The coconut baby powder alcohol sweat musk of The Caribou affronted Michelle like never before.  The nightclub seemed to fester with lust and cheap liquor, with penetrating darkness and artificial light.  The animate bodies around her were translucent and interchangeable as salt.

The dressing room’s neon lights blanched the vitality from the blushed cheeks and shimmered eyes of the girls as Michelle passed through to the back, where Julie changed out of her clothes.  As she drew near, Julie snapped up.

“Yeah?  Do you want something?”

“I – I just wondered how you were,” Michelle said.

Julie was shirtless, and her small breasts hung off her ribcage as she slouched against a locker to look at Michelle.  She crossed her arms over her torso.  “What do you mean?  You mean my ho-bite?  I went and got tested, and I’m negative.  They told me chances of transmission are slim through a bite like that, but they won’t know for sure until six months after the incident.”  Julie sighed.  “Nothing I can do for five more months, but they said I’m probably fine.  I’m not too worried about it.”  Her eyes shifted to the right.  She leaned over to pick up a pink bikini top.

“What about Princess?” Michelle asked.

“Don’t know,” Julie said as she tied her top.  “Bitch hasn’t been back.  Claudia should’ve fired her, but I don’t think she did.  You know how much money she brings in?  Claudia’d prolly still let her fuck the customers as long as she kept making money.”

Julie shivered with a sudden chill, then shook her head and shoved her bags into her locker.  “At least I don’t have to worry about anyone stealing my shit for a while,” she said, and brushed past Michelle and out of the dressing room.

Michelle walked to her locker and took out one of three clean outfits she had stored.  It was the black lace lingerie she had worn her first week dancing.  It had been months since she put it on, and it was noticeably looser now.  Its scent reminded her of the winter.

At the makeup mirror, she applied eye shadow and blush in a Zen-like trance.  She came to her favorite part, the lipstick, when the sound of crying turned her head and she looked over to see Vivian sitting on the counter, her feet on a chair, sobbing into her hands.

“Motherfucker,” Michelle said under her breath.  She finished her lipstick and put her makeup away.  Then she turned back to the girl.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, placing a stiff hand on Vivian’s shoulder.

The girl jerked her head up.  “Who is it?” she said.  When she saw Michelle, she turned away and started sobbing again.  “She left.”

“Princess?”

“No, you dumbfuck,” Vivian shouted.  “Beth!”

“Oh, your girlfriend.”  She lifted her palm and patted Vivian gently on the back.  “Um, what happened?”

“What the fuck makes you think I wanna talk about it with you?”

“I don’t – I mean, sometimes it just helps to talk about things.”

Vivian let out a long wail.  “She kicked me out of her dorm room!” she cried.  “I have to live in a hotel like some crack whore!”  Sobs again from her throat, from her chest as she balled herself up and heaved.  It seemed to Michelle that she sat with her for hours as she cried, but eventually, her voice quieted to a whimper, and she whispered, “It’s ‘cause of me.  I deserved it.”

“Why did you deserve it?”

Vivian sniffled.  “ ’Cause I’m a junkie!”

“You do heroin?”

“No!”  Vivian looked at Michelle as if she were an idiot.  “But I do coke.  Those stupid whores made me do it.”  She gestured vaguely to Angel, who dressed unaware in the back of the room.

“They made you?” Michelle asked.

“Well, they might as well have,” said Vivian, wiping her nose with a soaked tissue.  “And now Beth doesn’t love me anymore, and I have nothing left to live for.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true!” Vivian wailed.  “I may as well just end it.  I might as well snuff a whole eight ball up my fucking nose and fucking die!”

“You don’t want to die,” Michelle said gently, trying to inch closer and put her arm around the girl.  Vivian pushed her away.

“YES.  I.  DOOO!!!” she screeched.  The sound rang through the dressing room and carried into the cavernous body of The Caribou.

Julie felt weak as she took the stage.  As she gripped the pole, she glimpsed the bite mark, pink and healing, only inches below a tiny needle prick.  She quickly turned her head from it.  A flash of memory came over her as she winked to a man she recognized.  She had awoken that morning in a puddle of vomit and blood.

As she sat alone the night before trying to watch television, her cat cleaning himself in the corner, the arm pinprick and the doctor’s opaque words ricocheting through her skull, the tears began to flow.  She felt them hot down her face, down her neck, onto her chest.  Her nose ran, her mouth moaned, her life was laid out before her.  Just one twenty-five year downward spiral.  Never, ever did she think she’d still be dancing when she turned twenty-six.  Never did she think she would waste so much time.

As she watched it, the bite mark seemed to grow.  The gaping teeth were laughing at her, reminding her how useless she was, how little it would matter if she died, and how close to death she could be.

She walked to the kitchen and opened a bottle of red wine.  It was cheap and tart, but she sucked it like nectar.  When the wine in the bottle was one quarter lower, she opened her medicine cabinet.

Too many innocuous things.  Vitamins, Alka-Seltzer, Pepto-Bismol, aspirin.  She took another drink from the bottle and grabbed the jar of aspirin.  That book that one time – girl killed herself with a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of wine.  Worth a shot.

Calmly, stoically, she popped the aspirin into her mouth one by one, washing them down with swigs of wine.  She felt very tired.  It’s working.  It is.  I can tell.

When only a few aspirin remained at the bottom of the jar, she set it on the counter.  A few ounces of wine remained in the bottle, and she drank and wiped her mouth with her scarred arm.

She gripped the counter to steady herself and dropped the empty wine bottle on the floor.  It didn’t break, but landed with a bell-like ring.

Crossing the kitchen was difficult.  As she walked, she noticed Chester, her black cat, watching her from under the table.

“Fuck,” she said to herself.  She turned around, grabbed the bag of cat food from under the sink, and dumped it all over the floor.

“That should last you till they find me,” she said to the cat.  “I understand if you have to eat me, though.”  Chester blinked and went back to licking himself.

By the time she made it to her bed, she was dizzy and shaking.  She felt a calm spread over her like a warm blanket, and she weakly smiled.  Glancing around the room, she found a picture of her mother, young and pretty wearing red lipstick and a sundress.  She wanted that to be the last thing she saw before she died.  She closed her eyes and dreamed of freedom.

Hours later she awoke not to oblivion, not to a comforting white light, but to the familiar walls of her bedroom.  Her stomach felt like it had been stabbed with multiple dull, rusty knives.

As she propped herself up, she realized she was lying in something wet.  She glanced down and saw her mattress and sheets soaked with stinking blood-traced vomit.  Her face and chest were covered, and before she could reach for a waste basket, she heaved and threw up again onto the carpet.  Deep brown opaque liquid saturated a neat circle on the floor.

She ran to the bathroom in time for the next heave, and sat for an hour clutching the toilet.  Finally, when the spasms were dying down and she felt like she could walk, she hobbled into the kitchen.

A hazy memory from high school suggested she drink milk to dilute the poison in her stomach.  She poured herself a glass and tried to sip it.  On the floor, Chester meowed and flicked his tail against her calf.

Julie wheezed and cleared her throat.  “I guess I’m not going anywhere today,” she said to the cat.  She took another sip of milk and glanced around the kitchen.  There was a pile of cat puke on the linoleum beside where Chester had gorged himself on the sudden cornucopia of cat food.

She sat in her apartment all morning.  Maybe I should go to the emergency room.  Call an ambulance.  I could be bleeding, hemorrhaging.  I’m probably rotting inside.  I should call an ambulance.  Go to the ER.  I could call Mom.  I could call an ambulance.  What did I do to myself?  What does that do?  How long does it take?  I didn’t die last night but I’ll probably die today.  I should call an ambulance.  Should call the ER.  Call Mom.  ER’s too expensive.  Strippers don’t have health insurance, remember?  But I know it, I’m going to die here on the sofa.  I can feel it.  I can feel myself rotting, bleeding.  But that was the point.  That was the point.  That was the point.

Old movies played on the television.  She sipped tea.

Now she twisted and hung off the cold steel pole in a g-string and eight-inch platforms.  Her stomach boiled, her limbs were sluggish.  She felt a wave of faintness as she began to scale the pole, but it passed over her quickly.  Ten feet off the stage, she gripped the steel phallus with her thighs and bent backwards.  Every night she did this move – it was her signature, and it came easily.  She arched her back so far that her shoes touched the top of her head, and extended her arms to the sides imitating a swan dive.  In the audience, someone whistled.

Then she felt the wave again, and dizziness and nausea threatened her hold on the pole.  A cold sweat covered her exposed body, and she began to shiver.  She froze and concentrated, using every ounce of consciousness she had to remain perfectly still until the feeling passed.  As the nausea made its way through her, she held her position.  It passed.  She was okay.

She shifted ever so slightly to bring her torso back up and grip the pole with her hands, but as she moved she was struck by a piercing shriek.  “YES.  I.  DOOO!!!” it rang in tearing, vibrating shrillness.  Only the “do,” louder and more piercing than the other words, found its way onto the stage in a presence more powerful than the thumping beat of the club music, but it was enough to startle Julie into moving her thigh in an awkward way, which caused the sweat that had collected on her skin to become a perilous lubricant between her skin and the pole.  The next thing Julie saw was the stage floor rapidly approaching her face.

Filed under: Julie Han, Michelle, The Caribou, Vivian by Jade