Page 6 of Dance of Devils

Val grins widely. “Ayyy, that’s my girl,” he chuckles, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and slipping one between his perfectly sculpted lips. “Look at Ms. Thang over here, just walking down the street catching number.”

I roll my eyes again. “C’mon,” I sigh, slipping the mask back into place. Covering the fear. Covering the dirty, raw, unclean Brooklyn that I can’t let anyone see, least of all my friends. “We’re going to be late.”

The rehearsal daygoes by in a blur. I have some time to kill before I need to get to my other job, so I end up hanging in the back alley with Val, Naomi, Milena, and Evie for a while. Then I shower, actually washing my hair this time, and get dressed before hightailing it to the subway.

An hour later, I’m getting off the G train at Greenpoint Ave. I hustle my way through the trendier streets of Greenpoint until the hipster beer bars and coffeeshops give way to warehouses and broken streetlights.

I round the last corner and pause for a second across the street from The Mirage, taking in the flickering neon sign over the building announcing “GIRLS GIRLS GI-LS”with a missing R, the parking lot full of sleek street racing cars, and lots of motorcycles.

Like I said, ballet paysshit. And being poor is, ironically, expensive. So are Derrick’s legal bills. And while working at a cocktail bar, café, or anywhere else where I’d keep my fucking clothes on sounds nice, they also don’t pay enough.

Stripping does.

There are closer places to take my clothes off for money than Greenpoint, obviously. But when I was thinking about taking the plunge and dancing on a fucking pole a little over a year ago, Valbrought me out with some of his friends for someone’s birthday, and we all ended up at Centerfolds in Midtown.

That’s the night I realized I had to choose a place further out, where nobody who might know me might accidentally blunder in.

Like The Mirage.

The place is a sticky, grimy shithole, the clientele are usually rough, and Lou, the owner-manager, is…

A predator.

A shiver ripples down my back as I inhale deeply and start to cross the street.

But the money is great, and some of the girls I’ve met here, like Maya, are amazing.

The sound of a door banging open and men laughing loudly yanks my attention away from the club and to one of the warehouses. Two guys stumble out from what sounds like a party inside, swigging beers as they unzip and pee against the side of the building.

“Fastest grand I ever made,” one of them laughs. “That was a quick fucking fight, bro.”

Ahhh, okay. Not a party. A fight club. I don’t know who hosts these things, but they’ve had them at the warehouse across the street from The Mirage a couple of times before.

I turn away to walk toward the employee entrance at the back of the club.

“Hey! Cherry!”

It’s not a name I hear outside the club. “Cherry”, as in “Cherry Pie”, is my namein there. Out here, I’m still Brooklyn.

So the unexpectedness of hearing that name yanks my head around before I can stop myself.

Instantly, my stomach drops.

I recognize the four finance bros from last night—they were in with a buddy for his bachelor party. The groom-to-be got a little too drunk, and was sloppy trying to hide the fact that he was doing bumps of coke when he thought we weren’t looking, but hebehaved.

He got two lap dances from Maya and one from Em, and that was it.

His friends, however—these fuckers—took it too far.

You’d think by now that everyone knows the unspoken rules of a strip club. No, the stripper’s name isn’t her real name. When she tells you “herrealname,” no, that’s not it either.

She trulyisn’tgoing to fuck you, no matter how much cash you throw at her.

But that’s the game. The girls flirt and take their clothes off, and the guys’ horny monkey brains get them to empty their wallets…until it’stime to go home.

These four didn’t get the memo about that, though. Last night, these assholes thought the money thrown at me meant they owned me, that they’d bought my body. They got handsy to the point they got kicked the fuck out.

It takesa lotfor Lou to kick someone out of The Mirage.