“We don’t call the series Intro to Pole,” the woman explained. “We call it Pole Virgins. After you complete the series, you’ll be a Pole Kitten.”
“Meow?” I managed.
“Don’t worry. I’ll explain all about pole names later. I’m Salma,” she said. “Salma Hayek.” Which was surreal given that an aughts Salma Hayek was her celebrity doppelgänger. She shepherded me into the “chill room,” where students hung out until class started. As I stuffed my puffy coat into a cubby, a fellow Pole Virgin popped up beside me.
“Hi! I’m Layna!” she chirped. “My soon-to-be ex-husband is a douchebag. That’s why I’m here. This is my first class!” Her face was candid and cheerful, her dark hair in a bouncy ponytail. She looked like she was in her late thirties and owned a label maker and a TJ Maxx/HomeGoods credit card.
“I’m Tilly,” I said. “Tell me more.”
“A couple months after our daughter left for college I found out the douchebag was cheating. Now I’m going through the Big D. Divorce. So I gotta do something just for me, you know?”
Since my mom died, I’d been trying to pretend I was fine. But this woman clearly had no such impulse.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through it,” I said. “But as my septuagenarian babysitter said right before I left for class, ‘Hopefully you’ll be body rolling up on a tasty young personal trainer in no time.’” Had I made a joke? How long had it been?
Layna plunked down on the couch and hugged a pillow that read:Bitch, don’t kill my vibe. “Why’d you decide to come?” she asked, as if the decision to take a pole dancing class was as significant as getting a divorce, running for public office, or having a kid.
“I’ve been told I need a hobby,” I said. “I tried scrapbooking, but it filled me with existential despair.” It was true. All my scrapbooking stuff was in my trunk, waiting to be dumped at Goodwill.
“I used to scrapbook,” Layna said. “Now I have fifteen perfectly crafted books full of photos of me and my husband and our daughter at Disney. Only now I don’t want to look at them because the douchebag probably had a threesome with Moana and Jasmine. So don’t give me that hobby stuff. This is a safe space.”
Friendship begins the moment one person overshares and the other person responds in kind. But I had too much misfortune to unload in a soundbite.
“I’m here because I’m in a slump,” I said. “I make my kids’ lunches on Sunday night. Ten turkey sandwiches. And I freeze them. And I send them to lunch with blocks of ice that are probably only half-thawed by lunchtime.” In truth, I’d only sent the twins to school with freezer sandwiches for a week, and as soon as they grumbled, I put money in the Therapy Jar. (I tossed a bill in anytime I had a major Mom Fail, so the twins would have a head start on paying for counseling.) But still, the sandwich anecdote gave a good snapshot of my mental state.
Layna made that littlemmmmhsound people make in church or at poetry readings. “Packing school lunches,” she said, “is a goddamn beatdown.”
I realized I liked her. A lot.
“And on that note,” Salma Hayek called from the doorway. She’d shucked her sweatpants to reveal what looked like leopard-print bikini bottoms. “It’s time for class.”
Three
Monday, Presidents’ Day
Now my teeth chattered convulsively and my hands shook as I stared down at the man crammed into my trunk. Was he dead? He was still as a mannequin, his open mouth forever paused at the end of a death rattle. I reached out and touched the back of his hand. Ice cold. Time slowed to the pace of the numbers creeping across his neck in black ink. They read:23/16. I’d seen that tattoo before. I’d seen this man before. Last night.
“Jesus Christ,” Layna said. “Jesus fucking Christ. What—? What the—?” She started making strange noises, like maybe she was hyperventilating.
“He’s dead,” I said. I must’ve been in shock because I’d picked up my scrapbooking scissors, the blood on their long sharp blades dried to a rusty maroon. My last name was on the handle in my mother’s handwriting. She’d always been obsessive about labeling things, maybe because she couldn’t afford to replace anything lost.
The sound of Layna slamming the trunk shut made me startle. The scissors clattered to the asphalt, skittering to the middle of the parking lot.
A Boise Co-op cashier with a severe black bob and huge hot-pink feather earrings appeared from behind the dumpster, where all the employees went for smoke breaks. While I watched, helpless and immobile except for my clattering teeth, she scooped up the scissors, using her green apron to hold the edge of the handles.
“The Satanists must’ve killed another goose out here,” the cashier muttered. “Assholes.”
The sliding glass doors of the co-op swallowed her up.
“Oh no! Oh no no!” I cried. “Those are my scrapbooking scissors! They have my fingerprints on them. And—” I couldn’t squeeze out the words:And the dead guy’s blood. And my last name.
My knees wobbled. I was a split second from collapsing onto the icy asphalt when the Impala’s back door swung open. “Mom! Mom! What is it?” Phoebe called.
More adrenaline shot through me and I went into Mom Mode. “There’s a spider in the trunk,” I said. Spiders were my go-to for anything that scared me that I didn’t want the twins to know about. Boise was absolutely made of spiders. “Close the door, honey. You’ll let the cold in.”
The car door clicked reluctantly shut, but the twins’ round faces popped up in the back window.
Layna gasped. “They’re straight out ofThe Shining.”
