Things happen for a reason. That’s what my mom used to tell me, and it’s what I always believed. But I don’t know anymore. I’ve had a hard time buying into that lately. I’m in the graveyard now, and they’re lowering the coffin into that black hole carved into the snow-covered earth. It’s cold for March, and my breath keeps turning to clouds of frozen vapor. It makes me think of smoke drifting up from a slowly smoldering fire. I don’t feel my tears until they’ve frozen, burning hot against my cheeks. Mom won’t even look at me during the service. Dad does, but each time I catch him, he looks away and rubs his eyes like he’s was ashamed, embarrassed.

The priest starts talking as they start shoveling dirt over the body, but I don’t think anyone is really listening. He says the same things he always does about Jesus and his love and everlasting life. It’s bullshit. It’s always been bullshit, but we listen to it because our parents did, and they’re parents before them. Now though, it all seems so fucking trite.

I’m tired, way more tired than I should be. I pull my jacket tighter around myself and my hand lingers, just for a second, over my stomach. I feel sick. I wish Vic were there with me, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t have it. When they think I’m not listening, they call him a word in Tagalog I can’t pronounce, but I know it means scum, low-life, blood-sucker. Maybe they’re right.

I realized some time ago that my life with him was changing me, making me harder, colder, maybe a little bit more like a cat than a mouse. When I was a kid, I had a Siamese mix named Baily who would sometimes bring us the birds and mice she caught. My brother Jeremy told me they do that because they feel bad for you. They think you’re this helpless kitten who doesn’t know how to hunt. They think you’re going to starve to death, because there’s just no other way. That’s what it sometimes felt like with Vic when he was nice.

When I first saw him, I thought he was a ghost. He had this way of standing so still he seemed like he might dissolve and vanish into the walls like he was just a smeared grease stain, a mark that over time would dry up and disappear, leaving nothing but a memory. We were practicing, warming up for a busy night, and I was cleaning the pole after my set. A pretty, bottle-blonde who goes by the stage name Ruby, walked over to him sitting at a table near the bar. I swear, I’d thought the place was empty, but when Ruby sat down, she was not alone.

I watched her say something to him and gesture with her hands. The light glinted off her sparkling red manicure like claws, and Vic nodded. He slid something across the table to her, and she took it, smiled, and left. For some reason, I decided to follow her.

I found Ruby in the dressing room toilets snorting something from the back of a commode in an open stall. She looked up when she saw me, glassy eyed and grinning.

“You want some?” she drawled as her blond hair fell over her face and almost dipped into the stinking water inside the bowl.

I shook my head no, but I asked her who the man was who gave it to her.

“That’s Vic,” she said with a slow, dreamy smile like she was drifting a thousand miles over the toilet, floating on a cotton cloud spun with silver and gold in a sapphire sky. “He’ll get you what you want.”

A few weeks later, I stayed late chatting to Lara while she cleaned up the bar. She was one of the few people at Club Diamond who didn’t make me feel a little depressed or scummy when I talked to her. She told me about how an old friend of hers from high school got her this job after she dropped out of an English program at the University of Akron. Said her family was furious at first, but then they came around. They think she works at a restaurant, a brewery or something on West 6th. I told her it’s the same for me, only I was premed, and my parents don’t know I dropped out yet. I wouldn’t tell them until months later, after I moved in with Vic and my old roommate called them trying to track me down after my subletter split.

When it was time to go, I headed back to the dressing room. I stopped when I heard the sounds, but it was too late.

You ever see something that makes you a little different, something so mundane but so grounded in the grimy filth of this world that it catches you off your guard? These kinds of moments, they take something from you, don’t they? They puncture you like a needle. You don’t even feel it at first, but it sticks with you and drains you slowly... I hadn’t felt that way since the first time I caught Jeremy using.

We were sixteen and out parents were out of town for a work thing, some conference my dad’s engineering firm wanted him to attend. Jeremy had been locked in his room all day, blasting some shitty jock rock like Papa Roach or Staind or whatever. I didn’t think anything of it until seven o’clock rolled around and I hadn’t seen him once all day, not even to eat. I threw some leftovers onto a plate, abodo, rice, and a little lasagna, and brought it to him. I dropped the plate straight on the floor when I saw him there beside the bed. Mom was pissed when she found the tomato sauce stain all ground in and dried on the carpet when they came home. We didn’t tell them how I dragged Jeremy to the bathroom and ran the cold shower water over him, how I cried and cried ‘til he started talking, and he promised never to do it again. Before that, something that ugly was just a story, a grim and gritty parable people told you to keep you from venturing too far off a path they’d laid out for you. Afterwards though, you can see through the trees lining the narrow way forward. You can see how close all of the ugliness really is to you, and it’s hard not to think about it.

That night, in the back room of Club Diamond, I saw Ruby and Vic and felt that familiar sting of naivety bursting like an iridescent bubble inside me. There’s always a cost for floating on clouds spun from silver, isn’t there?

Ruby made a noise like an animal when she saw me. Her eyes had that same glassy shine to them, but she wasn’t smiling. She was bent over the back of a ratty sofa, and Vic was behind her, his face vacant and dead like the first time I’d seen him. He looked at me, and if I’d had a plate, I would have dropped it.

Now, I wasn’t stupid or a prude or anything like that. I was nineteen years old and well acquainted with the idea of casual sex. I’d lost my virginity at seventeen to a boy I didn’t like very much, but I’d let him do it anyway just to have it done with. I saw him a few times after that and let him take me to prom just to make my parents happy. He was, after all, a nice young man with a nice family. During the year I spent in college, I went to a lot of parties, hooked up with a few different guys and tried some things my mom would say would make Jesus cry. The point is, I didn’t care at all what two consenting adults did when they thought no one was around to see. It’s just that this felt so… transactional. And unclean.

Maybe what made it so strange to me was that I’d come to know Ruby over the last few weeks. Sometimes, when the club was dead, we’d sit at the bar together and talk. She always seemed to know all the gossip, which dancers were sleeping together, who was the owner’s favorite, and once, through the closed door of a bathroom stall, how to fix myself so I could still dance on the rag. She was nice, even if she did start to slur her words a bit after midnight. It didn’t seem to affect her dancing, and none of her customers minded at all. Ruby had taken it upon herself to show me the ropes, and I’d come to think of her almost like a big sister. So it was a little jarring to see her like that with Vic, the two of them rutting like stray dogs in the dressing room.

I grabbed my coat and ran out past Lara without saying goodbye. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her face, and I think she knew. I had stumbled onto one of the club’s filthy secrets kept in plain sight. It was the first of many, I’d discover. That night, I’d wonder if I should call this whole thing a misadventure and just go back to school, back to studying, back to living the same boring life that everyone had already decided I should live. But I was already well off that narrow path. The creatures living amongst the forest in its peripherals had already caught my scent. They had seen me, and they had decided I was one of theirs. It was too late to go back now.