The next day at about one-thirty, as Michelle was walking to the grocery store, she saw a long-haired teenaged boy skateboarding on a banister.  His unwashed brown hair lay in strands, whipping behind him as he slid down the pole and landed with a clack! back on the sidewalk.  He was wearing an oversized Nirvana t-shirt, and looked about sixteen.

When she saw him with his surly smirk sneering in all his freedom and agility and youth, the first thing Michelle thought was, You don’t remember Nirvana, and the second thing she thought was, Shouldn’t you be in school or something?

Then, No, of course, it’s summer.  There’s no school in the summer.  Duh.  Then another thought, this one starting not as words, but as a point, a tiny glow that pulsed and grew steadily until it filled her skull, her throat, her chest.  It pulsed and glowed until she felt herself pulsing and glowing, her chest, her neck, her skull vibrating and emanating this radiant realization, this new knowledge.  A realization she had kept buried for months, for years, suddenly surfacing and blooming into an undiscountable neon flower.

She wasn’t a child anymore.  She was an adult.  She was accountable and responsible for every choice she made, every action.

She could do whatever she wanted.

She blinked.  The colors she saw seemed suddenly brighter, the buildings and sidewalks not grey now, but silver, the skyscraper-sliced slivers of sky deep and brilliant sapphire.  The city air was clean, and she breathed it in uninhibited.  Yes!  I am an adult!  Yes!  I have all the power that anyone else has!  I control my destiny as much as anyone else!  As much as I want to!  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!

Forgetting about the grocery store and her bare cupboard, she walked quickly home and readied herself for work hours early.  She nearly ran down the streets to The Caribou, arriving just as the doors were opening.

“Hey, what’s up,” Jordan said as he placed the tray into the cash register and tossed it shut with the necessary violence.  “How’s Annie May?  You went with her, right?  Shit, that fall looked fucking harsh.”

“She’s fine as far as I know.  She went home late last night and seemed okay.”

Michelle walked in as Jordan was still talking.  “Shit man.  I mean, half the girls here swore she was dead.  They said she was puking blood or some shit.  Fuck, you guys didn’t realize you had such a hazardous job, I bet.  Did you?  Huh?”  Michelle walked straight through the club and back to the office.  She knocked.

“Come in,” Claudia said.  Michelle opened the door.

Claudia was alone in the office.  She sat behind the computer, watching the television screens in the corner.  There were only a few customers in the club, and no one was using the private dance rooms.  When Michelle walked in, Claudia looked up.

“Yes?” she said, darting her eyes quickly back to the motionless screens.

“Hi,” Michelle said.  “I just wanted to let you know that Julie’s okay, but she probably won’t be in today.  She was in the hospital all night last night.”

Claudia nodded.  “Glad to hear she’s all right.  Poor girl.  That fall looked like it could have killed a person.”  She took a sip from the coffee mug that sat next to her computer.  “You can tell her, if you see her, that whenever she’s ready, she can come back.  There’s no hurry.  We got plenty of girls.”

“Even with Sam and Princess gone?”

Claudia looked at her, raised her brow.  “We got plenty of girls.”

Michelle nodded and started to walk out, but stopped.  “Hey, do you have those surveillance videos all over, or just in the private rooms?”

Claudia had gone back to gazing at the TV screens.  “We got a few on the floor.  Not a lot, but a few.  Why?”

“Do you keep the tapes?  I mean, do you tape over them?”

“We usually keep the footage for a couple months in case we need it for legal reasons.  Why do you ask?”

Michelle clutched her bag.  “I’m looking for somebody.”

“Who?”

“A woman.”

“A dancer?”

“No, a customer.  Do you have tapes from the main floor, around?  Could I look at them?”

Claudia looked at her.  “What exactly is this regarding, honey?”

“It’s, uh, it’s about Sam,” Michelle said.

Michelle spent the time before her shift watching video of The Caribou main floor on the computer.  She had an idea of the date – it would be right before Sam’s disappearance, but after two hours of looking, she began to doubt her method.

Finally, she raised her eyebrows and drew her face close to the screen.  A tall, scholarly-looking woman sat alone in the back of the club, sipping a pink martini through a straw.  Something about this woman caught Michelle’s attention.  She seemed somehow different, somehow more vibrant than the other people caught on the grainy video.

Then the image of Samantha ran to her.  The woman stood up and they embraced.  Michelle’s heart thumped rapidly.  She had found Mademoiselle X.

“Claudia!” she called.  Claudia had been sitting near the stack of TV screens, watching with intensity a lap dance going on in one of the rooms.  She jumped when Michelle spoke.

“Huh?  What?”

“I found her!  That’s her!”  Michelle pointed to the woman.  “Can you print this out?”

Claudia zoomed in on the woman’s face.  The picture was grainy, but the woman’s basic features could be made out.

“I sorta thought she’d be prettier,” Michelle said as Claudia printed out the image.

“Well, honey, you know what they say,” Claudia commented, pulling the picture out of the printer.  “Love is blind.”

Michelle shrugged and took out the picture.  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem, baby,” Claudia said as she went back to her TV screens.  “It’s nice to see someone doing something nice for someone else.  So, what you gonna do now?”

Michelle looked at the picture.  “I really don’t know,” she said, and walked out.

She walked into the dressing room studying the printout.  When she glanced up, she almost dropped it.

Bunny Lu sat, tanned and fabulous, sitting on the makeup counter surrounded by the other dancers.

“No, I was like totally down with the natives,” she was saying to Angel, the other girls watching in awe.  “I mean, they were like poor and stuff, but you should have seen how cheap things were there!  Everyone was really nice.  I guess the American dollar really is the universal language!  Ha.  You know what I mean?”

“You look great,” Vivian said, gazing at Bunny in her oversized sunglasses and undersized top.

“Thanks, honey,” she said.  One of the girls handed Bunny a mirror with three lines of coke on it and a straw.

“I leave for three weeks and you all forget how to do this?” she said.  Bunny reached into her purse and pulled out a hundred dollar bill.  “This is how we did it in the Dominican Republic.”  She rolled the bill expertly and did a line.  “Shit, I gotta introduce you guys to some real coke,” she said, and handed the mirror and the bill to Vivian.

Vivian took the mirror and the hundred and looked at it.  She passed it on to the next girl.

“Where the fuck’s Julie?” Bunny demanded.  “That bitch owes me an apology.”

A few of the dancers muttered to each other.  Bunny Lu looked around.

“What, she get fired?” she asked with a smirk.

“We think she broke her neck,” Gabrielle said.

“Yeah, she fell off the pole,” another girl added.

“She didn’t break anything,” Michelle said.  Everyone looked at her.  She swallowed.  “She’s okay.  She should be back soon.”  The other girls still stared at her.  She paused, then held out the grainy picture and drew near to them.  “Hey, none of you guys know this girl, do you?”

They all shook their heads.

“Why, should we?” Angel asked, who seemed to be attempting to focus on the picture, but who’s eyes kept falling off to the left before she could jerk them back forward.

“No,” Michelle said.  “Guess not.”

For a few moments in the dressing room, there was silence.  Michelle used it to walk to her locker.  She placed the picture inside reverently.

“Well, when that Oriental bitch comes back, she’s gonna have some shit to answer for,” Bunny said.  Michelle started to get dressed.  From behind her, a voice.

“Hey, so, Julie’s okay?”  Michelle turned around and saw Vivian.

Now many of the girls were through dressing, were leaving the dressing room to go work the floor.  The room grew much quieter.  “She should be fine,” Michelle said.

Vivian watched the ground.  “I mean, I was thinking.  I was saying I wanted to die yesterday, but I don’t want to die.  When I saw her folded up on the stage like that, I thought she was dead, and it got me thinking about like, being dead.  I mean like, actually being dead, and like duh I don’t want to actually die.  I mean, I was just mad, you know?  But I don’t want to run away from my problems.  I got to face them and make them better.”

Michelle slid out of her bra and put on a pink polka-dotted bikini top.  “Um, that’s good.  I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“It’s not just that,” Vivian said.  “I mean, I don’t know if I feel better.  I’m still sad, but I talked to Beth this morning.  I don’t know if she’ll take me back, but I’m gonna try to make myself better.  I’m trying to work through my shit, because like I look at Angela and Laura and those girls, and maybe they seem like glamorous kind of in a way, but I mean, I really wanted to go to college.  Like really.  And I’m smart.  And I don’t want to end up like that in five years when I’m all old and stuff.  I was thinking I’m not gonna do drugs anymore, I decided.  And I’m not gonna hang around those girls.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Michelle said.  She didn’t believe Vivian, but she wanted to.

That night when Michelle danced, eyes lay on her as they used to on Samantha, or on Princess.  Her movements were electric, as if she had just needed time to grow into her sensuality, her rhythm.  Her regular was there.  She said hello to him and listened to a story from before she was born, but in her mind she wandered away from him and The Caribou and began already to search for Samantha’s mystery woman, pouring through mental directories, following tenuous connections, turning over invisible stones.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jade