how to get one for free.
Cricket never forgave me for being born, but I was a constant companion during her lonely life. I entertained her ambition, stayed in my corner of the dressing room while she danced naked under the red-hot lights above the stage, and I believed her when she said it was just a pit stop on the way to our real lives with a house and a pet.
She didn’t give a fuck about me.
Had she, I wouldn’t have spent my childhood in a strip club, tricked to believe it was liberation. If she loved me, she would’ve tried harder to change after we slept in the Buick the first time. Cricket wouldn’t have moved me into a house with a man who lingered outside my bedroom door at night, and she wouldn’t have let her only daughter walk in on her trading her body for drug money.
Cricket didn’t love anyone. Not even herself.
I stayed with my friend, whose name I don’t remember, for two nights after I realized the truth about my mom. Her room had roaches, the bathroom walls were covered in mildew, and her parents chain-smoked in the house. They hoarded, but I didn’t care. They were honest about their dysfunction, and I hoped to stay hidden behind the stacks of boxes and bags of trash for as long as I could. Didn’t happen that way.
“I think you need to go,” nameless friend said on what would have been night three. “My mom is starting to ask a lot of questions, and I really don’t want to tell her the truth.”
In two short years, my mom would be dead, and I’d belong to the streets. But I didn’t have it in me yet and went back to Mom and Marty.
Mom sat on a rickety, sun-bleached plastic chair against the front of the house. She was barefoot and sucking a long drag from a cigarette when I approached. The cherry at the end of her Camel Crush burned neon orange, and she accidentally kicked over a can of beer crossing her legs.
“Don’t you dare judge me,” she’d said behind a billow of cigarette smoke. “Someone has to support your lazy asses around here.”
She didn’t ask where I’d been, if I was hurt, or if I’d be staying. Her concern wasn’t that I’d caught her in a compromising position at the club, but that I didn’t condemn her for it. I was expected to accept it like I’d been fooled into accepting my entire irrational upbringing. But I’d finally figured it out.
Marty waited for me inside with a drunk smile on his fat face, and he said, “Where the fuck you been at?”
I’d known Marty was disgusting, but there were holes in the veil Cricket kept over my eyes. Marty was dangerous.
“If you come near me, I’ll kill you,” I said. I think it was the first mean thing I’d ever said aloud to anyone in my life.
It was the kindest thing I’d done for myself.
Cricket continued like nothing happened, but I’d woken to the transgressions of the sinners around me overnight. What I’d once considered powerful had turned intolerable, and I didn’t sit in the dressing room while my mom danced again. If I couldn’t stay with my nameless friend or avoid Marty at the house, I sat at the club’s bar with my back to the stage. Cricket had lost her magic when the track marks started to appear on her arms and neck, so she danced less and fucked strangers more.
The bartender served me spiked sodas and let me eat as many baskets of peanuts as I wanted. That’s how I got to know Marcel, the tall Polish security guard who’d pointed me toward the devil’s closet a few weeks prior. Marcel was in his early twenties, wore the same dingy hoodie every day, and had a patchy beard. He was nice to me, and I’d felt rebellious.
He called me pretty.
“Yeah, I know,” I’d said.
He called me prettier than Cricket. “That bitch is going to get fired if she doesn’t put down the dope.”
“Yeah, I know that, too.”
“She’s fucked-up, Cara,” Marcel had said.
I rolled my eyes. “My name is Lydia.”
He laughed loudly with the bartender and asked, “Who the fuck is Cara? My bad, girl.”
Marcel was my first kiss. A couple of days after he stuck his tongue into my mouth, I asked if he’d have sex with me. Motivated by curiosity and spite, I wanted to know how it felt as much as