“You’re doing the skull thing again,” she said on day nine, appearing beside me in the dressing room mirror with her arms crossed and her eyeliner already immaculate at six in the evening.
“I’m not.”
“Lena. You’ve been staring at that false lash for four minutes. You haven’t moved.”
I looked down at the lash in my fingers, sighing softly. She wasn’t wrong.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“The loan sharks?”
“They’ve been quiet.” That much was true, anyway. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
Sofia sat down.
“Did something happen that night? After you left?”
I applied the lash with great concentration.
“I walked home.”
There was a short pause, then she called, “Elena.”
“I’m fine, Sofia.” I met her eyes in the mirror, and I put enough steadiness into it that she let it go, albeit reluctantly.
I turned back to my reflection and thought about a suite full of city lights and a man who listened like the information actually mattered. And then I closed the door on that thought firmly and went back to putting my makeup on.
The transfer came through on day thirteen.
I’d applied for the Golovin two weeks before the alley, before everything. The casino was bigger, the production more prestigious, the pay nearly forty percent more than The Constellation. It was the kind of show that had a waiting list. I’d auditioned on a Thursday afternoon in a borrowed leotard and told myself not to hope, and then I’d put it out of my mind entirely because I was good at putting things out of my mind, and the following days had given me considerably more pressing things to focus on.
The email arrived while I was eating cereal at my kitchen counter.
“Congratulations. We are pleased to offer you a position in the ensemble cast of VOLNAYA at the Golovin Grand Casino Resort. Your first rehearsal is scheduled—”
I read it three times. Then I called Sofia.
“I got the Golovin,” I said when she picked up.
She screamed. Actually screamed, loud enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear, and I heard her say something in Spanish to someone in her vicinity, and then she was back.
“Itoldyou. I told you they’d want you, I said it after the audition—”
“I know.”
“This is everything. Lena, this is more money, this is a real production—”
“I know.”
This was me getting closer to what I’d come to Vegas for, at twenty-two and barely funded and stupid with hope. The success and full life I’d always wanted—I could say I was now beginning to start making money and plans. Not the debt, not the loan sharks, not the strange grief of a night I couldn’t categorize.
“I start next week,” I told my best friend.
“We’re celebrating,” Sofia said immediately. “Tonight. I’m not taking no.”
“I have an early—”
“Tonight, Elena. Put on something that makes you feel good and meet me at eight. Some things are not negotiable.”
