“Come on! We had to leave five minutes ago just to be on time!” Sam shouted and pounded on the door of apartment 118A.

Michelle was busy puking into the toilet. Despite her unremitting insecurities about her body, this was not a weight-loss strategy; it was simple nerves. She wiped her mouth and made her way to the front door.

“If you don’t come in today, you can forget about this job!” Sam was shouting from the other side. “Come on! You’re making me late, too! This is like, dollars, right down the drain, kid!” She pounded and pounded.

Michelle opened the door a crack. “Look, Sam, thanks for all your help, but I just can’t do this. I’m not a stripper.” She dismally attempted to look as pathetic as possible.

Samantha studied Michelle’s face. “Sweetie, you look like shit,” she said. “It’s okay. I’ll help you with makeup when we get there. Just come on!” She started down the hall, but Michelle called after her.

“No! Sam, I don’t feel well. I mean it. The thought of going back makes me sick. Plus I can barely move my back and I have this huge ugly bruise from when I fell the other day.”

Sam stopped, barely turning around. “Honey, you’re going to look a lot worse than that after a week. It happens to all the girls. Your body isn’t used to all this movement and impact and gets all bruised up. It goes with the territory, but you’ll get over it.”

There was a moment where nothing was said, and Michelle felt herself vacillate. She could have gone either way, but then the women made eye-contact and Samantha shot her a most enchanting smile, and every cell in her body called out to follow.

“Just let me grab my stuff,” said the ballerina.

They arrived at The Caribou what Mina called “fashionably” late. Abe Jackson called it “What do you think this is, a knitting circle? A Christmas party? A funeral for a relative nobody liked? Get here on time next time, okay ladies?” late.

Abe never came in on amateur night. The managers handled most of the hiring at The Caribou, and if there was one thing that Abe Jackson hated, it was an amateur. Amateurs, on the whole, talk far too much.

“Hey, Boss,” Samantha said. “This is one of the new girls, Michelle.” Michelle waved uneasily at the man, sitting with a much younger woman at a table with a dirty magazine in one manicured hand and a beer in the other. He was a small, brittle man with nut-colored skin in his mid to late fifties, and had apparently obtained his entire wardrobe from an estate auction of a relatively serious swing dancer from the nineteen forties.

“Michelle,” he mused, his hand covering his mouth. “That your real name?”

Michelle nodded.

“Very nice,” the man said, approvingly. “French. Michelle… ma belle… someday monkey want tray bland ensemble…” he sang off-key, and to no one in particular. Next to him, the woman’s red lips moved, pursing.

“Um, nice to meet you,” said Michelle as she hurried past toward the dressing room.

Other boys wanted to be astronauts, pilots, lion tamers, race car drivers, firemen, cowboys, or the President, but since he was ten years old, Abe Jackson’s one and only dream had been to own and operate a gentleman’s club. In that way he was very fortunate, because of all the boys in history who ever wanted to be the President, only a handful actually achieved it. Little Abe Jackson realized his dream.

However, in the process he also realized a cocaine addiction. Fortunately, his girlfriend Claudia, the much younger (and rather conventionally beautiful) woman with whom he was seated, did not have a drug problem, and as the club’s head manager, she took care of most of The Caribou’s business aspects.

One of the things that gave Abe the most pleasure in life was the fact that no one in the world but him knew why his club was named The Caribou. Not even Claudia. It was a secret that would die with him, he always said. If there was one thing Abe Jackson loved, it was dramatic mystique.

The Caribou, at any given time, employed about twenty five dancers. Some danced there for years, some stayed only a day or two, but there was always a new, sometimes desperate, sometimes naïve, but almost invariably young girl ready to fill in any holes in the lineup. After all, another future stripper turns eighteen every day, and every day, another future stripper is born.

It was early Sunday afternoon, and no one but Abe, Claudia, and the waitresses haunted the floor in the club’s main room. In the dressing room, girls were lackadaisically readying themselves to take the stage. Michelle snuck past the unfamiliar forest of strange faces and breasts protruding, swinging, and hanging before changing alone in a corner.

As she shoved her bra up, pressing her breasts together and watching herself critically in the mirror which ran down one entire side of the wall, she noticed Julie Han in a chair, applying her lipstick listlessly, drawing the tube back and forth until the tip slipped outside her lip line. Without expression, she groaned softly, capped her lipstick, and began wiping the edge of her parted mouth with a tissue.

Clutching her little grey makeup bag, Michelle approached the chair next to Julie’s. She sat down and started to apply concealer. The other woman didn’t acknowledge her, just kept rubbing at her mouth with half-focused eyes.

“Um, not a lot of people out there today, huh?” Michelle said, cringing internally, waiting for the reply.

Julie turned slightly. “Yeah. It’s a Sunday,” she said.

“Yeah, I just… I just meant it was a lot different from Friday, that’s all. I’m – I’m new at this.” She felt her face make that stupid smile that sometimes happened involuntarily when she knew she had embarrassed herself. Julie’s eyes rolled and she went back to her lipstick.

Michelle continued painting her face in silence. She was never very good at applying makeup, and while Julie’s face began more and more to resemble a glamorous modern-day geisha, Michelle’s began to look like a terrifying harlequin. As Julie started to pack up her kit, Michelle turned to her again, pathetic and desperate.

“Hey, uh, Julie? If you have a minute could you… I mean, I really kind of suck at makeup… I don’t know if you could… like… show me something.” Julie looked at her like she was trying to melt rock into magma with her eyes.

“Look, honey,” she said, hiking her makeup case’s strap around her shoulder as she stood up. Her face was cold, emotionless, the skin stretched and static as if every muscle beneath was taught. “No offense, but I hate strippers. I’m part of the one percent of us who’s actually doing this to put myself through school. I don’t want to talk to you or anyone else. I don’t want to be friends. I just want to come here, get my cash, and if I can get some homework done in my downtime, well, that’s a bonus, isn’t it? You might have the capability to not be horrible, but going off personal experience with other dancers, I’d rather just play it safe and keep to myself, okay?”

Michelle nodded and Julie walked away. This was a different world. No matter how much a ballerina hated you, she would always smile to your face. As she finished her makeup, she looked and saw Samantha looming over her like a dark willow tree. “I thought you were going to let me help you with your makeup,” she said.

“Oh, I, uh, didn’t see you,” Michelle said, gazing at the sad clown in the mirror.

Sam’s brow creased. “Come get me next time.” Her brow relaxed, crease melting again into smooth porcelain, and she left.

Michelle walked back to her locker. The blonde girl with the kanji tattoo was unconscious leaning against it on the floor. A thin line of blood ran out of her left nostril. She would have looked dead if it weren’t for the shallow, intermittent breaths that jerked her chest and moved her lips. When Michelle touched her shoulder she jumped up with a bestial gasp and the face of a frightened rabbit.

“Hey, it’s okay,” said Michelle. “I just needed to get in here. It’s my locker.”

The girl blinked furiously and produced a crooked half smile. Laughing bizarrely, maybe coughing, she pulled a business card and pen out of a small bag that sat next to her on the floor. She scribbled something on the card and handed it to Michelle.

Hi, I’m Princess! it read. I’m mute, but I can sure move! May I interest you in a private dance? Only the part about the private dance was crossed out and instead, in hasty, childish script, it read, Nice to meet you, with a smiley face at the end.

Michelle tried to smile genuinely at the girl, who had the body of a playboy model. (Is it natural? Couldn’t be. But those breasts…. She’s young. Yes, younger than me. Twenty, twenty-one maybe. Beautiful. Is it natural? Couldn’t be.)

“Nice to meet you. I’m Michelle.” She said it tentatively extending her hand, inviting this young woman to touch her. Princess clutched her with shaky fingers and the unnerving habit of blinking with each eye individually. The dumb girl let go and began to write something else, but was interrupted by Claudia, the manager, who entered the dressing room like a maelstrom.

“Girl, now, you gotta get yourself cleaned up right away,” she said as she sat Princess down on the counter in front of the long mirror and began to wipe her face with a paper towel, dampening it, wiping again. “What’s this?” she asked in her smokystern voice as she wiped the blood from under her nose. “I don’t get paid to baby sit you, and I don’t want to either, but you’re taking my time now, you understand? You do what you got to on your own time, but here, you have a job to do, don’t you? I tell you this every day, girl. You want to be a kid, you go back to school. You’re working now, aren’t you? Now, there’s two of your regulars just come in and they’re asking for you. You better get out there before they get fed up and leave.” Princess nodded absently and stood up wearing a crooked smile. She grabbed the bag containing her cards and pen and walked jerkily out onto the club floor.

Claudia muttered something inaudible as she followed Princess out of the room. She glanced at Michelle as she passed, and the ballerina shivered.

Michelle made it through the night in an alcoholic haze. She danced and drank, marching continuously a cold, straight, path between the stage and the bar. Sometimes Sam would come and talk to her for a minute, and sometimes she’d exchange a word with the bartender, who was not Mina, but another girl whose name she never did get. Late that night she walked home half-drunk and fell into bed.

The following day, she repeated the process almost exactly. By the end of it, she was beginning to show large purple bruises on her arms, knees, and shins. Every muscle in her body was twisted and ached, and there was no one to tell about it, no one to call. So this was the real world. Somehow she always thought it would be less painful.

Filed under: Julie Han, Michelle, Princess, alcohol, dancing by Jade