Shameless

by Nina Lemay

  “What are you waiting for?” he snaps. “Go on, get out of here. Don’t want your boyfriend showing up in here with the whole department in tow.”

  I stagger to my feet. The whole world is swaying, unraveling around the edges.

  “Aren’t you going to run after him? Explain everything?” Leary scowls with disdain. “Tell him your evil, evil Art History teacher raped you, because he knew you were a stripper and—oh, wait.”

  My vacant gaze travels to the open door, to the empty hallway beyond. The thought crosses my mind to do just that. Maybe I can still catch up with him, maybe I can explain and he’ll understand.

  Maybe it’s not too late, trills a tiny, hopeful voice in the back of my mind.

  Except it is too late. From the moment the whole thing started it was over.

  I’m not going to run after anyone, I’m not going to tell anyone anything. There’s nothing I can do to make people hear me, make them understand me. I should have learned that a long time ago, back in high school. People see and hear and believe what they want, whatever fits into the way they see the world, because everything else might ruffle their feathers and make them question things they always took for universal truths. All women are sluts, all strippers are whores, she asked for it, what was she thinking, showing her tits and then hoping to be treated like a human being?

  I’m not going to do a damn thing.

  I’m going to disappear.

  The next day I don’t bother showing up. Screw the deadlines for withdrawal, screw my GPA. I’ll fail every single class and I’m utterly indifferent to that fact. I’ll never come back, not next semester, not ever. With my floor-level GPA I’ll never get into another college, not here or back home. Maybe I’ll just find a rundown shithole of a strip club somewhere in Minnesota, next to a gas station, and give blow jobs to truckers in the so-called champagne room for the rest of my life.

  I spend the day in the bathtub, until the water grows so cold it seems to leach life energy right through my goosebump-covered skin. When my teeth start to clatter so hard I think I might break them, I get out and collapse into bed.

  The weekend goes by in a fog. My phone is dead: not a text, not a call, not from Emmanuel or from work or from Maryse or from anyone. It feels like I’ve been completely forgotten by the world at large, like I never even existed.

  Maybe I just forgot to pay the bill.

  On Monday, I get a single email, without a subject line. I look at the address: unfamiliar, something like hotgirl2365, probably bogus. I’m about to delete it as spam when I see that it’s a Facebook link to the group of our photography class.

  I click on it, and Audrey’s profile picture splashes across my phone screen.

  Hey you guys,

  I think I know what my final project is going to be. It’s not in black and white film, but I hope that’s okay because it’s just too juicy to pass up. I like to call it EXPOSURE. Let me know what you think.

  I scroll through the post.

  Slightly blurry photos in full color, high resolution—cell phone camera, no doubt.

  The pictures are from inside the club. Of me. Dancing on stage.

  My face is blurred out, just like my crotch and my breasts in those photos where I’m completely undressed.

  I bring the phone closer to my eyes: I’m not wearing my wig in the photos, and my outfit is that old gilded bikini I threw out long ago. These were taken in August, if not earlier. Before this semester. Before Emmanuel. Before everything.

  I have a very good guess where they came from.

  I thumb through the comments: it’s about what you’d expect. OMG, holy shit, I’d hit that. Girls throw around S-words and W-words.

  Every single one of them rolls right off my back. I stare at the screen, searching within myself for some kind of holy terror, shame, humiliation, maybe hurt, and come up with nothing. Maybe I simply ran out. Maybe it was never there.

  Maybe I am everything Emmanuel thinks I am. I am Vanessa, worse than Vanessa.

  Thinking of him is the only thing that can bring tears to my eyes anymore.

  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

  The month is drawing to a close. My days go by in a haze of numbness I’ve gotten so used to that I’m starting to confuse it for well-being. December first, December, second. On December third my phone rings and rings, buzzing like crazy until it falls off the nightstand. Then someone knocks: my landlord, yelling right through the door that rent is overdue and this isn’t a charity house.

  I tell him to hang on and go to my hiding place, in the bathroom under a loose floorboard by the tub. I pry it away, unroll the bundle of plastic bags…

  I collapse against the tub, choking on laughter. My stash of cash is gone. Probably in the same direction the roll of film had gone.

  He yells at me some more when I tell him I’ll have it next week. Great. All I need now is my landlord demanding that I pay him en nature. That would just be the cliché to end all clichés.

  I can laugh at this. That’s a good sign… right?

  Finally, he leaves me alone. I guess he figures $1000 in cash every month is worth waiting an extra week.

  That also means I have to go to work.

  Before I leave the house, I spend an hour warring with my hair, which had dried at weird angles and is slowly turning into dreadlocks from neglect. I tear out a few particularly gnarly tangles and flatten the rest with my iron until it looks remotely presentable.

  No point in wearing a wig anymore. The thought pops up randomly in my mind, and a manic laugh gurgles to the surface. I clasp my hands over my mouth before I can burst into tears—or start heaving.

  An inch-thick layer of foundation covers the red eyelids and dark under-eye circles and the smattering of stress blemishes along my jaw with generic beige color. From the mirror, this new peachy face blinks at me with pale eyelashes, like a corpse at the morgue, a mask painted on a dead thing. I draw on a pair of eyes, then lips, then eyebrows.

  I’m the hollow woman. Every man’s wet dream.

  The trek to the club, so familiar I could walk it in my sleep, feels surreal. I don’t bother going in through the back anymore—I enter the front door, the same as all the customers, with the blinking neon arrow above it, letters flashing XXX LIVE GIRLS LAP DANCES. It’s still early; couples and shoppers still stroll along Ste-Catherine, past the lit storefronts and restaurants. An older woman gives me a tight-lipped look when she sees me turn toward the door with the pole dancer poster on it. I glare at her defiantly until she’s the one to look away.

  The manager is pissed off at me for missing all these days and not calling in, but he lets me through. Up in the changing room, I put on my most comfortable, unpretentious outfit, a black bikini with a padded halter top that makes my boobs look slightly less-than-nonexistent. Except now, as I contemplate myself in the full-length mirror, it only emphasizes how much weight I lost in the last week and a half. My ribs are a lunar landscape. The front of my bikini bottom is stretched taut between my hipbones. Plus, the black sucks the little color there is out of my pale skin. I truly do look like a crack whore.

  I head downstairs. The club, thank God, is full: the season of the office parties has officially begun. I always wondered how anyone does their office Christmas party at a strip club. Do their women co-workers go to get pedicures in the meantime? Within these walls it’s like the last sixty years never happened.

  But if you follow the tenets of third-wave feminism, what’s good for me is good for womankind. Which is just as well.

  All the large tables and the booths are already occupied by men in office attire, in various stages of drunkenness. In one booth, three topless girls are doing table dances, their bronzed bodies aglow in the black light like dolphins. The bass of a hip-hop song shakes the floor beneath my plastic shoes.

  I’m a robot, going through the motions of a preprogrammed routine. I lean over, stick out my chest, say hello, I dance. I dance and dance and dance, automatic moveme
nts, my face frozen in an imitation of a seductive smile. But these men always like imitations better than the real thing. Less messy, and you always know exactly what you’re going to get, like a hamburger. Maybe that’s why I make a fuckton of money before it’s even midnight. I can’t bear to spend even a second not doing anything because that means being alone with my thoughts, so I go back and forth, back and forth, floor, champagne room, floor.

  I spot Maryse at one of the tables, chatting up a paunchy bald guy in a suit. Her freshly bleached hair looks neon in the light, matching the whites of her eyes and her teeth when she smiles. She waves me over, and, reluctant, I wobble to the table.

  “Hey, guys, this is my girlfriend,” Maryse bats her glue-on lashes. “Alicia. We can do a show for you guys, wanna get a champagne room with two sexy girls?”

  The guy’s gaze travels from her to me, settles on me. “I’ll just take her, if you don’t mind,” he drawls. The way he says it, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t really care if she minds or not. Maryse gives a shrug as he gets up to follow me, leaving her alone. I glance over my shoulder, trying to catch her eye, but she’s already talking to someone else.

  I should say no, but I can’t afford to refuse the money. Gritting my teeth, I make my way to the back, not even checking to see if he still follows. This is the part where the glittering dream turns to cautionary tale: you can’t afford to refuse, to you let someone push your boundaries. Then a little more, and a little more.

  Who am I kidding. That already happened.

  He wants to go to the nice room, even though that’s extra. He hands the doorman another $20 on top of the $40 it costs for the room, and winks. “Nothing but the best for this one,” he says. “A really fine girl.”

  He settles into the armchair, spreading his knees, slides down till he’s practically on his back, and glances up at me with a look of bored expectation on his face.

  “Sorry ‘bout your friend,” he says while I prop my foot up on the back of the chair, giving him a view of my crotch clad in nothing but a G-string as thick as dental floss. He has a pronounced Southern accent. A tourist, who probably thinks he’s in some third-world country where everything can be bought with a crumpled $20 bill. Including me. Especially me. “I just like them hot and thin, you know. No offense but she should go to the gym more often.”

  I gaze down at his protruding stomach, straining at the buttons of his shirt, and suddenly I have a vivid flash of Leary looming over me. My breath catches and I steady myself against the wall of the booth.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” he drawls on. I lean closer, until my vagina is practically in his face, hoping it’ll shut him up. “What’s the matter, you don’t speak English, girl? Fran-say only, is that it?”

  “I speak English fine,” I say in a colorless voice.

  He looks a little disappointed. Sorry to let you down, buddy.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Hannah,” I say. “Hannah Melissa Shay.”

  If he’s thrown, he doesn’t show it. “You’re from here?”

  “No. I’m American.”

  He livens up. “Oh, yeah?”

  “From Minnesota.”

  His bushy eyebrows furrow. “What’s a nice American girl doing in this hole? Sweetheart, you’re better than that. I bet you go to school or something, don’t you? Like, med school?”

  “I used to. But then I got kicked out for sleeping with a teacher. So now I’m just a stripper.”

  “Aw, I get it,” a smile spreads over his face. “You’re just shitting me, aren’t you. You think you’re so clever. I bet that isn’t even your real name.”

  “It is my real name. Wanna see my ID?”

  “A nice American girl has no business being here,” he mutters, ignoring what I said. “I want to get you out of here. Take you out to a nice dinner.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How much would that cost?”

  “Not on the menu.” I give an icy smile.

  “Come on, I’ll take you to—” he names an upscale steakhouse in the lobby of an astronomically expensive hotel. “I bet you’ve never been to a place like that.”

  I’ve had oysters in the heart of Quebec City, I’ve sipped wine in a suite with a view on the St-Lawrence River. You can’t even imagine the places I’ve been.

  “Sorry,” I repeat. “But you’re gonna have to find someone else.”

  That cools him off. His hands drop by his sides. “Okay, sweetie,” he snorts, and starts to get up. The chair creaks under his weight. “Look, this is really nice and all. But a guy needs something more, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Well, there isn’t anything more,” I snap. I grab my bikini top from the hook on the wall and start putting it on.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he panics.

  “We’re done here. That’ll be fifty.”

  “Fifty? You fucking kidding me? You didn’t even grind on my lap.”

  “We’re finished,” I repeat, reaching behind me to tie the strings on the top.

  He grabs the bikini top right between my breasts and yanks forward. It’s so abrupt and unexpected that I can’t catch myself in time. I stumble forward, my chest colliding with his stomach. For a moment I’m blindsided, choking on the reek of his cologne and BO—but the next thing I know, his hand goes for my crotch, pushing aside my G-string.

  My world ignites. I see Leary fumbling with my pants, his hands crawling around under my shirt; my nerve endings flare with the memory. A shock courses up my spine and explodes in my head.

  I shove him away with all my might. He doesn’t expect so much strength out of tiny little me, so he stumbles and lets go long enough for me to regain my footing.

  I’m screaming without hearing the words, don’t you dare fucking touch me you slimy creep or something like that. My spittle flies in his face. I don’t even see his fist approaching—he backhands me out of nowhere.

  Pain explodes in the right side of my face. The world tilts and jerks until I hit the opposite wall and slide down. At first I think he broke my nose, smashed my cheekbone—my right eye can only see red, with flecks of black like coal in a sea of lava.

  I think the thunder is in my head, but it’s steps. The door swings open and the doorman barges in. What the hell is going on? I try to get back up, but only manage to crouch. I cover the side of my face with my hand, feeling for the damage at the same time. The throb of pain fades, except my lip which thuds with a tiny heartbeat of its own. I look up through the motes of red and black.

  “She says it’s fifty bucks and she didn’t even take her bra off. And then she went crazy.”

  The doorman towers over me, reaches down, takes hold of my forearm and pulls me up. I groan with pain in my shoulder and in my lip.

  “Is that what happened?”

  “He grabbed my pussy,” I try to say, but my lip is swelling and all I manage is muffled moans.

  The doorman glowers at me. “You. Go upstairs and wait there, got it?”

  I push past him, past the other one. The neon lights make my vision swim.

  “That’s what you get for being a gentleman to a stupid whore,” I hear him say to my back, but I don’t even care enough to flip him off. I stumble through the main floor, people following me with looks ranging from bewildered to alarmed to disgusted.

  When I take my hand away from my lip, it’s bloody.

  No one follows me.

  Upstairs, the manager bursts in, a tornado of righteous fury. “What the fuck was that, Alicia? What the fuck are you doing? You realize how it makes us look?”

  “He grabbed my pussy,” I say. At least I can get the words out intelligibly this time. I’d wadded up some brown paper towels in the changing room bathroom and soaked them in cold water before pressing them to my lip.

  “He’s got a tab going at the bar,” the doorman says. “He’s one of our VIP members. What did he do that was so damn terrible?”

  “He stuck his hand und
er my G-string. That’s against the rules,” I repeat, obstinate—like a child in grade school who’s being punished unfairly.

  “Gee, so it was a fucking accident. There’s no need to punch the guy.”

  “He punched me.”

  He ignores me, like he didn’t hear. “You’re out,” he says curtly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re done. It’s over. Go home, take a break. For a month or so. Then you can come back and we’ll see how it goes.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “Yeah? Try me.” He steps up to me until his barrel chest is inches away from my face. “And if you’re gonna be a fucking princess again, it’ll be bye-bye forever, got it?”

  “That guy broke the rules. He split my lip.”

  “Rules, rules. T’es pas à l’église icitte. This isn’t church in the good old Midwest, honey, better start getting used to it.”

  I stare him down for a few long moments. Smug, he crosses his arms. He knows who has the upper hand.

  I turn around and hobble to my locker. Numbly, I pull on my sweatpants, my hoodie, toe on my sneakers without tying the laces. I shove my heels and bikini into my bag without looking, catching one of the strings in the zipper but I couldn’t care less. I get to my feet, ignore the rush of dizziness, and storm to the exit.

  “You still owe me tip-out!” he yells after me, but I just give him the finger without turning around. Yeah, I know he could snap me in half, but right now I just don’t give a shit.

  “Get the fuck out!” he roars in my wake. “And never come back!”

  Outside, the roar and blurring lights of Ste-Catherine swallow me up.

  It’s not very late, and it’s a Friday night. Drunk people about my age amble up and down, from one nightclub to another. Girls teeter in heels higher than my work shoes. Guys show off orange tan arms in muscle tees in spite of the freezing weather. Tiny snowflakes speckle the air, spinning in the currents, gray and dirty like the sky above. I tilt my face up, welcoming the pinprick of their icy touch.