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president is.”
    Carlos smirks.  “Well, I do more
besides run this bar.  Sometimes I read the newspaper.  You should try it
sometime.”
    Alicia rolls her eyes.  “I swear,
Carlos hasn’t even heard of the Internet.  Who reads a newspaper?”
    Carlos ignores her and goes back to
wiping down glasses.  It’s that weird time before the club opens where it’s
empty but DJ Long is spinning haphazardly so chunks of music flip around and we
rotate between speaking normally and shouting.  It looks dirty in the
pre-evening light, but today is so marred that I can’t imagine anything looks
particularly good right now from my perspective.  At least I’m somewhere I feel
safe.
    Alicia and I finish a bottle
between us.  I’d like to think we split it but I know I drank more than my
half, and she doesn’t say anything.  She knows enough of my problems to piece
together that alcoholism just comes with the territory. Or maybe she feels
guilty that we don’t really have health insurance but we do get paid under the
table.  I pick my battles and so does she.  I get sufficiently drunk enough to
feel like I’ve fast forwarded to being in my cage.  The music is an eerie
jungle beat that makes the bars vibrate in my hands.  The automatic lights are
swirling pink, green, gold, red and they make my head spin.  My hair is down
and falling around my back, which is cold and wet.  I can’t tell if there’s
been a drink poured on me from above or if I’m sweating in air conditioning.
    People become a blur in Appleseed
and every now and then I notice something stand out in the crowd.  Red shirt. 
Blue hair.  400 pounds.  Once I saw a gun tucked into some guy’s belt and
flagged down Carlos to point him out.  I got a nice bonus that day.  No one
wants weapons in the club or you might get the wrong publicity.  Normally
people ignore the atmosphere after they take it in for the first few minutes of
being on the dance floor after they’ve had a few drinks in them.  Tonight I
feel like someone is watching me and I’m distracted, but I can’t stop.  The
only way I can stop and have a look is to grab onto one of the top bars and
hang upside down and glance around, but I’m drunk and attempting it makes me
dizzy, so I continue to sway and dance.
    I start at 11:00 pm and dance until
2:00 am with a break around 1:00 am.  It’s a long time, and sometimes I’m
clever and put an audio book on my iPhone and listen to it by duct taping the
iPhone to the back of my bra and wiring the headphones through my hair.  I
didn’t do that tonight and of course I regret it after an hour, as my mind is
wandering and thinking about Jack and Devin and attempting to remember
something happy about Justin.
    Kate sits at the bar, watching me. 
She is wearing the gold counterpart to my silver bikini which complements her
amber hair.  “There was this one time when you were riding your bike home from
school in the second grade and fell and skinned your knee pretty hard.  Devin
was ahead of you riding with friends of his and didn’t want to stay behind and
wait for his little sister.  You sat on the sidewalk and cried for an hour and
Justin was the one friend of Devin’s who rode back because he didn’t know where
you were and carried you home.”
    “Before you were here,” I say.  It’s
a sweet memory.  “What else?”
    “Not all memories are good,” Kate
tells me.  “I can’t tell you everything without talking about anything bad.”
    “I don’t give a shit tonight,” I
reply.  “Today was all bad and I’m alive.  Maybe I can live with knowing it
all.”
    “Not all of it,” she says.  “Even I
don’t remember all of it.”
    “Who were they?” I ask her.  “How
many?”
    “I don’t know who they were,” she
says.  “Maybe six or seven…maybe ten or fifteen.  They were just older men who
wanted a taste of something young and sweet, and Jack sold it to them for a
price.  You probably paid the biggest