone again—the latest model, an indulgence way beyond the indulgences of the other girls. Each time a new phone comes out Julianna finds the money. It’s the camera that drives her—more pixels, more saturation, a more perfect eye on her imperfect world.
She scrolls through her pictures, her long pink nail tap, tap, tapping against the glass.
How many selfies you gotta take, the girls tease her. You think you’re becoming an Instagram star? Think someone’s gonna buy your low-rent Maybelline? Julianna doesn’t correct them. A while back she figured out how to fake them and everyone else out—pretend she was taking a picture of herself, but really turning the lens around. Using the camera how it was meant to be—looking out not in.
It started as a slim rectangle to hide behind. But soon she began looking at the pictures she was taking. Each night she examined the who, where, and why of the previous day. She used it to see behind the fronts the girls put up for one another—the rough talk, the layers of makeup.
She’s scrolling back the years. Rewinding time. Erasing the lines and wrinkles. Doing away with almost a decade of late nights. Removing all the men who have left their marks. And she finds another one.
“Fucking Kathy.”
Because there she is again, this time sitting at one of the bright plastic tables at Chabelita Tacos, the twenty-four-hour joint up over the 10 on Western. She’s wearing a black cropped halter with three silver buttons. Her hair is bobbed and bleached and looking a little fried. Her head is tipped back so her mouth is in focus and her nose and eyes are slipping away. A gasp of smoke has just escaped her lips and hovers above her like a spirit. There’s a man visible just over her left shoulder. He’s looked up from his food, drawn by Kathy’s laughter.
Julianna swipes the screen again. There’s another. This time Kathy’s mostly turned away from the camera so that only the edge of the right side of her face is visible. She’s either teasing the man or telling him off—Julianna can’t remember. In fact, she can barely remember the night, what they were doing at Chabelita and what happened next.
“Fucking Kathy,” she says again. “The Ragin’ Cajun.”
Coco looks up from what she’s doing and when she does Julianna can see she’s crushing a bag of Molly into a fine powder that she’s rolling in wads of rolling paper for later. “Girl wasn’t Cajun. She was straight-up Texas. I’ve been to her mother-in-law’s place down somewhere in Inglewood and there must have been five generations eating that sweet-ass barbecue. Cajuns eat that blackened spice shit, not B-B-Q.” She shakes the small balls of paper in her palm, then dumps them into an empty tin of breath mints. “You’re working, right?” Coco asks, tucking the breath mint tin into the secret compartment in her purse where she hides drugs and extra cash. “Because you miss another shift, you’ll be slipped out of the rotation.”