Revenge of the Cootie Girls by Sparkle Hayter Page A

Julie’s ear before he went to the men’s room, and when Billy tried to get up, Julie pulled him down, put her arm through his, and said, “Don’t desert us!” We held him there, laughing. We thought it was a big game.
    Of course, I couldn’t tell then that either or both of them were gay. I didn’t know the Village People were gay stereotypes until I had been living in New York for about six months and one of my college friends told me, that’s how naïve I was.
    Wait for contact, said the typed “clue.” Contact would be helpful, since I hadn’t a clue where to go next. I remembered a lot of things we did on that trip, but I didn’t remember exactly when we did them. Time and geography blend together after the passage of years. Even my ex, Burke, and his fiancée, Gwen, after knowing each other just under a year, confused their memories of shared events. At dinner in L.A., they told a story about their European vacation and had to keep referring to each other during their joint storytelling—“What day did we get stuck behind the long line of turnip trucks?” “In Slovakia, after we took that wrong turn?” “Yeah.” “Monday, Tuesday, the same day we lost the muffler on the Skoda.” “No no, we lost the muffler in Prague.…”
    Another reason I didn’t remember that evening as clearly as I should, aside from the passage of time and all the wine spritzers, was that I was so self-conscious, so focused on not giving myself away in the face of all our big old lies, that I didn’t pay attention to a lot of other stuff going on.
    Where the hell did we go next? I remembered Julie and George whooping it up on Bleecker Street and Julie asserting at the top of her lungs that she wasn’t tired. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she said, her motto du jour. This was, after all, the city that never sleeps, and we were young. George put his arm around Julie and they giggled, while the morose Billy and I walked behind them in silence. Shortly after, as I recalled, some friends of George and Billy’s arrived and Billy left with them, while George, Julie, and I continued on.
    Next … next. I wracked my brain. Was it the … the Staten Island Ferry? Yeah, we’d taken the ferry for the ride past the Statue of Liberty at 3 A.M. There were hardly any people aboard, and we drank coffee out of paper cups with one of the ferry engineers, who showed us pictures from his last vacation at a nudist colony.
    No, that was the night I went out with Ricardo, a disco promoter I met in the hotel lobby, and Julie went out alone with George. Ricardo was back in his hometown for the big disco convention. Though Julie was anxious about him—“He’s Puerto Rican or black or something, you don’t even know him”—I took up his offer to go out because he’d made me laugh in the lobby and seemed like a nice guy … and I was sick of hanging around with Julie and George, who only had eyes for each other. Ricardo took me to eat at a Brooklyn diner called the Blue Bird Diner, then we went back to Manhattan to a disco in Spanish Harlem. I was the whitest person there, which was strange for me, coming from a pigmentless part of the nation, but nobody made it a problem for me, even though I was with a dark-skinned man. Au contraire . Everyone was really friendly. Anyway, we ended the night on the Staten Island Ferry. That was my third or fourth night in New York.
    If only we hadn’t had so much to drink that second night …
    â€œAre you Robin Hudson?”
    I looked up. A woman in a green wig and Groucho-nose glasses was looking down at me. It wasn’t Kathy.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAre you looking for Kathy?” she said, with a heavy New York accent.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œCome with me,” she said.
    Contact.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I said.
    â€œUp to the corner of