A few people screamed when Julie fell.  She landed with a shocking thud and lay so still and twisted afterward that most of the audience assumed that she had broken her neck.

“Sweet Mother of God,” John muttered over the PA.

Several customers rushed the stage.  A dancer called Gabrielle leapt past them and stood over the motionless body.

“Oh fuck,” she squealed, hand over her mouth.  “She’s fucking dead!”

Lucy was on stage now too, and another dancer.  They all crouched over Julie.  Gabrielle’s cheeks were red.  She looked as if she were going to cry.  Lucy shook her head.  Then Julie coughed, rattled, and threw up a pancake-sized puddle of blood.  The dancers screamed.

Gabrielle put her hands on Julie’s arm.  “We have to take her to the hospital!” she cried.

“No, no,” Lucy said.  “Don’t move her.”  She pulled Gabrielle away from Julie.  “Go tell John to call an ambulance,” she said.  “Then go get Claudia.”

Gabrielle nodded, her face wet with tears, and ran off the stage toward the announcer’s booth.   By the time she disappeared, however, Claudia was already climbing up to the stage, followed by all the girls who had been in the dressing room.

They saw Julie wrapped inhumanly around the pole, and the opened mouths and tears of the women who stood encircling her.  Claudia pushed her way through and crouched over Julie.

“Hey, sweetheart, can you hear me?” she said softly.  She moved blood away from the dancer’s mouth with her bare hands.  “Julie, baby, you all right?”

Julie didn’t respond, but continued to breathe steadily, a red snot bubble rising and falling over her right nostril.  Michelle and Vivian were the last ones to reach the stage.  They stood outside a circle of dancers and waitresses illuminated garishly by the spotlight, the pulsing bass line of a remixed pop song punctuating every other instant.

“Get all these people the fuck out of here,” Claudia said to the bouncers.  “We’re closed for the night.”

“But it’s only five-thirty!” Angel whined.  She was barefoot, standing pigeon-toed, and two pink platform shoes hung from her fingers.

Claudia glared at Angel and waved her hand.  The bouncers began to clear everyone away.  The ambulance arrived.

The paramedics fastened Julie to a board and hoisted her off the stage.  Claudia, Michelle, and a few other girls followed them out to the flashing ambulance.

“Anyone coming with her?” a paramedic said as they slid her inside.  The girls looked at each other with discomfort.  The paramedic nodded and began to close the doors.

“Wait!” Michelle called.  A faint sense of something edged its way out of the recesses of Michelle’s mind.  She couldn’t put name to it; it was simply a small, persistent voice asking the question, What would Sam do?

“I’ll come with her,” she said.  “Just let me go get my clothes on.”

“Sorry,” the paramedic said.  “We can’t wait for you.”  He started to close the doors again.  She thought she detected the hint of a mocking smile on his lips.

Michelle rolled her eyes.  “Fine,” she sighed, and climbed into the back of the ambulance in her black lace lingerie and heels.

July was warm, but Michelle shivered in the back of the ambulance looking at Julie’s unconscious face.  In her negligee she sat with her legs crossed and her arms folded over her torso.  She didn’t say a word.

The hospital itself was a white, white daydream.  Through double doors and down hallways Julie flew.  Glares and glances aimed themselves at the naked girl on the stretcher and the girl in lingerie who chased after her in stilettos.

“You better stay out here,” a female paramedic said as they brought Julie into a room to take her vital signs.  She looked at Michelle’s attire and pointed down the hall.  “You see that desk over there?  Ask for Alice.  She’ll get you a robe to wear.”

“Oh, thanks,” Michelle said, looking down, remembering her lack of clothes.  She went to find Alice.

Meanwhile, Julie was being shoved into a CAT scan machine.  Behind her eyelids her corneas flicked back and forth, back and forth.

When she fell from the pole, her life flashed in front of her eyes.  She remembered being a child in Cincinnati and being teased by the boys at school.  She remembered her schoolwork.  She was the best in math and science, and a tomboy.  Boys called her egghead, nerd, or boy-girl.  She had beaten a few of them up over the course of three summers.

Then when she was a little older, eight or nine, she remembered visits from her cousins and the games they played.  With her female cousins, the games were simple.  Games like dress-up, or dollhouse, or grown-up movie star.  Sometimes they would play army or cowgirls.  Sometimes they would play horses.  Julie liked these games.

Her oldest cousin, Steven, played different games.  In these games, he told Julie different things to do, or did different things to her.  Sometimes the things felt good, but they scared Julie and made her stay up all night with her eyes open.

When she whimpered, Steven would always say:

“Julie, honey.  You know we’re best friends, right?”

Julie would nod.

“Well, you know what best friends do for each other?”

Nod again.

“Good.  And you know what best friends don’t do?”

The small, slim girl would play with her fingers and avert her eyes.  “They don’t tell on each other.”

These secret games continued until Julie was twelve and her cousins moved away.  She never told.

Julie remembered high school, a long trough of depression and guilt, and how disgusted she felt when she first had sex voluntarily at fifteen.  She remembered growing up, her breasts and hips growing, her waist narrowing, and how differently people treated her as soon as she made the visible change from girl to young woman.

Two weeks after turning eighteen, she saw an ad in her local paper for a modeling studio.  She was about to graduate, and people always said she was pretty.  Visions of runway fame and glossy magazine glory filled her head as she followed directions to a small cinderblock building between an empty lot and a fried chicken stand.  Well, she thought, looking at the crooked neon sign (Eden Live Modeling) and broken glass in the parking lot, you have to start somewhere.

Inside the doors, she met a heavy woman in a tight black dress standing behind a hostess podium.  An inch of brown roots showed beneath her tightly ponytailed blond hair.

“Can I help you?” she said, her orange-red lips parting, crooked teeth unveiled.

“Uh, I’m here for the modeling job,” the teenager said.  “I, uh, I brought a portfolio.”

Julie handed the woman a black binder.  The woman flipped expressionlessly through snapshots and senior photographs, all featuring Julie twisted, back arched, with an oblique half-mouthed smile or overly dramatic pout.  This was how Julie thought a model looked.

“Well, you gotta talk to Bob, but honey, I’m not sure if you’re in the right place,” the woman said.  She held disinterestedly a picture of Julie vamping in a cherry print tank top.

Julie watched the greasy hand drop the photo back onto the pile.  “Okay… um… where’s Bob?”

“’Round back,” the woman said.

“’K,” Julie said.  She reached her hand out to gather her photographs, and the woman covered them.

“I’ll hang on to these for now,” she said.  “You’re not gonna need them with Bob.  Trust me.”

Julie looked at her and started to say something, but decided fighting with this woman probably would not help her land a contract with the Eden Live modeling agency.  She went outside and walked around to the back of the building.

Bob was sitting on a bench by the dumpster smoking a cigarette.  His potbelly spilled over his pants and rested on his thighs, its hairy countenance charmingly peeking out from beneath a faded grey t-shirt.  What remained of his hair was ashen grey, greasy, and combed over his substantial bald spot.  When he saw her, he gathered a wad of phlegm in the back of his throat and spat it onto the dirty concrete.

In retrospect, Julie realized several things should have alerted her to the fact that Eden Live was not a legitimate modeling endeavor.

Bob’s voice was raspy and drawn.  He spoke too loudly and too quickly, and made no secret of his distain for Julie, anything she had to say, and women in general.  Nevertheless, she followed him back into the building and into his office.

“You nervous about men seeing your cunt?” he said as he settled into a creaking wooden chair behind a particle board desk.

“Huh?” she said, for lack of anything more cogent.

“Your pussy,” Bob said.  “We do full nude here.  You can wear a sheer nightgown, but no g-strings.  My customers get what they pay for.”

“Hang on,” Julie interrupted.  “I think I made a mistake.”

“Most of the girls here take in about five hundred a week,” Bob continued.  “But a cute little Oriental pussy like you?  I bet you could get close to a thousand if you work that little ass off.”

Julie paused.  “A thousand a week?”

“You’re eighteen, right?  You need to give Tammy at the door some sort of proof of age before you can work.  I almost got in trouble once before ‘cause of one of you little sluts.  Thought you could put one over on Bob, little sixteen-year-old Blondie.  Almost got the whole place shut down.  I ain’t gonna make that mistake again.”

By the time Julie came back out to give Tammy her ID, the heavy woman had shoved the photos more or less back into the binder and was leaning on her podium reading a music magazine.

“I’m supposed to show you I’m eighteen,” Julie said.  She held out her driver’s license.

Tammy glanced up.  “’At’s great, hon.”  She handed the girl her portfolio.  “You wanna come back tomorrow?”

Julie’s job in the jack shack was to stand with a customer in a small room while he masturbated.  The customer paid twenty dollars for a half an hour with a model posing in traditional lingerie.  For another thirty dollars, she would pose naked wearing only a transparent robe or nightgown.  Most men chose the second option, and most were finished long before the half hour was.

Julie kept half of all the money she made, plus any tips the customer gave her.  She started out making almost five-hundred dollars a week working part time.

For the first few weeks the sight of men her father’s age (her grandfather’s age, in some cases) jerking off in front of her stayed in her mind’s eye as she went to bed at night and followed her into her dreams.  She would wake up at night at intervals sweating and pushing at phantom hands which in the dreams did not remain on the body of the man, but ventured and touched her stomach, pawed at her breasts and reached between her thighs like snakes.  After a few wrecked months, the dreams stopped, and the routine of stripping down to underwear or to nothing while men masturbated watching her with eyes that did not see her eyes became routine.  She walked to work with the listlessness of a teenager on her way to a tedious after school job.

When she graduated, she moved out of her parents’ house and began to work full time.  She rented a modern one-bedroom apartment and after three weeks of coming home to empty rooms she adopted a kitten from the shelter so she could hear another breath at night.

At the jack shack, men would ask things of her.

“Will you pee on me?”  The words came now from a short Indian man in a collared shirt and glasses, but she heard this question a lot.

The first time she ever heard it, her response had been, “I – uh, what?”  Now she looked at the man and said, “Look, man.  You should feel sick just being in here.  The last thing you need is to get pissed on.”  The next day she walked into Eden Live Modeling and quit.

She began working at an upscale gentlemen’s club, and her income quadrupled instantly.  Her mailbox became clogged with credit card offers.  She opened as many as she could and began to charge anything she wanted.  At the end of the month the bills came.  She paid the minimum balance and forgot about them.  Money in fat stacks just kept coming and coming.

She was friendly with the other girls.  She formed bonds with other young beginners, but friendship after friendship was lost when the other girl discovered cocaine or meth or how much more lucrative it was to backstab rather than befriend other dancers.  Julie avoided the drugs and prostitution, but witnessed those around her succumb to them one by one.

At nineteen she planned to leave exotic dancing and go to college with the money she’d earned, but by the time the reality of credit card payments struck her, she was thousands of dollars in debt.  After a few weeks of rejected waitress applications, she walked into another strip club and was hired.

It was dark and smelled of stale beer and faintly of urine, and was patronized mostly by big, bearded, biker men who used the dancers’ runway as a second bar, resting their drinks beneath the girls’ feet and leaning in too far when they’d crouch down to pick up a tip.

Still, Julie liked it better than her last club.  The bikers were appreciative, and the pressure she felt before to be sexier than human dissipated.  The money wasn’t as good, but she was slowly paying off her dept.  After a year, she began to make plans to attend college.

She enrolled in a two year business program.  To continue paying off her debt and cover tuition at the same time, she quit the biker bar and sought out the highest end club in Cincinnati.

At low-end places like the biker bar, “auditions” generally consisted of nothing more than the girl’s taking off her clothes to prove she wasn’t afraid of being naked in public.  At classier places, there would be some sort of open audition, i.e.: amateur night at The Caribou.  Heavenly Creatures, however, subjected Julie to the most scrutiny she had endured since middle school.

She was made to dance to no music in front of a panel of five men and one woman.  Afterward, she stood naked in front of them as they told her everything that was wrong with her, both physically and regarding her performance.

“You need to wear more makeup,” one of the men said.  They were different races, ages, and builds, but to her all the men blended together.

“And maybe some work done,” the one woman added.  The skin of her face was pulled taughtly back to her hairline, and covered with thick pancake foundation.  Her lips looked swollen, like they had been stung by wasps, and they shone with gloss.  Her hair was bleached to straw.  “Maybe some boobs.  Or an ass.  They’re doing ass implants on a lot of Asian girls.”

“I think her body’s great,” a man said.  Was it the same one?  “She’s thin, and her tits and ass fit her body.  Guys like natural bodies.  They’re used to seeing Pam Anderson wannabes.  They get a kick out of seeing a girl with small tits now and then.”

“I agree,” said a man who sat at the far left of the panel.  “The younger guys are more into girls without a lot of work.  I think you’re fine, babe.  But you do need to wear more makeup.”

“What about her contortionism?” another commented.  “That was pretty rad.”

Nods all around.

“That’s definitely a cute gimmick,” the woman said.

“I think she’d be all right,” a man said.

“I’m willing to give her a shot,” a man said.

“Me too,” a man said.

“We need more Asian girls, anyways,” a man said.

Goose bumps covered her skin and her nipples stood reaching away from her chest in the cold room.  “You’re hired,” a man said.

Heavenly Creatures employed about a hundred dancers.  It was Cincinnati’s premier gentleman’s club, and the city’s richest and most powerful men came frequently.  Julie easily made enough to support herself, pay off her dept, and go to school, but the differences between herself and the other dancers became more defined and problematic.

A girl named Cindy developed an arbitrary rivalry with her and stole Julie’s customers every time she could.  She regularly took things from Julie’s locker and destroyed them.  Julie ignored her until she came home one day and found her apartment broken into and Chester missing.  She put up posters and called shelters, but no one had seen the black cat she had raised from a kitten.  After two months, she gave up the hope of getting him back.  Then one day she walked past Cindy’s open locker and stopped.

“You bitch!” she shouted.  She reached into the locker and tore a Polaroid off its wall.  “That’s my fucking cat!”  In the photograph, Cindy sat in a plush chair in a hooded sweatshirt clutching Chester to her chest.

“I dunno what the fuck you talken about,” Cindy said.  “That’s my cat, Smooty.”

“Smooty?”

“Yeah.  You fucken crazy, girl.  Why don’t you go get on some of those anti-depressant drugs.  You been having hallucinations.”  Cindy closed her locker and walked away with a smug strut.

In her twenty-one years of life, Julie had never hated anyone as much as she hated Cindy at that moment.

One night when Cindy was working, Julie and one of her male friends broke into her small, beige, garbage strewn apartment and rescued Chester.  The cat took two days to readjust to his home.  Julie never recovered.  She just went back to work, night after night.

A man named Joseph routinely bought dances from her, dropping often hundreds of dollars on one evening.

“You know, you’re putting me through school,” she said one night, a wad of hundred-dollar bills held to her hip by the strap of her thong.

Joseph said nothing, but after that day, a hand would wander, a word would slip.  One day he called her his “happy little whore.”  Instead of objecting, Julie accepted a fifty dollar bill for a twenty dollar dance.

When Joseph offered her fifteen thousand dollars to fly with him to Vegas for a weekend, she politely refused.  When he offered for the fifth time, she vehemently refused.

She swore she saw him one night outside her apartment building.  She couldn’t be sure, and the man disappeared as soon he saw her looking out the window, but that weekend she added a second lock to her door.

She needed to get away.  Her summer break from classes was coming up, and she began planning a trip to Ireland.  When the other girls noticed too many smiles from her, she bragged.  She was proud of herself for earning it, and it was finally something that the other girls couldn’t ruin for her.

Two days before her flight, she checked her bank accounts to make sure they were in order before she left.  To her surprise and confusion, she found ten thousand extra dollars in her savings account.  No matter what anybody said about Julie, she was always honest, and she called the bank that day to alert them of their error.  After being transferred, interviewed, talked at, questioned, and eventually counseled, she discovered that Joseph had somehow hacked her bank account and used the information to deposit a large “gift.”

“Well, fuck,” was all Julie said for about ten minutes.

She was supposed to go into work that night, but she didn’t.  Instead, she spent the evening closing her accounts and packing.  She took Chester and what luggage she’d need in Ireland and left her apartment that night, staying at a friend’s house on the other side of town until her flight.

During her three weeks in Galway, she drank effervescent whiskey that slid down her throat like mercury and ate brown bread layered with sweet and silken golden butter.  She told strangers her life story over pints of stout and danced to live music in pubs hundreds of years old.  As she sat down one night exhausted, laughing after a round of social dancing, she knew how many generations of people must have collapsed into this particular booth in the same way over the centuries, and for a moment in that warm, bi-level wooden pub, she felt intimately connected with all of humanity.

Back in Cincinnati, the troubles she left seemed muted.  There must be some explanation.  I overreacted.  He’s a decent guy. When she returned, the first thing she did was go to collect Chester from her friend’s house.  She fell asleep easily in her own bed, cuddled with her cat.  I’ll sort it all out tomorrow.  It’s probably no big deal at all.  Just all a misunderstanding.  He’s a decent guy. Then sleep came, bringing dreams of the stone walls and red doors of Ireland.

Julie walked into work the next day smiling.  The upturned corners of her mouth, rarely seen within the walls of the club and never before upon her entering, drew the attention of the other girls who sat and stood in the garishly white-lit, tiled room.  As she walked to her locker and began changing, heads turned following her.  She was – yes! – she was humming!  Julie Han smiling, humming, walking shoulders back into the dressing room.  The other girls exchanged looks, barely breathing.

“How was Ireland?” a young dancer called Celeste asked.

“It was incredible,” Julie said, turning, making eye-contact.  “Just fantastic.  I feel like a different woman.”

“That’s great,” Celeste said.  She had always been one of the dancers who held the least distain for Julie.  “Hopefully I’ll get to take a vacation, soon.  It sounds like so much fun.  I’d love to go to another country.  I went to Canada once, but that doesn’t really count, and it was only for a few hours to say I went.  I was gonna stop and eat or something, but I didn’t even do that.  It was pretty stupid.  Did your friend find you, by the way?”

Julie’s smile fell.  “What friend?”

“That guy who always comes in for you.  With the glasses.  Joseph.  He didn’t remember where you were supposed to meet.  I told him you were in Dublin.  I thought that was right, but I can be dumb about remembering things.  I might have just said Dublin ‘cause that’s the only city in Ireland I know.”

Julie’s words were caught in a tangle of terror and anger.  She stood clutching a bra and staring into her locker.

“Hey, are you okay?” Celeste asked.  She touched Julie’s shoulder lightly.  “Did everything work out?”

The touch let Julie move.  “Oh, yeah.  Don’t worry.  We met up.  Everything’s fine.”

Slowly and precisely, she put her street clothes back on, walked back to her bosses’ office and quit.  Two weeks later, she was in a new city dancing at a new club.  She had to abandon her degree program, but she was safe.  She developed a new act and a fake Japanese accent that made her more money than the dry Midwestern one that came to her naturally.  Before long, Annie May was well-known in the local exotic dancing world.  She enrolled in another business degree program.  Things were better, things were going well, and after everything she’d been through, she thought she deserved it.

Willy, the sociopath, was her first friend in the city.  She met him on the internet, and he came to watch her dance frequently.  Despite his condition, he had never been anything but respectful to her.  Willy was a connoisseur of gentlemen’s clubs, and it was he who suggested she try The Caribou after a couple years of dancing around lower- and higher-end establishments.  She liked the atmosphere at The Caribou for the most part, and though most of the girls were horrible, there were a few (that tall girl, Samantha, the little blonde one, Michelle) who didn’t disgust her.  Most of the customers were respectful, and slowly and steadily, she worked her way through school.  Until the Princess situation escalated, her life was going just as she planned it.

Princess.  In her dream in the ER, she saw Princess.  She hadn’t understood everything Princess spouted in her broken, muddled English as she knelt huddled around her thighs in the dressing room.  At first, the realization that she was speaking alone was enough to block the understanding of any words, and this was made even more difficult by her accent.  Eventually, Julie understood that “HIB” was actually “HIV,” and Princess was apologizing for biting her and possibly infecting her with the virus.

Julie stood staring into space as Princess rambled through tears and mucus.  In her head, she said, Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. She didn’t care why the bitch had lied about being mute.  She didn’t care why this white girl had a Japanese accent.  And she especially didn’t care about an apology.  She was filled with terror and rage and hatred, and it was directed at the girl crouched desperately at her feet.

She didn’t say anything, she just kneed Princess swiftly in the chest.  When she flew backward, Julie gathered her belongings and left The Caribou.  She didn’t see what happened to Princess after she left, but now, in her dream, she saw the other dancers abandoning her slowly, one by one.  She saw Princess shaking and crying, huddled in a corner and totally alone.  Yes, a pragmatic voice floated through the scene, this is what she deserves.  To waste away and die terrified and alone.  A lying, amoral whore who spreads disease through ignorance and irresponsibility.  How many people has she infected?  Yes, this is surely only what she deserves.

Julie’s dream self stood over her fallen rival and let out a self-righteous cackle.  No matter what happened now, she had won.

Princess looked up at her without malevolence, her face wet, cheeks pink from crying, and crystalline blue eyes shining glass-like in bloodshot pools of red.  In the dream, her corneas emitted an almost ethereal glow, and Julie saw in them all the loneliness, the fear, and the isolation of a human being – in her the pained grasping of the first primate to look up and cry at being alone.  She remembered dancing in the pub in Galway, and the sense of connectedness she felt there returned, creeping and nebulous in form.  It seeped into her dream self and suddenly when she blinked, she saw Princess, but not the wretched, spiteful girl she was used to seeing.  In the beautiful woman sitting defeated on the floor, she saw a vivid reflection of herself, and every fear, every dream, and every moment of darkness she had ever experienced.  Suddenly, she felt nothing but pity, compassion, and love for this human being cowering before her, and she dropped to her knees from her looming stance, drawing her face as close as possible to the face of the crying woman.  She wrapped her arms around the woman’s head and drew her to her chest.

“It’s okay,” she said over and over again.  “It’s okay.  It’s okay.  It’s okay.”

She said it in dream time, and might have said it a hundred times before she was drawn out of her world and into a white, bleach-scented room with an IV in her arm and Michelle sitting in a robe and black stilettos in the corner.  She was reading a back issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Julie gazed at the dancer who sat cross-legged, flipping through the magazine and humming quietly to herself.  The memory of her dream lingered, and the love she had felt for Princess extended momentarily to Michelle, and on to everyone else in the world.

Then she remembered herself, and she spoke.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, sitting up stiffly in the bed.  When her cover fell off, she realized she was wearing only a g-string and eight-inch platforms.  The hospital-white air chilled the bare skin of her chest.

Michelle looked up.  “I – I came with you.  To make sure you were okay.”  She put her finger inside the magazine to mark her place and laid it across her lap.

Julie rubbed her head.  “Well, am I?”

“Yeah,” Michelle said.  “I think so.  They said you were really lucky.  That you should have broken your neck.  I told them maybe it was because you were so flexible…”

“My head feels horrible.”

“They said you got a mild concussion, but you should be fine now.  They said they want to keep you here tonight to watch you.”

Julie rolled her eyes.  “Please.”  She flipped the blanket off to one side and started to stand up.

“Wait,” Michelle said, watching Julie try awkwardly to get out of bed with tubes coming off of her.  “I’ll go get the nurse.”

She ran out of the room.  Julie continued to work her way out of bed.  Everything hurt, but nothing was broken.  They had given her pain medicine.  She could tell from the way the world was muffled.

Once she was standing, she reached down and pulled out her IV, letting it fall to the side of the stand dripping clear fluid onto the floor.  She rubbed where it stung.

She looked down at her exposed body and shoes and felt ridiculous.  Just then, Michelle returned with a male nurse.

She saw them and fought the strange, sudden urge to shrink into herself, covering as much of her nakedness as she could with crossed arms.  Instead, she thrust out her chest, rested a hand on her hip and addressed the nurse.  “You couldn’t have gotten me one of those?”  She pointed to Michelle’s robe.

The nurse shrugged with an amused smirk.  “That’s how you came in,” he said.

Julie groaned.  “Great, so I’m being wheeled around a hospital in nothing but a g-string and huge stripper shoes, so everyone looks at me and knows exactly what happened.”

Michelle laughed, stopping as Julie glared at her.  The nurse went to get a robe.

The two women stood in the cold room.

“What time is it?” Julie asked.

“It’s almost midnight.  You were out for a long time.  I was – it was sort of scary for a while.”

From Julie’s nose, a small sigh escaped.  “Well, the scary part’s over.  And there’s no way I’m staying here tonight, no matter what the doctors say.  I know my body, and I’m fine.”

A half hour later, Michelle and Julie shared a taxi home.  Both wore t-shirts and sweatpants from the hospital donation box.

As the cab pulled away from the hospital, Julie clutched her knees and watched as lights periodically broke through the darkness out the window.

“They said they found a lot of aspirin in your stomach, or in your blood or something,” Michelle said.  “I mean, they uh, said you made your stomach bleed from it.  That’s why you were spitting up blood.”

Julie glanced sideways at her.

Michelle continued.  “Were you… trying to hurt yourself?”

Julie returned her gaze to the window.  “Well, it didn’t work, so it doesn’t matter.  And now I’ve got these goddamned ER bills to pay for.”

“At least you’re okay.”

“Ppht.  Okay?  Do you know how much the ER costs?  Do you think strippers have health insurance?”  Julie’s patent-leather hair lay clinging to the side of her face.  She brushed it back behind her ear.

Michelle searched for the most honest, least sentimental phrase she could think of to express herself.  “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said and braced for the inevitable sting which would come from Julie like the recoil of a gun.

But Julie just watched out the window as the city passed by, and when the driver came to her apartment building, she paid for her share of the ride and got out.  Before she turned to walk up the steps to the door, she caught Michelle’s eye and waved goodnight.

Michelle sat in the back of the taxi watching Julie as the cab pulled away.  She laid her head against the sweat-smelling vinyl headrest, closed her eyes, and rested as the driver carried her silently through the black streets to her apartment.

Filed under: Julie Han, Michelle, dancing by Jade