No, I’m a Whore! by Meghan Louise Wagner

No, I’m a Whore!

Kelsey was in the back-parking lot when Gabe pulled up in his red Chevy. Get in, he said, and don’t tell anyone. She’d just gotten home from her job scooping ice cream at Sweet Sixties. She did as he said and shut the passenger door. We were nineteen years old and this was our first time living anywhere on our own. Gabe was in his mid-thirties. I wouldn’t have been able to do what Kelsey did with a straight face.
    Gabe drove out of the apartment complex onto Clifton Blvd. and parked at the twenty-four-hour CVS across the street. Kelsey said she just sat there and waited for him to murder her or something but then he started crying. Read this, he told her and opened the glove box. There was a letter written in loopy, bubble-gum pink ink from his live-in girlfriend, Berry. For the last month, Berry had been having an affair with a guy who worked the drive through at Taco Bell. This guy (who’s name Kelsey didn’t remember) was a real man and said Berry had nice boobs and that made her feel real sexy.
    She wrote that to Gabe? I asked. No, Kelsey said, the letter was written to the Taco Bell guy. Gabe found it in Berry’s car.
    I wished I would have been the one Gabe whisked away in his ’96 Beretta. If I had been there, I would have remembered more details. But people liked Kelsey more than me. I probably would have said something that made Gabe want to put a plastic bag over his head. Kelsey comforted him in front of CVS and then they went to Taco Bell. There was an old woman working the drive through so they just ordered Mountain Dew and soft tacos. They ate them in the parking lot and Gabe cried some more.
    Kelsey told me the whole story when she got home. We stayed up listening to the shared wall between our apartment and Gabe’s, waiting for a fight that never came. In the morning, I saw Berry on the elevator with a circular hamper of dirty laundry and wireless headphones on her ears. Her naturally blond hair was dyed purple. She wore skull and crossbones patterned shorts that rode up between her floppy thighs. She was probably the same age as Gabe but looked older. She didn’t say hi to me.
    Things went back to normal with Gabe and Berry. On Halloween, they knocked at our door, dressed in their usual black clothes and inky black makeup, and said they were going to a costume contest. They wanted us to guess what they were.
    Goth kids? I said.
    Berry laughed. No, she said, I’m a whore!
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Gabe and Berry had weird pets. A big gray parrot that talked. A skunk that had been fixed so it didn’t spray. Gabe made a living buying Star Wars posters and toys from flea markets and selling them to people on the internet. Neither of us knew what Berry did.
    He developed a specific knock when he came to our apartment in the middle of the day. It went rat-a-tap-tap-tap. Me and Kelsey knew it well. Sometimes he just needed a cup of sugar or coffee. Sometimes he’d catch me before I went out for a jog and would ask me to buy a couple packs of cigarettes for him. He let me keep the change but I always felt stupid walking up to the window at the Shell Station and asking for Basic Lights in my track team shorts and tank top, a sweaty twenty-dollar bill between my fingers.
    One day, on my way to a job interview at the college library, I was dressed in a red plaid skirt and black turtleneck. Gabe heard me in the hallway and opened the door. That dumb bird sat on his shoulder. He whistled at me and said, going on a date? The bird squawked but didn’t say anything. No, I said, a job interview. He shook his head and rubbed the parrot’s feathers. I can’t imagine any guy saying no to you, he said to me. I’m going to an interview, I reminded him.
     He thought we liked his pets so he brought them over for visits. Once, when I was in the shower, he came over with the skunk. Kelsey said he tried to talk her into opening the bathroom door and launching the skunk right through the shower curtain. Gabe said, wouldn’t it be funny if Mary came out screaming?
     Please, I said to her, don’t let him into the apartment when I’m in the shower anymore.
   There were two cute college guys who lived in the apartment directly below us. Aaron and Ben. The first time we met them, they accidentally walked right into our apartment on a Saturday afternoon, their arms filled with blue plastic grocery bags. Me and Kelsey paused, shocked. They looked at us, and our apartment, the same. Then they laughed and explained that they must have gotten off on the wrong floor. We giggled and said they could accidentally knock on our door anytime. Wink-wink.
    The next weekend, Ben came up and knocked. They were having people over downstairs and invited us to hang out. Kelsey liked Aaron and I liked Ben so we went. Their place was filled with a bunch of other guys, none of whom were as cute as them. They were all on the wrestling team together. We drank a little and one of their friends, this wiry guy with sunken eyes and cheekbones that popped out of his face like elbows, kept trying to rub my inner thigh on the couch. I left my drink and bolted. Kelsey met me in the stairwell, panting, and said that Elbow-face was rubbing her crotch, too.
    Later that night, Aaron and Ben showed up with a bottle of cherry-vanilla vodka and said they were sorry about their friend. We let them in and made drinks. Ben sat next to me on our sofa, right against the wall we shared with Gabe and Berry. Kelsey gave Aaron a tour of the apartment, stopping to explain the process behind the collages she made out of old National Geographic magazines and Amazon Prime boxes.
    After a few drinks, we were all drunk, and Ben showed me some wrestling moves. It was funny at first but then he pressed me against the sofa and kept me pinned so I couldn’t move at all.  Kelsey told Aaron to make him stop but he just laughed and said we were joking around. It was obvious Ben was just joking, he said. I told her it was okay, even though it wasn’t.
    She darted out the door and a few moments later she was back with Gabe, who was dressed in a ratty Batman tank top and gray striped boxer shorts. Tufts of curly black and silver hair poked out from his chest. He grabbed Ben, yanked him off me in one swift motion, and then grabbed Aaron by the collar. He dragged the two of them out of our apartment, down the hall, and then down the stairs. From the third floor, we heard him say, if you shitheads ever bother those girls again, I’ll just call the cops, okay? Got it?
    Gabe came back and we let him in. The three of us finished the bottle of cherry-vanilla vodka together. Once we were out, Gabe ran over to his apartment and grabbed a box of Chardonnay he had in the fridge for a while. It tasted like sour grape juice. Kelsey held the box to her chest and said she wanted to make a collage out of it when we were done.
    Close to five a.m., we heard a series of thumps. Kelsey rushed to the window and said, looks like someone’s throwing their clothes on the lawn. Then I looked up and saw the big gray parrot out on our ledge, staring at us dumbly. Gabe leapt from the couch and ran to the hallway. Berry was tossing all his clothes and Star Wars shit out. The skunk made a break for it down the fire escape and then scampered over a pile of plastic covered Boba Fett figurines and light-saber cases. Its black and white striped tail flickered in the moonlight and then it disappeared into the shadowed parking lot.
    Have fun with them whores, Berry said.
    I looked at Kelsey but she was looking at Gabe, her eyes misting over with sympathy. I turned back to the window and saw the bird tip its black beak at me. It squawked like it always did, but this time, it seemed to make actual words. I walked closer and opened the window on the other side of it. Through the screen, I felt a clammy breeze and heard the parrot.
    Whore, it said. Whore, whore, whore.
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Meghan Louise Wagner is a fiction writer and professional chef from Cleveland, OH. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Umbrella Factory Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Literally Stories. 

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