The Butterfly Clues (12 page)

So far, everything’s going smoothly. I made a plan on my way here:

1) Find club

2) Find manager

3) Find out more about Sapphire, in whatever way I can

4) Try not to get killed

One and two I’ve got down. I’m working on three and four.

“Work experience?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah. Yes. Absolutely.” I put my hands on my hips and push my chest out—normally, I try to hide my C-cup boobs, but now, they might be just what I need—just a little, three little juts, as I gaze around the club, formulating answers: I’ve never been to a strip club before, and Tens is not what I imagined. I thought it would be glossy, larger-than-life and distant, like a movie.

Instead it’s just a dim room, and there’s a lingering cigarette smell in the air and a half sweet, half sour liquor-y smell layered somewhere beneath it and big men dressed all in black clomping onto the main floor from what must be a basement or secret level below, watching, waiting.

The customers—the men lined up at the bars and at the tables— look surprisingly normal. I guess I expected some leering, bug-eyed creepers. But they look like guys my dad might play golf with, newly beer-bellied and taking a load off in their post-work polos. One table is full of boys just barely older than I am. They’re laughing too loud, at jokes I’m sure aren’t funny.

A girl with feathery dyed-red hair slides down the pole cross-legged, her back arching toward the audience.
Look. No hands.

Her skin puckers slightly against the slick-looking metal, thigh-sliding, ankle-gripping, all of her skin flashing in the light. She seems to be floating through air, her body pliable and shiny as bubble gum.

She makes it look like the whole thing’s a breeze: capturing metal between thighs, making it melt between warm skin and muscle. I can’t imagine being her, being up there, eyes snaking over every inch of my skin.

I focus my eyes back on Mustache. “I just moved here from … Chicago. But I was working there, for a while, in a club. Waitressing.”

His eyes rove up and down my body, lingering momentarily on my slightly lopsided boobs (can he tell?); a sick feeling floods my belly. I force myself to keep smiling.

“You seem like a good girl. Good body, good attitude, good face, nice long, thick hair—you got an Irish look to you. You Irish?”

I shrug, again, again, trying not to shrink into myself. “I don’t think so.” Hearing his “assessments,” I feel both weirdly satisfied that
I’m good enough
and disgusted with myself for caring and then, again, more of the half-sick-feeling excitement.

“That’s what we’re looking for around here,” he continues, rocking back and forth slightly in his leather shoes, lips pursed and hands perched on his hips in a way that makes him look oddly feminine. “Just lost a girl, so we’re definitely looking for, uh, some, uh, new blood.” His eyebrows crease together. “You’re eighteen, right?”

The way he so casually throws out the phrases
lost a girl
and
new blood
makes me stiffen, though I answer yes with three curt nods.

“Let me get you an application,” he says. “Stay right here.” He pushes through swinging doors just next to the deejay booth; I make out a dimly lit hallway, and what must be the entrance to the office, before the doors swing shut again.

A new girl takes the stage. She is wearing sparkly pink underwear, and sprawls majestically onto her taut stomach, then cat-crawls, lollipop in mouth, toward a wide-eyed customer in the first row. She’s Tens’ answer to Carver High’s Jessica Fisk-Morgan: The Cheerleader. All sugar and fluff. Ever vapid, ever bouncy, she earned yearbook superlatives “First to get Married” and “First to get Pregnant” four years in a row. It makes me feel better to think of the girl onstage this way, less freaked out and out of place.

Mustache returns with several slips of paper, clipped together, and slaps it on the bar. “Go ahead and fill out the forms and I’ll give ’em a look-over, ask you some questions, see if you’re a good fit.” His head bobs as he talks. It never stops bobbing.

On the application, I make up a whole list of clubs and restaurants, change the year of my birth to make myself eighteen, then write out my fake name:
Juliet
. There isn’t even a space for a last name. They don’t want to know, I guess.

The Jessica-like girl onstage has transferred her lollipop into the wide-eyed customer’s mouth. A whooping holler breaks across the small crowd of men. Mustache comes back toward me, pulling my application from the bar and scanning the pages quickly, mumbling
hmm
s and
uh-huh
s, as he reads.

“So …” I swallow hard, tap again against my back. Nine, nine, six, counting the numbers silently, quickly in my head. Time for part three of my plan. “Would I be able to take a look around the club, you know, to get a better sense of the place?”

Just as he looks up from the paper and opens his mouth to answer me, one of the waitresses cuts between us.

“Howard, look, I was supposed to be out of here
forever ago
, okay? And I finally convinced this dipshit at table twelve that he needed to pay his twelve-hour eight-hundred-dollar bill so that I could
go home
, and now the piece-of-shit credit card machine decides it doesn’t really feel like
working
right now
.
So, can we figure this shit out? My night off started, like, six hours ago.” She taps her foot, twitching as she speaks, glaring at him and ignoring me. I start twitching, too, just watching her.

The manager puts his hands on her bare shoulders, glancing quickly at the sparkling triangle of thong between her thighs. “Take it easy, Amber. I’ll fix it, all right?” He turns back to me. “You can take a walk around the club, talk to some of the girls, you know, whatever you want.” He says it like it was his idea in the first place, like he’s already my boss. I weave through a cramped maze of red and black tabletops with
Tens
written in cursive across the face of each. The air has a thick look to it. The floor is covered in wall-to-wall plush black carpeting. About a third of the tables are occupied—small clots of customers between big pockets of emptiness. Most of the tables are just a mess of paper napkins and plastic multicolored toothpicks and green olives and different size glasses and hairy forearms and wedding-banded fingers.

The underage-seeming boys are closer to the stage, sporting matching
SIGMA TAU GAMMA
T-shirts in matching navy blue—I bet these are the boys that Kevin DiGiulio and Brad Kemp and Tony Matthews will become in a maximum of three minutes post high-school graduation.

A waitress pushes past me with a tray of drinks, flashing me a look of frustration. She’s the Simone Rothbait of Tens, I decide: she looks way too old to work here. Some people think that Simone is secretly on parole and can’t graduate until it’s over—and that she’s been on parole for fifteen years. That’s why she’s always so pissy, and in all the slacker classes—at this point, she’s given up the jig. Simone Rothbait will be in high school
forever
.

I move quickly out of the waitress’s way, as I do with actual Simone when I cross her path at Carver, and grasp harder on to the butterfly in my pocket.
Five rows of six tables. Thirty tables. Three x ten.
I focus on the three, push the ten somewhere else for now. I’ll deal with ten later. The red-haired dancer appears from behind the stage, and I follow her, into the hallway that stretches along the back of the club.

Remember
.
You’re not Lo. You’re Juliet. You’re new.

“Excuse me. ” I tap the red-haired girl on the shoulder and resist the urge to tap her other shoulder as well.

She whips around, the look on her face fading quickly from anger to confusion. Keri—I realize—she’s the Keri Ram. Teen Queen. Pretty Princess, but with enough very minor imperfections, close-up, to render her unhateable to even the very jealous types. “Can I help you with something?”

“Uh, hi. Yes. I’m, um, applying for a job, and the manager told me to look around the club, talk to the girls. So, can I? Talk to you about the club, I mean?” I don’t know where to look as I speak to her. My eyes keep gravitating down toward the sparkly purple thong hugging the sides of her waist, capped in hot pink fringe and swaying gently as she moves.

I tug at my Gap tank top and just-barely-above-the-kneelength jean skirt (from eighth grade), Mom’s tacky old heels from the eighties, suddenly aware that I must look, to her, like a child, a narc, a visitor from a foreign land.

But her face relaxes. She runs a hand through her hair. “Oh. Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s the same here as anywhere, but …” She shrugs, then bends over to remove her black rhinestone-studded high heels, one by one, wincing slightly and motioning to a hallway in front of us. “I’m heading to the break room right now if you wanna come. Quieter there. Easier to talk.”

A security guard grants us entrance into a cordoned-off hallway. I
tap tap tap, banana
so so softly.

“Duck,” the redheaded girl warns me. “Ceiling’s too low.”

There are five girls in the break room, six including me, and we’ve just finished making introductions. The girl who reminds me of Keri Ram is named Marnie, and the others introduce themselves as Suzie, Randi, Lucy, and Lacey. I can’t help but assume they’ve all got made-up names. They reapply makeup, toy with different styles of too-small lacy G-strings, spray perfumes onto their wrists and ankles and necks. Two of them finish smoking their cigarettes at nearly the same time, both pulling new ones out of separate packs almost immediately after stubbing out the old, becoming visibly less twitchy as soon as they relight. For some reason, seeing this relaxes me a little—they’re nervous, too. Masking it as best they can. Just getting by.

Lacey has a mole on her cheek. She has just finished giving me a rundown of club rules. Nails must be painted at all times. No full nudity on the pole. Two sick days a month, suspension for no-call no-show. No drugs.

“But don’t worry”—Suzie exhales a cloud of smoke—“they’re
so
not that strict about that.”

“So, you feel pretty safe here?” I try and steer the conversation toward Sapphire. “I mean, nobody creeps you out?”

“Once in a while there are situations—you know how it goes.” Marnie shrugs. “Sometimes someone makes it past security, comes charging into the dressing room all lit up. But nothing crazy. Same shit as everywhere, you know?”

“And the customers aren’t allowed to touch us,” says Lacey. “No hands. Not that that stops most of them from trying. If they try to get up onstage or anything we’re allowed to throw a shoe at their heads. It’s in our contract.”

“But that doesn’t usually happen?” I ask, working at the hem of my skirt. There’s a slightly twisted expression on Randi’s face; she’s staring at me through the mirror.

Lacey continues, furrowing her brow: “Most of them definitely
try
to see how far they can get—usually some drunk old guy with a lot of money who thinks he can do whatever he wants. But the bouncers are usually on top of it.”

“And,” says Marnie, “we got some great regulars, too.” She pulls a wad of sweaty cash from between her symmetrical cantaloupe boobs and zips it into the interior of the black leather purse slung across her chair. “Moneybags in business suits, dumb frat boys with a trust fund. Bachelor parties.”

“I
hate
bachelor parties.” Lacey pouts.

Marnie ignores her. “You’ve got such a baby face, you’ll do great. Wednesday’s costume night—put on a school girl outfit, or some cat ears … the guys’ll love it.”

The dead cat flashes into my head. It keeps doing this: assaulting my field of vision, not letting me forget. The big question—the reason I came here in the first place—stretches itself long between my teeth and practically leaps from my mouth.
Time to go for it, Lo. Just. Ask.

“Didn’t you work with a girl who was just killed? Sapphire?”

The girls all stop dressing and lip-sticking and hair-curling and are still for a moment. I hold my breath through the agonizing pause.
One, two, three …

The dam breaks.

“Sapphire,” Suzie cuts through the new silence in a quavery voice. She looks at the other girls, as though asking permission to speak. But the mood in the room has shifted: they’re all looking somewhere else—at their feet, at the walls, at their long polished nails. She begins anyway, hesitantly at first: “Yeah, we knew her. She was one of the good ones—you know, showed up on time, would lend you a twenty if you were having a slow start and needed a drink. She was funny as shit, too. Not a pissed-off drunk, like the rest of us.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out more as a cough.

“She used to cover for me whenever Colin got sick—he’s my son—even if he just had a cold or something,” Randi adds, lacing a pair of stilettos higher up her thighs than I knew boots could reach. “She cared. She really did. Yeah. She was good people.” She finishes lacing with remarkable speed and goes over to the lockers, pointing to one with long French-manicured fingernails. “This used to be her locker. It’ll be yours, now, if you take the job. She left some crap in it. You can just take it, I guess.”