“These two got ID? We’re twenty-one and over.”
“I’m down a babysitter,” I explained. This was definitely a parenting low.
“You don’t say,” the bouncer said.
“Ugh! Fine!”
The sun wouldn’t go down for another hour and a half. After locking the twins in the backseat of the Impala with their stacks of library books and stern instructions not to unlock the car door foranyone, I headed back to the club. After I’d hung up with Miley O’Riley in front of the Library!, I’d called Miranda. With a shaking voice, she whispered she’d already seen Ralphie and Errol cruise by her house twice since I left. “What if they throw a grenade through the front window?” she said. “I have to tell Chauncey. I have to tell the cops.”
This was an option. Miranda could tell the cops everything. I had an alibi. The cops could stake out in front of Miranda’s house and maybe catch Ralphie and Errol as they drove by. But I wasn’t a total rube. Noone was going to let Miranda foster a baby, much less adopt, if law enforcement found out a bunch of white supremacists were after her for tasing an ODing man and stuffing him in a trunk.
And we couldn’t let Errol and Ralphie go free. They’d keep harassing Miranda. They’d find me. They’d get their revenge. I told myself I could survive having a finger chopped off. But I knew deep down whatever they did to me would be worse. Much worse.
I wasn’t a murderer. I didn’t have that worry and guilt hanging over me anymore. And the dead body in my backyard was gone too—hopefully for good. I was ready to move on from all of that, but also from my grief. I was ready to live a full life. Ralphie and Errol were the last remaining block. The truth was, writing jokes again had woken me up to the fact that to be truly alive, I needed to do my art. But I’d never be able to perform comedy publicly unless Ralphie and Errol were caught. And I really wanted to do my set at the Winter Will Never End Festival. Standing at the mic again would scare me almost as much as trying to lure out Ralphie and Errol. But it was time to do something really brave. To perform again. To clear all this up. To make sure Ralphie and Errol didn’t hurt me or anyone else.
On the phone outside the Library!, I’d told Miranda all of this and outlined my alternative idea for next steps. She was all for it.
Now, as I stepped into Huckleberry’s, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the strip club’s seedy lighting, the sequins and glitter, the men with lonely ravenous eyes, the women towering on their hollow plastic shoes. It was only five o’clock, but the place was already filling up with the Friday happy hour crowd. In a corner, a dancer in a thong and clear eight-inch pole shoes had her hands on the floor and her legs backed up wheelbarrow-style on either side of a wide-eyed man in a chair, who feasted his peepers on her bare rump.
A halo of cotton-candy-pink hair beckoned from the bar. Cheyenne’s microscopic mermaid-scales bikini and glittery skin made her mythic as she batted her eyelash extensions at a man with skin so pale it borderedon translucent. He looked like a mouse that had been dropped into an aquarium with a five-foot rat snake, the rat snake being Cheyenne.
She looked less than pleased to see me. “You here for a private show?” she said. “Because this guy is.”
“Actually I’m not,” he said and fled.
She sighed and gave a slow blink of her massive lashes. “He was finally ready to be in close proximity to a woman for the first time in three years. But you ruined it for him.”
“I’ll be quick,” I said.
She pointed at the cash machine. “Great. I’ll be waiting. It’s twenty a song in the VIP room.”
“Each song lasts about a minute,” a grandpa on a nearby stool warned.
“And don’t forget, Woo Girl. I feel most respected when tipped well,” Cheyenne added.
The ATM confirmed I had eighty-five dollars in my bank account, but the machine refused to give me eighty, citing the twelve-dollar fee. On a second try, it spit out three twenties. So much for tipping well.
Cheyenne took the Jacksons and my hand and guided me through some chintzy silver curtains into a little room with cheap LED light strips, a fuzzy bench seat, a pole, and way too many mirrors. The VIP room next door emanated Eminem and a man’s soft sobs.
“It’s okay, baby,” a woman murmured until the speakers in the corner of our little slice of strip-club heaven drowned her out.
Cheyenne was a mercenary in eight-inch heels and I had three minutes to convince her to do me a major favor. “Take off your shoes and sit,” I said, with as much authority as I could muster.
“That’s right. Hot-girl shit,” Cheyenne said. Now that I was a paying customer, her demeanor had changed entirely. She unstrapped her Sentient Strippers and sat on the bench.
After a scared glance at the floor (is there anything in this world more disgusting than strip-club carpet?), I sat down cross-legged and started rubbing one of her feet.
“You’re an angel.” Cheyenne groaned in surprise as I dug into her arch with my thumb.
I kept working, hoping to soften her up. “I’m wondering if you and a friend would be up for pole dancing behind me at the Winter Will Never End Festival tomorrow afternoon?” I said. “I’m doing a ten-minute comedy set about taking pole classes and I need two incredible pole dancers behind me to highlight my own incompetence.”
She opened one eye wide enough to shoot me a skeptical look as Dua Lipa and Megan Thee Stallion sang about giving someone a bite of their sweetest pie. “You doing comedy about being a woo girl?”
“Kind of. It’s more about how hard pole dancing is,” I said, putting extra pressure on her big toe mound. “And how strippers invented it. I want to talk about how women manage to survive and thrive in a capitalistic patriarchy hellbent on objectifying them.”
“Interesting,” she murmured.
“But it’s also about how surprised I am. That pole dancing makes me feel so much joy.”
