Lucy

 

I walked out of The Bounce House strip club and crossed the parking lot. It was as dead outside was it had been inside. The so-called ‘gentlemen’s club’ was in a seedy, rundown section of town, but I had heard on the street that a lot of money passed through it. Some of the girls made bank night after night.

 

I saw the ad in the local independent newspaper. The ad requested girls who were a cut above the rest and not afraid to bare it all. I had never done anything like that, but I had run out of options. Stripping was my last stop. There was nowhere left to go.

 

When I had left my parents’ house, I went to Dylan’s house first, but the windows were dark and there were no cars in the driveway. I peeked in and saw an empty house. I wondered how he’d picked up his family and relocated so quickly, but it wasn’t important. What mattered was he was gone. He probably wasn’t leaving his wife. He’d probably taken her with him.

 

With what money I had in my checking account, I checked into a cheap hotel room. I didn’t need anything fancy or expensive, just a bed and a shower. Carpet and wallpaper leftover from the age of disco didn’t hurt either. The musty room featured stained curtains, a dirty window that could only barely be seen through, and an air conditioner in the wall that clanged and knocked whenever it came on.

 

It was a roof over my head, and it was incredibly orange, which was better than the world outside. The city was just different shades of gray smudged together like a charcoal drawing. At night, it lit up with old yellow-brown street lights that merely emphasized the pools of darkness between them. Still, it was color.

 

From my 1970s hotel room, I had attempted to find a job. I had a handful of marketable office and people skills. I was a Harvard undergrad studying business and economics. All the opportunities in the city should have been open to me, but there was one problem: my dad knew every major businessman in the city.

 

He had gone ahead and taken the liberty of making sure there were no job opportunities available to me because I was pregnant out of wedlock. I had even been turned away by a few receptionists before even speaking to anyone because they simply knew who I was thanks to my dad. I was beginning to see the downside of being the daughter of a successful, wealthy, and powerful man like my father. He had everyone’s strings in his hand and could easily pull them, one by one.

 

I had taken dance classes back in high school. It wasn’t ballet or anything like that. My parents knew I never would have gone for anything that artsy. I learned real dances, like the waltz, tango, salsa, and dances like that. I learned how to move my body and use it to express myself. We had even focused on some popular dances, and not just traditional or formal dance styles. I knew how to handle myself enough to dance on the stage at a strip joint.

 

I figured I only had a few months to dance before the baby started to show, so I was going to work and save up enough money to get back on my feet by the time I started showing. At that time, I was probably going to have to figure something else out, but I was going to work on that while I was dancing. I had to take it one step at a time.

 

Before going in to get an interview, I got some bad news from the hotel manager. My account had been frozen. I had no money to continue paying for the room. On my way out to The Bounce House, I had to pack all my things up and carry them with me. I had left my pack outside the office before going in to see the sleazy owner.

 

I couldn’t believe he hadn’t given me the job after the way he had watched me. I saw the hunger in his eyes. He stared at me with his gray eyes and his shiny black hair slicked back. He scrutinized my every move from his leather desk chair. He’d kept one hand under the desk the whole time. I was sure he’d been touching himself while I stood in front of him.

 

His office was dark. There was one hard white light on his desk, but everything else was black, and not the black of my parents’ living room. Their black created a contrast to show just how sterile everything was. The black of his office emphasized the dead-end feel of his establishment. The place was as seedy as the world outside.

 

It hadn’t been much of an interview either. He didn’t ask me about myself other than to get my name. He hadn’t even introduced himself to me. It was like I was supposed to accept that he was who he said he was just because he sat behind the desk with a perverse hunger in his eyes.

 

I didn’t get a look at him from the waist down, which was probably a good thing, but I saw a few pieces of ink on his forearms. His vest looked like a biker vest with patches on it. The one patch I could read said Blade, so I figured that was his name, or at least what the gang called him.

 

After I walked out of his office, I cried.

 

I sat down on the curb at the edge of the parking lot and cried. Everything came crashing down on me at once. I had lost my virginity to a man who more than likely never cared about me at all. I was preparing to have a baby instead of starting my senior year of college. I had been kicked out of my house. I couldn’t find a job. I’d lost the one place I had to stay.

 

I was alone, and I was at the end of my rope. There was only one option left that I could see, and I didn’t want to take it. I didn’t want to sell my body to make ends meet. I’d heard stories about women getting stuck on the streets that way. It seemed like the way to make a good bit of money at first, but the story always seemed to go the same way. Once they started, they found it harder and harder to get back above it. That wasn’t going to be me.

 

I felt like there was a time limit on anything I was going to do. I had a baby on the way, and I didn’t foresee myself continuing to work immediately after it was born. It. I wasn’t even far enough along to know my baby’s gender. I was having to call my unborn child it.

 

I wept in the dirty, oil-stained parking lot under an old yellow streetlight. It was the first time I had cried since the whole thing began. I never cried; it was a sign of weakness in our home, and my dad insisted he wasn’t going to raise a weak daughter. Well, I wasn’t home anymore. A nice private cry in the parking lot of a strip joint wasn’t going to upset anyone who wasn’t there to see it.

 

The world was not what I had expected. Leaving my parents’ house, I had strange, romanticized notions of what the streets were like. There was always a way to make a buck. People who were down on their luck would stick together and help each other out. The people were colorful even if nothing else was.

 

But that wasn’t what I had encountered at all. Everyone I had met was out for themselves. They had no time to worry about anyone else while they were trying to get off the streets. There was always a way to make a buck; it was called prostitution. It was the lowest of the low, the most desperate act, and it was illegal. I wasn’t about to have my baby behind bars. Most of the people I had met were not colorful. They were as gray and dirty as the city streets they walked.

 

I figured I had hit rock bottom. I cried because I didn’t know what else to do. I could have gone home, but my dad would have shipped me off to family in Washington to have an abortion. At the end of summer, I would have returned to college as if nothing had happened, and I would have been expected to carry on like normal. Except I would have known what had happened, and I would have carried that guilt and shame with me without being able to divulge my truth to anyone.

 

I wanted to scream. I wanted to get up and run away, but there was nowhere else to go. I just sat there and waited. I didn’t really know what I was waiting for. A miracle, maybe.

 

In all the time I sat out there crying into my hands, not a single person walked by. No cars drove by. It was almost silent other than the far-off sounds of traffic, the interstate highway that cut through downtown, and the occasional siren. But all the city sounds were off in the distance. Nothing was going on where I was. I was at the end of everything. There was nothing beyond where I sat.

 

It was a horrible feeling. Nothing in my colorful, hopeful life had prepared me for this. I looked around me at empty parking garages, abandoned cars, and deserted gray streets. It was surreal. I tried to tell myself that if I were sitting in the empty parking lot of a strip club, I was better off than the girls inside trying to perform for an empty room. At least I wasn’t stuck having to work for nothing. I still had the opportunity to get off my ass and try to find another job.

 

Who was I kidding? I couldn’t even get a job dancing. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I buried my face between my knees and sobbed.

 

I did one thing wrong, one thing, and my whole life was ruined. I was supposed to be finishing school, dammit! I was supposed to be getting ready to go out into the world and pave my own way through it, not crying my eyes out in front of a strip club. And I certainly wasn’t supposed to be pregnant and alone.