by E. Lockhart
“Not yet.”
“Then I have an idea I want to talk to you about. Just a crazy thought I’m having, but you might like it.” She took a cream-colored card out of her handbag and handed it to Jule. It had a Fifth Avenue address. “I have to get home to my husband now. He’s not well. But why don’t you come to dinner at our place tomorrow night? I know Gil will be thrilled to meet one of Immie’s old friends.”
“Thanks, I’d love to.”
“Seven o’clock?”
“I’ll be there,” said Jule. “Now, do we dare put our shoes on?”
“Oh, I guess we have to,” said Patti. “It’s very hard to be a woman sometimes.”
FIRST WEEK OF JUNE, 2016
NEW YORK CITY
Sixteen hours earlier, at eight p.m., Jule got out of the subway in a dodgy Brooklyn neighborhood. She’d spent the day looking for work. It was the fourth time in a row she’d worn her best dress.
No luck.
Her apartment was a flight up from a bodega with a dingy yellow awning: the Joyful Food Mart. It was a Friday night, and guys clustered on the street corner, talking loudly. The trash cans on the sidewalks overflowed.
Jule had only lived here for four weeks. She shared the place with a roommate, Lita Kruschala. Today the rent was due and she had no way to pay it.
She wasn’t close with Lita. They had met when Jule answered a listing she’d found online. Before that she had been staying at a youth hostel. She’d used the public library Internet to look for apartment shares.
When she went to see the rental, Lita was offering the living room of an apartment as a bedroom. It was sectioned off from the kitchen with a curtain. Lita told Jule her sister had recently moved back home to Poland. Lita preferred to stay on in America. She cleaned apartments and worked for a catering company, both for cash. She wasn’t legal to work in the US. She took English classes at the YMCA.
Jule told Lita she had a job as a personal trainer. That was what she’d done back in Florida, and Lita believed her. Jule had paid a month’s rent, cash, in advance. Lita didn’t ask for ID. Jule never spoke the name Julietta.
Some evenings, Lita’s friends were over, speaking Polish and smoking cigarettes. They made stewed meats and boiled potatoes in the kitchen. Those nights, Jule put on headphones and curled up on her bed, practicing her accents from tutorials online. Sometimes Lita stepped into Jule’s room with a bowl of stew and gave it over without saying anything.
Jule had arrived in New York by bus. After the boy and the blue slush, after the strappy heeled shoe and the blood on the sidewalk, after that boy had fallen, Julietta West Williams had disappeared from the state of Alabama. She’d left school, too. She was seventeen and didn’t have to finish her education. No law said she had to.
She might have been okay staying put. That boy did live, and he never said a word. But then, if she’d stayed in town, he might have spoken up. Or he might have retaliated.
Pensacola, Florida, was only a couple hundred miles away. Jule got hired to work for cash at a storefront gym in a strip mall. The owners didn’t ask their staff to be certified trainers. They jacked their boys up on steroids, and everything was less than legit.
Julietta put guys through workouts every day. Bouncers, thugs, bodyguards, even a few cops. She worked there six months and put on muscle. The boss owned a martial arts place a mile away, and he let her take classes there for free. Julietta rented a week-by-week motel room with a kitchenette. She bought a laptop and a phone, but other than that, she saved her money.
Lunch hours, she often walked a ways down the road to the shopping mall. It was a high-end place with fountains and flagship stores. Julietta read in the airy bookshop, window-shopped thousand-dollar dresses, and tried on makeup in the department store. She learned the names of the classiest brands. She reinvented herself with powders, creams, and glosses. Her face looked one way one day, another way another. She never spent a cent.
That was how she’d met Neil. Neil was a slim guy in a butter-colored leather jacket. Now and then he spent an afternoon hanging around the makeup counters, talking to girls. He wore custom Nikes and spoke with a Southern accent. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he had a white baby face with ruddy cheeks, sideburns, and a gold cross around his neck. The type of guy who was too loud in the movie theater and always bought a big popcorn.
“Neil what?” Julietta had asked.
“I don’t use my last name,” he answered. “It isn’t as pretty as me.”
Neil was in business. That was what he said when she asked what he was doing at the makeup counters: “I’m in business.”
She wondered where that phrase came from. Was it a Pensacola phrase, or from somewhere else?
She knew what he meant.
“You could earn a lot more than you do now, working for me. I’d treat you so nice,” Neil told her. It was the third day she’d talked to him. “What are you doing for money, pretty baby? I can see you’re not spending any.”
“Don’t call me pretty baby.”
“What? You’re gorgeous.”
“Do you seriously get girls to like you, calling them that?”
He shrugged and laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
“You got some stupid girls, then.”
“I have nice girls, that’s what I have. They would show you how it goes. The work ain’t hard.”
“Right.”
“You’d stay clean. You could get some pretty clothes. Sleep late every morning.”
Julietta had blown him off that day, but Neil had been back around the makeup counters a week later. That time, he asked so politely that she let him buy her a burrito from a fast-food place in the mall. They sat at a dinky table by a pool of water.
“Guys like women with muscles, you know,” Neil said. “Not everyone, but a lot of guys. Those types like to be bossed around. They want a girl built like you, who won’t let them call her pretty baby. Do you know what I mean? I can get you very good money from a certain type of guy. Very, very good money.”
“I’m not walking the streets,” she told him.
“It’s not the streets, newbie. It’s a group of apartments with a doorman and an elevator. Jacuzzi bathtubs. I’ve got a guard who patrols the hall, keeps everybody safe. Listen, you’ve got it tough right now. I can tell, ’cause I’ve been there. I came from nothing, and I worked like hell to get a better life. You’re a smart-mouth girl; a beautiful, unusual girl. You’ve got a bangin’ body that’s nonstop muscle, and I believe you deserve better than what you got going on. That’s all.”
Julietta listened.
He was saying what she felt. He understood her.
“Where you from, Julietta?”
“Alabama.”
“You sound like you’re from up north.”
“I lost my accent.”
“What?”
“I replaced it.”
“How?”
The guys at the gym where Julietta worked were old. They only wanted to talk about reps and miles, weights and dosages. And they were the only people she ever talked to. Neil, at least, was young. “When I was nine,” she told him, “one day I’d had—let’s call it a bad day. Teacher telling us to be quiet. Yelling at me to be quiet. ‘Shut up, little girl, you’ve said enough.’ ‘Stop, little girl, don’t hit, use your words’—and shut up at the same time. They squash you. They want you to be small and silent. Good was just another word for don’t fight back.”
Neil nodded. “I always got called out for being loud.”
“One day, no one came to pick me up at school. Just—nobody came. The people in the office called and called my house, but no one picked up. This after-school teacher called Miss Kayla, she drove me home. It was already dark out. I barely knew her. I got in her car because she had pretty hair. Yeah, stupid, to get in a stranger’s car, I know. But she was a teacher. She gave me a box of Tic Tacs. While she was driving, she talked and talked, to cheer me up, you know? And she was from Canad
a. I don’t know where in Canada, but she had an accent.”
Neil nodded.
“I started imitating her,” Julietta went on. “I was curious why she talked like that. She said gaz instead of gas. Aboot instead of about. That’s called Canadian rising, by the way. It’s a vowel shift. And I made Miss Kayla laugh, doing the accent. She told me I was a good mimic. Then we got to my house and she walked me to the door.”
“Then what?”
“Someone was home all that time.”
“Dang.”
“Yeah. She was watching TV. She hadn’t thought to come get me. Or she couldn’t. I don’t know. It was messed up, either way. She hadn’t bothered to pick up the stupid phone, all those times the school called. I pushed the door open and walked in. I said, ‘Where were you?’ and she said, ‘Be quiet, don’t you see I got the TV on?’ And I said, ‘Why didn’t you pick up the phone?’ and she said, ‘I told you to be quiet.’ Just another shut up and don’t fight back. So I got myself a bowl of dry cereal for dinner and watched the TV next to her. We had been watching for an hour or more when this idea hit me.”
“What?”
“TV gives you an education in how to talk. Newscasters, rich people, doctors on those medical dramas. None of them talked the way I did. But they all talked like each other.”
“I guess.”
“It’s true. I figured: learn to talk that way, and maybe you don’t get told to shut up so much.”
“You taught yourself?”
“I learned general American first. That’s the one on TV. But now I do Boston, Brooklyn, West Coast, Lowland Southern, Central Canadian, BBC English, Irish, Scottish, South African.”
“You want to be an actress. That it?”
Julietta shook her head. “I’ve got better things in mind.”
“World domination, then.”
“Something like that. I gotta figure it out.”
“You could definitely be an actress,” Neil said, grinning. “In fact, I bet you’ll be in the movies. A year from now I’ll be like, wow. That girl Julietta used to stand at the Chanel counter and cake on free makeup. That girl let me talk to her every now and then.”
“Thanks.”
“You need to get some nice clothes, Miss Julietta. You got to meet some big-money guys who’ll buy you jewelry and pretty dresses. Talking like the television is one thing, but right now, it’s all tracksuit, gym shoes, cheap-looking hair. You’ll never get anywhere like that.”
“I don’t want to sell what you’re selling.”
“Let me hear you talk Brooklyn,” said Neil.
“My lunch hour is over.” She stood up.
“Come on. Irish, then.”
“No.”
“Well, you ever want a better job than the one you got, here’s my number,” Neil said, pulling a card out of his pocket. The card was black and had a cell number in silver writing.
“I’m leaving now.”
Neil raised his Coke as if in a toast.
Julietta laughed as she walked away.
Neil made her feel pretty. He was a good listener.
The next morning she packed her bags and got on a bus to New York City. She was afraid of what she might become if she waited any longer.
Now Jule’s rent was due. She’d been eating supermarket ramen. She had only five bucks in her wallet.
No gym in New York City would hire an unlicensed trainer. She didn’t have a high school degree. She had no references because she’d ditched out on her first and only job. Gyms would pay the best, she’d figured, and she’d get a little saved and then look for something that would move her up in the world. Then, when none of them would hire her, she’d tried cosmetics counters, other retail jobs, nanny jobs, waiting tables, any opening listed. She’d been out looking every day, all day. There was nothing to show for it.
She stopped into the Joyful Food Mart below her apartment. It was busy inside. People getting off work bought boxes of pasta and cans of beans, or they played their numbers in the lottery. Jule bought a cup of vanilla pudding for a dollar and took a plastic spoon. She ate the pudding for dinner as she walked upstairs to the apartment she shared with Lita.
The apartment was dark. Jule was relieved. Lita had turned in early or was out late. In any case, Jule didn’t have to make excuses for not having the rent.
—
Next morning, Lita didn’t come out of her bedroom. Usually, she was up by seven on a Saturday to work her catering job. At eight, Jule knocked. “You okay?”
“I am dead,” Lita called through the door.
Jule peeked in. “You have work today, right?”
“At ten. But I’ve been throwing up all night long. I mixed my cocktails.”
“You need some water?”
Lita moaned.
“You want me to go to your job?” asked Jule, the idea dawning.
“I don’t think so,” said Lita. “Do you even know how to work catering?”
“Sure.”
“If I don’t show up, they’ll fire me,” said Lita.
“So let me go,” said Jule. “We’ll both come out good.”
Lita swung her legs off the edge of the bed and clutched the side table, looking queasy. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Really?”
“Just—tell them you’re me.”
“I look nothing like you.”
“Doesn’t matter. They got a new supervisor. He won’t know the difference. It’s a big operation. The important thing is, get my name checked off on the grid.”
“Got it.”
“And make sure the guy pays before you leave. Twenty an hour, cash, plus you’ll get tips.”
“I keep the money?”
“Half of it,” said Lita. “It’s my job, after all.”
“Three-quarters,” said Jule.
“Fine.” Lita checked her phone and wrote down the info on a piece of paper. “Greenbriar School on the Upper East Side. You have to get the bus to the train, and then change to the subway.”
“What’s the event?”
“Party for donors to the school.” Lita lay back down in the bed, moving as if she feared jostling her head. “I should not drink again, ever. Oh, you gotta wear a black dress.”
“I don’t have anything.”
Lita sighed. “Take one from my closet. They’ll give you an apron. No, not the one with the lace. That’s dry-clean. Take a cotton one.”
“I need shoes, too.”
“God, Jule.”
“Sorry.”
“Take the heels. You’ll get better tips.”
Jule squeezed her feet into the heels. They were too small, but she’d manage. “Thanks.”
“Bring half the tip money home to me, too,” said Lita. “Those are my good shoes.”
Jule had never worn a dress this nice. It was heavy cotton, a day dress with a square neck and a full skirt. She was surprised Lita had such a thing, but Lita said she got it for cheap at a resale shop.
Jule stepped onto the street in the dress and her running shoes, Lita’s heels in her bag. The smell of New York City in the heat of early summer floated in the thick air around her: garbage, poverty, ambition.
She decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. She could get the subway from the Manhattan side and wouldn’t have to transfer.
The sun sparkled as she set out. The stone towers loomed. Jule could see boats in the harbor, leaving trails through the water. Lady Liberty was strong and bright.
It was strange how someone else’s dress made her feel new. This sensation of being someone else, of changing into someone else, of being beautiful and young and crossing this famous bridge to something big—it was why Jule had come to New York.
She had never felt that possibility stretch out in front of her until this morning.
THIRD WEEK IN JUNE, 2017
CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO
A little more than a year later, in the Cabo Inn, at five a.m., Jule stumbled to the bathroom, splashed water on her
face, and lined her eyes. Why not? She liked makeup. She had time. She layered concealer and powder, added smoky shadow, then mascara and a nearly black lipstick with a gloss over it.
She rubbed gel into her hair and got dressed. Black jeans, boots, dark T-shirt. Warm for the Mexican heat, but practical. She packed her suitcase, drank a bottle of water, and stepped out the door.
—
Noa was sitting in the hallway, her back against the wall, holding a steaming cup of coffee between her hands.
Waiting.
—
The door clicked closed. Jule stepped back against it.
Damn.
She thought she was free, or nearly free. Now she had a fight in front of her.
Noa looked confident; relaxed, even. She remained sitting, with her knees up. Balancing that foam cup. “Imogen Sokoloff?” she said.
Wait. What?
Did Noa think she was Imogen?
Imogen, of course.
Noa had tried to win Jule over with Dickens. And a sick dad. And godforsaken cats. Because she knew all those things would lure Imogen Sokoloff into conversation.
“Noa!” Jule said, smiling, returning to the BBC English accent, her back against the door of her room. “Oh, wow, you surprised me. I can’t believe you’re here right now.”
“I want to talk to you about the disappearance of one Julietta West Williams,” Noa said. “D’you know a young woman by that name?”
“I beg your pardon?” Jule shifted her handbag so it went across her body and wouldn’t easily come off.
“You can cut the accent, Imogen,” said Noa, standing up slowly to keep her coffee from spilling. “We have reason to believe you’ve been using Julietta’s passport. The evidence points to you faking your own death in London a couple months ago, after which you transferred your money to her and took over her identity, possibly with Julietta’s cooperation. But now no one has seen her for weeks. She’s left zero footprint from shortly after the execution of your will until you started using credit cards under her name at the Playa Grande. Does that sound familiar? I wonder if I could have a look at your identification.”