talks. It never stops bobbing.
On the application, I make up a whole list of clubs and restaurants, change the year of my birth to make myself eighteen, then write out my fake name: Juliet . There isn’t even a space for a last name. They don’t want to know, I guess.
The Jessica-like girl onstage has transferred her lollipop into the wide-eyed customer’s mouth. A whooping holler breaks across the small crowd of men. Mustache comes back toward me, pulling my application from the bar and scanning the pages quickly, mumbling hmm s and uh-huh s, as he reads.
“So …” I swallow hard, tap again against my back. Nine, nine, six, counting the numbers silently, quickly in my head. Time for part three of my plan. “Would I be able to take a look around the club, you know, to get a better sense of the place?”
Just as he looks up from the paper and opens his mouth to answer me, one of the waitresses cuts between us.
“Howard, look, I was supposed to be out of here forever ago , okay? And I finally convinced this dipshit at table twelve that he needed to pay his twelve-hour eight-hundred-dollar bill so that I could go home , and now the piece-of-shit credit card machine decides it doesn’t really feel like working right now . So, can we figure this shit out? My night off started, like, six hours ago.” She taps her foot, twitching as she speaks, glaring at him and ignoring me. I start twitching, too, just watching her.
The manager puts his hands on her bare shoulders, glancing quickly at the sparkling triangle of thong between her thighs. “Take it easy, Amber. I’ll fix it, all right?” He turns back to me. “You can take a walk around the club, talk to some of the girls, you know, whatever you want.” He says it like it was his idea in the first place, like he’s already my boss. I weave through a cramped maze of red and black tabletops with Tens written in cursive across the face of each. The air has a thick look to it. The floor is covered in wall-to-wall plush black carpeting. About a third of the tables are occupied—small clots of customers between big pockets of emptiness. Most of the tables are just a mess of paper napkins and plastic multicolored toothpicks and green olives and different size glasses and hairy forearms and wedding-banded fingers.
The underage-seeming boys are closer to the stage, sporting matching SIGMA TAU GAMMA T-shirts in matching navy blue—I bet these are the boys that Kevin DiGiulio and Brad Kemp and Tony Matthews will become in a maximum of three minutes post high-school graduation.
A waitress pushes past me with a tray of drinks, flashing me a look of frustration. She’s the Simone Rothbait of Tens, I decide: she looks way too old to work here. Some people think that Simone is secretly on parole and can’t graduate until it’s over—and that she’s been on parole for fifteen years. That’s why she’s always so pissy, and in all the slacker classes—at this point, she’s given up the jig. Simone Rothbait will be in high school forever .
I move quickly out of the waitress’s way, as I do with actual Simone when I cross her path at Carver, and grasp harder on to the butterfly in my pocket. Five rows of six tables. Thirty tables. Three x ten. I focus on the three, push the ten somewhere else for now. I’ll deal with ten later. The red-haired dancer appears from behind the stage, and I follow her, into the hallway that stretches along the back of the club.
Remember . You’re not Lo. You’re Juliet. You’re new.
“Excuse me. ” I tap the red-haired girl on the shoulder and resist the urge to tap her other shoulder as well.
She whips around, the look on her face fading quickly from anger to confusion. Keri—I realize—she’s the Keri Ram. Teen Queen. Pretty Princess, but with enough very minor imperfections, close-up, to render her unhateable to even the very jealous types. “Can I help you with something?”
“Uh, hi. Yes. I’m, um, applying for a job,
On the application, I make up a whole list of clubs and restaurants, change the year of my birth to make myself eighteen, then write out my fake name: Juliet . There isn’t even a space for a last name. They don’t want to know, I guess.
The Jessica-like girl onstage has transferred her lollipop into the wide-eyed customer’s mouth. A whooping holler breaks across the small crowd of men. Mustache comes back toward me, pulling my application from the bar and scanning the pages quickly, mumbling hmm s and uh-huh s, as he reads.
“So …” I swallow hard, tap again against my back. Nine, nine, six, counting the numbers silently, quickly in my head. Time for part three of my plan. “Would I be able to take a look around the club, you know, to get a better sense of the place?”
Just as he looks up from the paper and opens his mouth to answer me, one of the waitresses cuts between us.
“Howard, look, I was supposed to be out of here forever ago , okay? And I finally convinced this dipshit at table twelve that he needed to pay his twelve-hour eight-hundred-dollar bill so that I could go home , and now the piece-of-shit credit card machine decides it doesn’t really feel like working right now . So, can we figure this shit out? My night off started, like, six hours ago.” She taps her foot, twitching as she speaks, glaring at him and ignoring me. I start twitching, too, just watching her.
The manager puts his hands on her bare shoulders, glancing quickly at the sparkling triangle of thong between her thighs. “Take it easy, Amber. I’ll fix it, all right?” He turns back to me. “You can take a walk around the club, talk to some of the girls, you know, whatever you want.” He says it like it was his idea in the first place, like he’s already my boss. I weave through a cramped maze of red and black tabletops with Tens written in cursive across the face of each. The air has a thick look to it. The floor is covered in wall-to-wall plush black carpeting. About a third of the tables are occupied—small clots of customers between big pockets of emptiness. Most of the tables are just a mess of paper napkins and plastic multicolored toothpicks and green olives and different size glasses and hairy forearms and wedding-banded fingers.
The underage-seeming boys are closer to the stage, sporting matching SIGMA TAU GAMMA T-shirts in matching navy blue—I bet these are the boys that Kevin DiGiulio and Brad Kemp and Tony Matthews will become in a maximum of three minutes post high-school graduation.
A waitress pushes past me with a tray of drinks, flashing me a look of frustration. She’s the Simone Rothbait of Tens, I decide: she looks way too old to work here. Some people think that Simone is secretly on parole and can’t graduate until it’s over—and that she’s been on parole for fifteen years. That’s why she’s always so pissy, and in all the slacker classes—at this point, she’s given up the jig. Simone Rothbait will be in high school forever .
I move quickly out of the waitress’s way, as I do with actual Simone when I cross her path at Carver, and grasp harder on to the butterfly in my pocket. Five rows of six tables. Thirty tables. Three x ten. I focus on the three, push the ten somewhere else for now. I’ll deal with ten later. The red-haired dancer appears from behind the stage, and I follow her, into the hallway that stretches along the back of the club.
Remember . You’re not Lo. You’re Juliet. You’re new.
“Excuse me. ” I tap the red-haired girl on the shoulder and resist the urge to tap her other shoulder as well.
She whips around, the look on her face fading quickly from anger to confusion. Keri—I realize—she’s the Keri Ram. Teen Queen. Pretty Princess, but with enough very minor imperfections, close-up, to render her unhateable to even the very jealous types. “Can I help you with something?”
“Uh, hi. Yes. I’m, um, applying for a job,
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