Exit Stage Right

by Ashley Jenkins

Her name is Jericha—Jericha like Jericho, the city whose walls fell down. She is a big girl, round up top and on bottom like a tube of toothpaste that's been squeezed too many times in the middle. She is not tall, either; barely shoulder-high. She cannot find jeans that don't drag the floor or sag in the ass. But tonight, she is not wearing jeans. She is wearing strappy shoes that lace up her legs like a gladiator's boots, and lace underwear she got on sale at Target. Tonight, she is dancing to Latin music in a dirty bar on a seedy street in Pittsburgh, where a man she doesn't know is trying to slide his hand down the back of her skirt.

She spins with him anyway, subtly taking his wrist for the third time and moving it back up to the small of her back, where she can feel the sweaty heat of it against her shirt, like leaning against the side of a horse. He is Mexican, she thinks, from the accent—he is very clean, pressed into a white polo shirt, good jeans, slick shoes. By the next chorus, the next chant-through of Las morenas son muy buenas, she knows that his hand will be on its way down again, that its callused fingers will start stretching the waistband, and she decides she doesn't care enough to make a scene. Besides, he is a good dancer—his hips move against hers just the right way, and she doesn't feel like finding someone else.

Mimi, her only friend from the office, is spinning on the end of a man's hand across the floor. Jericha can spot Mimi's hair from anywhere she happens to be standing, the kind of red that looks like it's on fire any time the fanned-out strands whip past the glare of a stage light. Mimi is thin like a Prada shoe model with big feet. She loves to dance.


Two hours ago, Jericha's mother had called to tell her that her brother had been killed in Iraq. She didn't say how, or if she did, it was lost in the throaty sounds she was making between the sentences. Jericha had sat down on the arm of her couch to listen, had said only, okay, okay as if she was taking down instructions. Okay, mom. Okay.

She put the phone back in its cradle. Then she walked to her closet, threw on a second-skin tank top that showed the top halves of her breasts so that they were like two smooshed dodgeballs and a skirt she held onto but never actually wore because it didn't—and doesn't—properly cover her ass. She considered—and rejected—a pair of black stiletto pumps she uses for work, paired with dark slacks and a sweater that covers her up like a blanket. She opted instead for something metallic and shiny, with straps like tentacles. And then she walked down the street, over gravel and cracks in the sidewalk, over broken bottles that shine like pebbles at the bottom of a stream, until she finds just the right seedy bar, one that's blasting the right songs, the ones that sound like her favorite kind of college party, back when she went to parties.

She calls Mimi up from her cell phone as she leans against a telephone pole and dug around in her clutch to make sure she had enough cash for cover. Because she knows Mimi well enough to dance with her, but when they talk, it's still awkward, all who's cute at the office and what are you doing for the holidays. She won't ask her personal questions.

Jericha is not from Pittsburgh. She is from Preston County West Virginia—a poor place where everybody's brother is a Marine or an Army boy or a coal miner or a truck driver. But mostly, everybody's brother is a Marine, and in Iraq, not usually because they like their country, but because it pays good. Boys who aren't smart, or who don't get called smart, go into the Marines because that's a surefire way to make money, and it's how you make something of yourself. You can work down at Lowes forever, and hold your head up just because you could say you were in the Marine corps.

Jericha is not a boy. She was only supposed to be. The ultrasound said so. Her name was Jericho until the moment she was born, when the nurse cut her cord with a soft, "oh," and her father said, she was told later, "Well, damn."

But there are no fathers here tonight. Some of the men, she'll grant, are old enough to be her father—their hands are even roughed up the same way, like her dad's always were from working construction. She likes these men better than the greasy-headed boys in the bars up the street, though—she likes that they have a system for everything, that they ask her to dance by holding a hand out to her, palm up like a knight, and smiling with white, white teeth instead of latching onto her belt in the center of the dance floor and grinding like they have every right to her.

The man that she is dancing with leans in close—she doesn't recognize his cologne, and wonders why. She knows the scents of Stetson, Old Spice, Brut, even some of the frat-boy smells like Axe and Tommy Hilfiger, but this is different—and asks her where she's from.

Aqui, she says, Soy de aqui, though it isn't true. It's what she knows how to say. She doesn't know the words for a dying coal town a long way from here, or someplace where the bars still have jukeboxes and wooden stools. So when she is speaking her rough Spanish, she is always from wherever she happens to be at the time.

He asks her next, as she knows he will, whether her mother was Latina. Her father. A grandma. Jericha smiles like she doesn't understand, but she gets that a lot, she expects it. It's because she dances with her whole hips, not just a stiff little wiggle like the other white girls, it's because when she was trying to pay for college, she tended bar at a local dive where all the Mexicans came after a day's work on the road crews, and she'd learned to dance there, and she'd learned other things, too, like how you move a man's hand from your ass to your waist without getting one of you thrown out.

Sometimes, she jokes with them. Tells them she's a gringa just to watch them do the same shocked-laugh the motorcycle guys at the bar back home always gave her when she'd open a beer with her belt buckle. But tonight, she doesn't feel like talking . No entiendo, she says, I'm sorry. No hablo. I don't understand.


"Hey little sis," her brother says. He is twelve and shaggy-looking, skinny as the boys you see on t-shirt commercials. The sun is coming in behind him like honey into hot water. He tossed her his old catchers' mitt, butter soft in the middle. "Wanna toss a few with Jeremy and me?"

Jericha looks up from the couch. Her hair is in two braids that skim her shoulders. It makes her head look like a squash. She is watching Teddy Ruxpin and squeezing her teddy bear so hard that his head looks like a squash, too. "Really?" she asks.

"Sure," he says like it's nothing.

Jericha jumps up and leaves her teddy on the couch. She runs out the door to the muddy ups and downs of the back yard. Leaves stick to her shoes, already wet and squishy. She sways back and forth on the spot to show how ready she is, low to the ground and hungry for one of them to throw her the ball.

Jeremy is a freckly kid with red hair and skin like a mouse has when it's born. He looks at her like she's made of papeier mache and tosses the ball to her underhand. It floats in the air, slow as anything, and she has all the time in the world to get her glove under it.

Her fingers barely go all the way around the ball when she throws it to her brother. He catches it in his glove, cocks his arm back like the hammer on a gun, and he fires it back at her so hard it disappears.

Jericha holds her glove up anyway. She feels the impact in her shoulder, but it's almost not real. She takes the ball out of the glove with her right hand, then shakes the left once or twice, feeling the sting spread out through her palm.

"Holy crap, Ben," Jeremy says, "be careful already."

"It's fine," Ben says.

"You'll make her bawl and then we're gonna be in for it," Jeremy says.

"She's not gonna bawl," Ben says.

Jericha throws the ball at him so hard it makes a gun-sound in his glove. And he grins at her like their dad grinned at him when he hit a home run at the last game.

"Whoah," Jeremy says. And he means it, which is even better.


Jericha lies on her bed and stares at the soft lump of her belly, pokes it and leaves her finger in the depression it makes. Her mother, elbows deep in dish soap, has just told her that she's not buying her jeans any bigger than a size 12 —if she goes up to 14, she can buy them herself.

That would be fine with Jericha, but she doesn't have a job. And when she lies down, her skin presses up against the waistband of her jeans like a lump of dough presses against a loaf pan in the oven, and she thinks that she's going to start changing for gym in the bathroom stalls, and she thinks that no one will ever fall in love with her.

"Lemme in, Pud," Ben says from the hallway, and she tells him the door's open.

He is still skinny, scarecrow skinny in his first two years of high school, and she thinks it's funny how hard he tries to gain weight, four eggs for breakfast, two hours in the gym a day, and she thinks if they'd been switched, if Ben had been a girl, he'd have been one of those pretty spindly-leg girls who have ribcages like baby deer and collarbones shaped like clothes hangers, and she hates him for a minute.

Ben holds up a bag of Gummi bears and opens it with his teeth. They spill onto the comforter like jewels. "You gonna try out for softball this year?" he asks.

Jericha shrugs. "Dunno," she says.

"You're as good as anybody," Ben says.

"Do your friends think I'm fat?" Jericha asks.

Ben leaned back on his elbows and thought about it. "Don't know," he said. "Who cares anyway?"

Jericha picks up a gummy bear between her thumb and her first finger. She smooshes it slightly so that it's a shorter, rounder bear. She takes a second, and stretches it out so that it's very thin, and lays it beside the first. "Look," she says.

"Pud," he says, "You try out for softball, or I'm gonna kick your ass."

She says, "Okay," and bites the tall bear's head off. She smiles at him with the little green bear head between her front teeth.


Ben calls her from Iraq one time in the years he's over there, and it's awkward—his voice is too deep over the phone, like he's speaking to her through time, like he's thirty now, far away, with kids and a family and a life.

Jericha doesn't know what to say to him over the phone except a lot of yes, yes's, and yeah, everything's fine, and no, she didn't go out for softball this year.

The night before, Jeremy drove her home from school and, between there and home, he stuck his hand between her legs, stuck his fingers in her and made crooking motions like he was telling her to come here, all while he was driving, asking her how Ben was doing in the Marines, asking her how school was, if she liked it.

He took his hand out of her lap when they rounded her family's mail box, put it back on the gear shift as he had to downshift to make the turn. There were little wet smears over the numbers.

When they pulled up to the house, he didn't get out of the truck and open her door for her. He just gave her a little grin and said, "You're a tough kid, Jeri," and she felt like she'd been inducted into something, somehow, without knowing what it was.

And there isn't a thing wrong with her—she got wet like she was supposed to—but she feels funny today, like she wore a tampon too long, and she isn't sure it was everything it was supposed to be. She almost wants to tell him about it, ask him what girls are supposed do when you feel them up like that, if it's really supposed to feel like a weird kind of handshake.

Instead, she promises to send him Gummi bears.


Sure enough, by the next chorus, she can feel it again, those fingers dipping down into the waistband of her skirt. This time, she doesn't grab his wrist. She rests her forehead against his shoulder, curls her left hand up behind his neck and lets her right hand hang down by her hips. If he wants her hand again, he will put his left hand behind her arm, slide it down the back past her elbow, and take her by her wrist as if she is his woman, as if he's going to lead her somewhere.

As the song ends, he whispers in her ear, asks her if she needs anything, and she says yes.

Mimi catches her eyes across the room and mouths at her something with three syllables, something that pulls her mouth wide in the middle—be careful, Jericha thinks, or just one more, but that doesn't matter by now. She lets the man she doesn't know lead her to the bar, buy her a drink. It fizzes up in the glass, white and soft like her belly against a pair of jeans, like popcorn in a white case at the stand by the dugouts.

The man says something else to her—she doesn't recognize most of the words, just pretty and a word that could be sad, or could be glass. She smiles and pretends that she understands. Because she does need something, even if it isn't the beer he buys her, or the dark corner they'll stand in while she drinks it.

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