Later that week, when I saw Ruby’s husband come to pick her up, I watched him for a while as he waited at the bar. He looked like a nice enough guy to me, rough hands, five o’clock shadow, and a denim jacket stained with black oil at the cuffs and rolled up over thick forearms. He ordered two whiskey neats and sat there patiently, not even glancing up at the girls in pasties and g-strings parading past him. When she was finished with her shift, Ruby sat down beside him for a while, drank her whiskey, and cried. I didn’t know why.

I remember the first time I told someone I’d taken a job as a dancer in East Cleveland. It was a low-key party my ex-roommate from college asked me to go to with her, telling me there was a guy there from one of her Psych classes she was hoping to talk to. I didn’t have anything better to do. They hadn’t started scheduling me for Saturdays yet, so I went, thinking that if nothing else, it would be a good distraction from the new bills piling up, and maybe someone would bring some good weed. Sure enough, it wasn’t hard to find a guy who was holding, and we went out on the fire escape so we wouldn’t stink up the place.

“What’s your major?” he said to me, and I knew then that he was a child.

I told him I was taking some time off school to figure out what I wanted. I said I might not ever go back but wanted to keep my options open. I told him about Diamonds and how good it felt to just live in my skin for once instead of constantly feeling this pressure to become someone I didn’t even know I wanted to be.

The kid took a bong hit, and with a slow, croaking voice, he told me I’d probably get addicted to coke and start fucking the club owner. I wanted to smack the bong out of his soft little boy hands. I didn’t, and instead I stayed and finished smoking. Later, when he put those clumsy boy hands on me and tried to kiss me, I shoved him away and laughed. This wasn’t my world anymore, and I didn’t want it.

But fitting into my new world wasn’t exactly a breeze either. About a month after I’d seen Ruby with Vic in the back, a week since she’d been crying at the bar, something messed up happened while I was doing a private dance for a guy in the VIP lounge.

VIP is where we take customers who want something up close and personal. It’s a little enclave on the second floor decked out with velvet curtains, plush couches, even a few beds if that’s the scene you’re into. It’s a nice enough space when the lights are off, but flip a switch and you start to see the stains and frayed edges. Just like us dancers, we’re better when we’re airbrushed and perfect. That way, you don’t have to look your fantasy in its untouched face and realize it’s got black heads and crippling student loan debt.

Now, usually I do about a dozen private dances on a good night, five on a slow one. I’m not the most popular but I do get my fair share of admirers. Tonight though, I was on fire for some reason. There was a bachelor party at Diamonds, and they were getting rowdy, ordering round after round of drinks for themselves and the girls they liked. I was already on my third vodka cran when Lara set another one on the table between me and the guy in the polo shirt I’d been talking to. She looked at me and gave an almost imperceptible nod. I nodded back, the universal signal that I was ok, and she left. I finished the last of the one in front of me and started in on my fourth.

“My buddy’s getting married tomorrow,” the guy in the polo shirt slurred. “Think you’re just his type.”

“You want to buy him a dance?” I said to him.

“Maybe one for me first,” he said. “Got to sample the goods.”

I took him by the hand and led him upstairs. There was always a bouncer on duty outside VIP, though usually you never noticed them. They kept their eyes down, politely pretending they weren’t listening for any sign of real trouble. Tonight, the guy minding the scene was Vic. He pulled back the velvet rope without looking at us and let us in.

I tried to steer him towards one of the couches, but he pushed me to the bed. I laughed, trying to make like I didn’t care, like I’d been here a million times before. He sat back, and I crawled over him, trying to move and look sexy without touching him, all the while ignoring his hands as they moved up my thighs, towards my ass and across my stomach. He had a silver band on his ring finger I hadn’t noticed before, but now it glistened in the neon pink and purple light as he cupped my breast. There was no touching in VIP. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“How much?” he said as he tried to pull me down on top of him.

“Huh? No, it’s not like that,” I tried to say, all the while trying to gently push away his pawing hands. “We don’t-”

“C’mon, it’ll be quick. I’ll give you two hundred. Three hundred. Just tell me.”

“No!” I said louder this time, but he flipped me onto my back and pressed a hand over my mouth.

What came next was almost too quick for me to be sure of how it really happened. I was disoriented, the lights were shining in my eyes, and maybe I’d had one too many of the watered-down vodka crans Lara made me, but over the guy’s shoulder, I saw… Well, I’m still not exactly sure what I saw.

It was a black shadow, more a shape than a man. It was standing over us, watching with eyes that could see for a thousand years. It was tall with sinuous limbs and a face like something that had died and come back across miles of Hellish wasteland to find me. It looked at me, and for the second time since Vic had locked eyes with me in that dressing room a month back, I had the unsettling feeling that something in the dark had taken notice of me.

I wanted to scream, but my mouth was covered, and before I could even whimper, the guy on top of me was torn away and flung across the room. I heard the sound of his scream, the crack of bone as he hit the wall, and then a low moan as he tried to pick himself up off the floor. For a moment, I was paralyzed, certain that the thing that had done this was coming back for me next. But nothing happened, and after a while, I sat up. I was just in time to see Vic standing there with one of the bigger bouncers, a broad chested guy named Clive, both of them looking down at the slithering pile of scum that had been my customer. He was huddled against the wall clutching an arm that appeared to bend at an odd angle from the elbow, and he was crying.

“You, uh… You fucked up his arm,” said Clive.

Vic shrugged. “Found him like that.”

Clive looked down at the sniveling thing on the ground between them and sighed. “Well?” he said to the man in the polo shirt. “That what happened?”

The man on the floor looked up to Vic, and I could see in his face that he had seen what I had. “Whatever you say,” he said weakly. “Just… Just let me go. Please.”

Clive rolled his eyes like he’d seen it all before, picked the guy up off the floor, and shoved him towards the exit.

When they were gone, Vic looked to me with those dead eyes of his, and he handed me a little bag of powder like what I’d seen Ruby snorting off the back of the toilet.

“Try this,” he said. “It’ll help.”

“Help me what?” I said, my head still reeling from the shock of it all.

“Deal,” he said. “With them. With this.”

“Thanks,” I told him. “But, you don’t want me to pay you with… Do you?” I looked at the bed behind me, and Vic looked horrified.

“Jesus, no,” he said. “Just pay me something from your tips if you want. Fuck. Chill out.”

I managed not to cry until he left, and then I felt a little like Ruby must have, only I didn’t have a nice husband to buy me a whiskey neat. I looked down at the little bag of powder, thought of Jeremy, thought of Ruby, and then thought about that ringed hand cupping my breast, the other one covering my mouth to keep me from screaming. Maybe I could use a little something to take the edge off. Just this once.

The medicine worked just like Vic said it would, and before long, I was floating on my own silver cloud over the club and above the bed in VIP. I was able to put the whole thing out of my head for a while and just think about how nice it was to move my body, to see the men in front of me stare in awe at my young flesh. I felt like a princess, a goddess, a queen. All together, I did about ten more private dances that night, twenty in total, but I stayed away from that fucking bachelor party. Those guys could eat a round of fat dicks.

Eventually, 3 AM came around and it was time to close up and go home. All of the other girls had already left or were in the dressing room getting changed into their streetwear. Vic and Clive were busy walking them out to their cars while Lara cleaned up the bar. Everyone was ready to go home, but I was up like a live wire. I was still on stage, climbing to the top of the pole and spinning acrobatically down to the base where I landed in a perfect split each time. On a good night, I was a fucking brilliant dancer. Years of gymnastics and ballet classes had seen to that. But tonight I was alive in my body like I’d never been before. My nerves sparked and fired like circuits in a perfect machine. Did dancing always feel this good for Ruby?

After a while, Lara came over to the stage and waited for me to finish a move called the Gemini which involved hanging upside down, your arms spread while you extended a leg out and crossed the other over the pole to keep in place. I knew it looked fucking sick as hell, so I held it and floated six feet above the stage, waiting and waiting for my limbs to grow tired, but they never did.

“Hey! What’s going on?” I said to her without dropping the pose.

“What’s going on is the club’s closing. You ready to go home?” she said to me. I noticed then that her arms were crossed and she was scowling just a little bit.

“Oh. Right,” I said, and I let myself slide down slowly.

“Shit. Vicky! Vicky, what the fuck man?” I heard her shout across the club. I landed in a sort of balletic pretzel at the base of the pole and looked up to see Vic standing beside her, watching.

“What. What is it?” he said as he looked to Lara and then back to me. I don’t know why, but suddenly, I liked the feeling of those dead eyes glued to me. I wanted to keep dancing, and I wanted him to keep watching.

“What the fuck did you give her, Vic? You know she’s just a kid.”

“I gave her the same shit as you,” he said. “And she’s not a kid. She’s just-”

“A lightweight. What the fuck man. I can’t drive her home. I got a date with Lily,” said Lara.

“Shit. Shit, I got a thing too,” said Vic.

“Where’s Clive?”

“Already left,” said Vic. “Fuck.”

As I watched them argue over me, the high began to fade. Suddenly, I remembered the events from earlier in the evening, the glint of the ring, the feeling of helplessness as someone tried to take something precious from me. I felt like a kid. I felt small.

“This is your mess,” Lara said to Vic. “Fix it.”

She walked away, and Vic looked at me a little differently than he had before. This time there was pity, embarrassment, and just a hint of irritation behind that deadpan stare.

“Get your stuff,” he said to me. “I’m going to drive you home.”

The thing that no one ever explains to you about being a girl is that there’s all these extra rules you have to follow. Growing up, I heard the same shit they always tell you these days: you can be anything, you can do anything, nothing’s holding us back anymore, and if you put your mind to it, it’s all possible. “You can be a doctor, Andrea. A lawyer, an engineer like your father. God knows your lazy brother won’t do it, but you could. You’re smart, Andrea. Use it.” My mom told me that when I was thirteen, and I almost believed it. But even then, I knew that something about me was different than my twin brother in the eyes of the world. I was still a kid, but already, people were teaching me how to protect myself, how to keep men from seeing me so that they wouldn’t try to steal what didn’t belong to them. I was a person, but I was a possession as well. At least, that’s how half the population saw it. And there was nothing to be done about that except to keep yourself safe from them. It wasn’t fair. It isn’t fair. But that’s the world we live in, and you can’t be a dumbass about it.

Vic’s car was a piece of shit, and it smelled like fast food grease and the cheap pine scented air freshener that dangled from the rear-view mirror. I sat in the passenger seat and waited for him to lock up and finish a smoke with Lara while I watched the snowflakes fall and melt against the wet asphalt outside. He’d left the heat on for me, so it was warm, but the stiff springs in the seat were starting to dig into me and my muscles were beginning to ache. I was coming down. The party was ending.

“Ok,” he said as climbed in beside me and flipped on the radio. “Where we headed?”

“The apartments on Edgewater,” I told him. “The ones by the pier.”

“Ooh, fancy,” he said as he pulled the car out onto the road. “If I get pulled over, I’m your chauffeur, ok Madam?”

“Sure Jeeves,” I played along. “Whatever you want.”

We didn’t talk for most of the drive, and I leaned my head against the cold glass window beside me. A dull ache had started to pulse in my temples, and I listened to the sound of the radio. It seemed like it was stuck between stations. The noise was mostly static with a few voices spouting a single word or syllable every now and then. It reminded me of ghosts reaching out from the FM, desperate to communicate something, anything, to the rest of the still breathing world on this side of eternity. After a few minutes, it started to get to me. I thought about asking him to change the station, but I never did.

Later, he’d tell me that he liked the way it filled his head like white noise, blocking out all the little distractions. I pointed out that white noise wasn’t supposed to be speckled with human voices, snatches of commercial jingles and chart-topping songs. Then his eyes would go dead again, and he’d look away from me. “No,” he’d say with a current of tragedy buried beneath that monotone. “There’s worse things than that if you listen good enough.”

Vic was always saying weird stuff like that. Jeremy used to say that you never really know what its like inside someone else’s head. I always though that was bullshit coming from him. As kids we were inseparable, finishing each other’s thoughts and knowing exactly what the other was doing, even if we were all the way in different corners of our big house in Strongsville. But I guess I was wrong about Jeremy, wasn’t I? Maybe everything Vic said about himself was true. Maybe he really was cursed.

Vic pulled into a fast-food taco place and ordered from the drive through menu without asking me what I wanted. A Nacho Grande and large Mountain Dew. They handed him the food through the window and he shoved the greasy bag towards me.

“Here,” he said as I took the bag from him. “The cure for what ails you. Or what’s going to ail you. You’re going to want to sleep in tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I said. I peered into the bag and the smell of the salt and fat and starch all hit me at once, sending pangs of hunger from my gut to my brain. “Don’t think I can though. I got yoga.”

“Yoga? You can’t skip that shit?” he said. “Seems to me you’re already plenty flexible.”

“I appreciate it, but no. I’m kind of the teacher,” I explained, and I closed the bag to eat it later. “It’s an intro class, and they give me a discount on the advanced ones if I… Sorry. You don’t give a shit, do you?”

“No,” he said bluntly. “But that sounds like a racket. You should get paid.”

“Yeah, I should,” I agreed. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have to get groped by strangers for a living.”

For a second, Vic looked at me like he was going to say something. But then, he lit a cigarette, cracked a window, and he pulled the car back out onto the road.

I don’t know why I did what I did next. Maybe I didn’t like the way that Lara called me a kid, a lightweight. Maybe I didn’t want to be seen as a naïve girl pretending to fit into a world she didn’t belong in. Or maybe I just liked the way that Vic looked at me most of the time, without pity or worry, just… emptiness. It was the same empty stare that he surveyed the rest of the grim world with. Sure, I was perched a little higher than some, but to him, I was just another fallen angel.

He pulled into the carport of my apartment building and stopped in front of the door to the lobby.

“Hey. You uh… You want to come inside?” I asked him nervously.

Vic looked about as startled by this as I’d ever seen him, but the expression faded quickly to something cold. I felt then like he was sizing me up, trying to perform some complex math in his head before he gave me an answer. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and ashed it outside the window.

“Nah. Some other time. You got yoga in the morning.”

“Right. And you got a thing,” I said, doing my best to hide my embarrassment.

“Yeah, hey,” he said as I reached for the door handle. “Before you go, you uh, you mind if I give you some advice? For free?”

“What?” I said a little more stridently than I meant to. Everyone loves to give young girls advice. Like they have any fucking clue.

“Don’t fuck around with guys like that. Let Ruby or Star deal with them. You’re… Top shelf. You don’t have to do that shit.”

“Yeah, well, my bank account says different,” I said.

“Fuck your bank,” said Vic. “I’ve seen you dance, Andi. You’re a fucking showstopper. You aught to be writing your own checks, you understand? Tell the boss you want more money. Tell him you’ll do more pole work, pose for the calendar, bring ‘em in so the other girls can suck them off in the back or whatever. You’re the one that gets them in the door, ok? You don’t do the dirty work. ‘Less you want to. Then it’s your own goddam business.”

For a few seconds, I didn’t know what to say to him. I was stunned to learn that not only did he know my name, but he’d seen me dance. And he called me ‘a showstopper.’

“Thanks,” I said quickly, and I jumped out of the car before he could see the stupid smile spreading across my tired face.