Madison

Three Days Earlier

“So this club.” Johnson is a professional bouncer. Nobody knows he's a nineteen-year-old runaway. He looks like a 27-year-old football player. His driver's license says something in between. We're friends from grammar school days, and I know all his ups and downs. His mama kicked him out of the house when she caught him fooling around with his boyfriend. You'd think a woman who lived all her life in Sin City would be a little more relaxed about the gay, but she's fucked in the head and there's no changing it.

So. If there's one thing you can do in Vegas, it's get a new name and the paper to go with it. Johnson is now twenty-three and a bouncer, and it's a useful friendship because he can get me into all the cool clubs even though I'm only eighteen.

He watches out for me because he's my brother from another mother and also because he knows the secret nobody else can know.

I'm the last virgin in Vegas. People think I'm a girl who acts out and makes a lot of noise, and I got tossed into the troubled class at my high school after a few shoplifting incidents. High school being what it is, that was enough to make me seem cool. But now high school is over, and I need to get caught up with everybody else.

There's a place outside Caesar's Palace where you can buy fancy snow cones, and I put in an order for a nice blueberry with condensed milk on it, New Orleans style.

Johnson mumbles around and then orders what he always orders, a tall green smoothie with too much kale in it.

It's my turn to pay, especially if I'm gonna talk his ear off, so I tap my phone to the booth's credit card reader, and it twitches in my hand to let me know it worked.“Yeah, so the new club I joined is kind of crazy. That new girl started it.The one from Mississippi. You know how Southern girls are. They shriek a lot when they get excited.”

“Boys like shrieking.” Johnson smiles a teasing smile. “It soothes the male ego.”

The clerk delivers our drinks. There are tables with umbrellas but it's too hot to sit outside. Better to keep moving. Without needing to talk about it, we drift in the direction of the Bellagio dancing fountains. Watching fountains dance to bad music doesn't make us feel any cooler, but the drinks are well-chilled.

“Fuck you.” There's no force in my words. Johnson already knows I'm not a shrieky kind of girl. “So. anyway, this club, it's called Club Sugar Daddy, and we're all pledged to nail some rich fucker who's going to take care of us.”

“Isn't that kind of what girls do anyway?”

“Kinda. But more targeted. The guy has to qualify as a bona fide member of the one percent. Not just in a sexual sense but in a financial sense.”

“Hmm.”

“Don't judge, Johnson. I know perfectly well you've started dating that banker.”

“I didn't know he was a banker when he picked me up at the gym. I'm not checking out the dude's car when he's butt-naked in the sauna.”

I might or might not believe Johnson didn't know how rich his sugar daddy was from the get-go, but it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. “Well, I'm expected to know exactly what I'm doing. I don't want to let down the members of the club, you know?”

He shrugs, and we drop the subject of Club Sugar Daddy for now.

“What do you know about Inflated Celery?” I ask. The name makes it sound like a band, but it's actually a hot new music club. A lot of indies play there.

All he's got for me today is shrugs. “That's bigger than the places I usually work. So I don't know any more than you do.”

“How would you go about meeting Noah Hammond if you wanted to meet him?”

“Get there before soundcheck? Bat my eyelashes a lot?”

“You're a big fucking help.”

Without talking about it, we're both walking in the direction of the nearest air-conditioning. “I'll bring some refreshments over around seven,” he says. “Hold your place in line so you can grab a restroom break.”

“Thanks. I'll pay for your ticket.”

“No need. I'm working that night so I won't be staying around. I'll collect on the favor later.” He pretend-punches my arm, and now we're inside the Bellagio mall, the kind of place where they sell jewels that cost more than houses and purses that cost more than cars. Who buys that stuff?

Me, maybe. If I play my cards right as a charter member of Club Sugar Daddy.

“Why do you want to meet that guy anyway?” Johnson asks. “He isn't any good for your club, is he? I mean, he's a musician, I doubt he's any member of the one percent. Have you checked CelebrityNetWorth to see what he's got?”

“They say they're still collecting data.”

Everybody on the internet already knows what that means, but he has to say it anyway. “Well, I can tell you one thing, honey. He ain't any billionaire if they're still collecting data.”

I give him some serious side-eye over the last of my snow cone. “I'm not meeting him for the club, Johnson. I'm meeting him for the music. Nothing's going to happen between me and Noah Hammond. This is my night off from Club Sugar Daddy. I want one wild night to be a kid before I get serious about finding Mr. Right. You remember being eighteen, Johnson? After all, we used to be the same age.”

“Mmmm.” Through the window of a snooty store with wide shelves that throw a spotlight on eight leather bags, Johnson spots a baby blue purse the color of the streak in my hair. “How much you think that is?”

“Fifty-three thousand,” I say. “I checked it online.”

“Fuck me. Lot of money for a purse.”

“A lot of money to us is nothing money to some people.”

We don't really have our noses against the glass, but it feels that way. I grab Johnson's hand and keep walking him toward the casino. We're a few steps in before a guard stops us to ask if we're twenty-one.

Johnson isn't the only one with a false driver's license. Five minutes later, we're both wearing wristbands.

The state of Nevada and I have some differences of opinion. Eighteen's old enough to join the army and kill people. It's old enough to get married. I've made the executive decision that it's plenty old enough to stick some twenty dollar bills into some fucking slot machines.