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Chapter 1
What do you do when your two lives suddenly collide? Well, if you’re me, you run. Now granted, most people don’t live two separate lives or if they do, they have at least a small portion of overlap. But when you’re a twenty-three year old girl from a tiny conservative town who’s more likely to be found curled up on the couch on a weeknight than out on the town and you’re discovered waitressing at a strip club by two classmates from your high school there’s not really too much of a choice. You stay or you run, which is precisely what I find myself doing at the moment.
How did my world suddenly disintegrated, you ask? Well that one’s easy, Jim-Bob Joe—the nickname we had for Joe Rice—a country boy who fits the full-on hick accents of both ‘cun-tree’ and ‘bo-why’, is getting married in three weeks. Back home, at my parents’ church.
No I did not grow up a pastor’s daughter, a deacon’s yes. My dad is the current chairman of them at the church and if Jim-Bob Joe and Curly Quentin breathe a single word, I’m dead and so will be my dad’s position as a deacon.
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how a deacon’s daughter who’s more likely to be home than out came to be a cocktailwaitress, aren’t you? Yeah that story’s a bit longer but if you really want to know—I’ll tell you.
I wasn’t the greatest student, but I also wasn’t stupid. I knew home had only two options one—marry some dork from the same town and have babies or two—get the hell outta dodge. If you haven’t guessed, I chose the latter.
Now I didn’t come here to be a waitress and for the record, that’s all I am, a waitress. I had a partial scholarship, but it didn’t even cover tuition to maintain fulltime status, which is required in order to keep my scholarship. After one semester, I was nearly eight thousand in debt with student loans since I don’t qualify for any other help thanks to my parents’ blue-collar just above the poverty line jobs, but according to the government, they should be contributing at least twenty thousand a year towards my college education.
Now when my mom makes forty thousand a year as an account clerk and my dad brings home roughly forty-five a year driving a short distance delivery truck it’s not very easy for them to do it. Yes, some of you are probably arguing that they should have started saving for me to go to college when I was little, but neither of them did so they weren’t in the “know” as far as what types of expenses have to be added in on top of tuition. Most people around my town live paycheck-to-paycheck hedging their bets that their paycheck will hit before their electric payment does so I’ll forgive them for not being able to contribute to my endeavors.
Okay, now that I’m off my soapbox where was I? Oh yeah, eight thousand in debt and no clue as to how to stop it from growing deeper, until I ran, literally, into Cookie. Yes, her parents actually named her Cookie.
Seriously, why do grown adults do that? Really, can someone explain to me what could possibly be going through their heads that leads them to names like Cookie, Apple, Story, Harbor,Bear…heck even something as simple as Penny. What are you trying to tell the kid? That she’s cheap or common? But that’s neither here nor there and so I’ll get back to my explanation.
I was out walking right after school had restarted mid-January and it was freezing, finger numbing, toes tingling, freezing your ass off cold, temperatures that only a true Missourian could stand. I turned the corner ignoring the stares from a bunch of skeezy gang-banger wannabes and ran smack into the middle of a scene from any action flick.
Some dude was smacking Cookie and then turned on me when I knocked into her sending her flying off balance in her five-inch heels and out of harm’s way. He reared back his fist attempting to punch me and my fight-or-flight instincts kicked into high gear, as did my nearly thirteen years of karate training. I’d wanted to take gymnastics but there weren’t any gyms in our town, but I digress back to that day. Before he knew it, he was flat on his back with a cop running towards us with a stunned yet amused look on his face. Cookie had a black eye, broken rib, sprained ankle and no one to fill in for her at work, which was of course, waitressing at the strip club.
She was crying telling me, between thank yous, that if she didn’t make it in or find someone to fill in for her, she’d be out of a job with no way to feed her three kids. Now typically I’m not an easy mark, yes, I’m sympathetic to those in need but I don’t find myself volunteering for every charity or sending in my last ten dollars to help St. Jude’s, but listening to her I felt the urge to help. Which is how I found myself in the back of the club, lying about my age by a year since they didn’t hire anyone under nineteen, dressed in the shortest skirt I’ve ever worn, hell some of my boyshort underwear was probably longer than it, or at the least my swim shorts I wore because I hated my thighs.
I can’t say that now though, my legs are awesomely toned thanks to five years of serving heavy trays of drinks in four tofive-inch heels. But back to that first night, I was half-terrified, half-amused by my reflection. My makeup was heavier than I’d ever worn it, even when I was thirteen and snuck into my mom’s case and applied some, and it strangely helped yet hid my identity. My eyes were bluer and my lips even plumper covered with a thick layer of color and topped with gloss. My blonde hair that was normally straight was teased and curled and pined to my head. I honestly believed that if my mother saw me from across the street, she wouldn’t recognize me.
I panicked and was about to back out but one look at Cookie and I knew she needed my help, plus she promised to let me have any tips I made so I thought what the heck, it’s only one night, I’ll do it. I wasn’t worried about the waitressing part of it as much as the men present and the bodies up on stage, I worked for two summers at the local diner but the dress code there was black pants, red top, an apron, and flats.
My first foray onto the floor nearly had me running for my life but when I saw the looks some of the men sent my way, I thought I might as well go for broke. I pasted a smile on my face—a fake one I usually reserved for irritating customers or guys at school—and checked with the hostess. Cookie had explained the table numbers to me already. Number one was the VIP table in the corner of the room and they worked their way around clockwise. She had also told the hostess I was covering for her, and she’d agreed to take it easy on me.
I got my table numbers and a tiny pad of paper that slipped inside my tiny apron that didn’t begin to cover my midriff beneath my tiny top that showed off my not so tiny breasts. I stopped at the first table smiling and the wolf whistle the one let go sent me into another world. I was suddenly being looked at like a desirable woman and it was flattering yet revolting. Their drink orders were mercifully easy and after a quick jot on thepad, I went to the next one taking theirs before heading to the bar to get their drinks, delivering them with ease.
The entire night followed suit and when the club closed, I had almost five hundred in tips,five hundred American dollars. The boss, a hard-nosed woman named Sam, was thrilled with my performance and wanted to hire me. I had shaken my head no, there was no way I could do this again, but Sam wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’d told me that this was a slow night, but I’d managed to bring in the most tips. Then she told me that if I thought making five hundred in a night was good to come back Friday and see what I could earn.
That got me thinking and Friday night I somehow found myself outside the club and at the end of that night I had almost a thousand dollars, well…nine hundred, ninety-nine dollars and fifty cents to be exact, and I somehow found myself saying yes to Sam’s second request to come work for her. Filling in the paperwork for my W-2’s I’d almost forgotten to add a year to my birthday, and it ended up smudged, but Sam didn’t even read it and I realized I could have put Jane Doe on it Sam wouldn’t have cared.
Living two lives the past five years wasn’t really as difficult as I’d thought it would be and I’d slipped into a comfortable pattern working most Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and every other Tuesday. By the time summer had come around I had enough to cover half the rent on an apartment with a girl from college who also didn’t want to go back home. I spent that summer taking classes to get ahead and working.
Now, I don’t know about other clubs but some of the elite businessmen who were more generous than the everyday Tom, Dick or Harry patronized Sam’s and their generosity continued each and every week. Thanks to that generosity, I’d been able to take a few extra classes each semester and during the summer graduating an entire year early with a 3.75 GPA and a bachelor’sdegree in business administration, double major of accounting and marketing.
So why am I still working at the club you might ask? Well, I’m not really sure I have an answer to that which isn’t selfish. Once I was done paying for school, I took a week off and went on vacation with my best friend and roommate Rebecca. Everything was paid using tips and I decided to create a nice cushion for myself.
So I stayed here but now I realized I’ve been fooling myself into thinking I could keep this up, but I guess it’s better that Jim-Bob Joe is the one who discovered it and not my boss. Now that would have taken a bit of explanation. I couldn’t imagine what it’d take to convince him to let me keep my job.
So that’s how I currently find myself hiding out here behind the club hoping Joe and Quentin leave ASAP. A noise to the left has me looking towards the alley and there they stand, the two stooges who have managed to bring my two worlds crashing together. How am I going to survive this train wreck? Only heaven knows.
“Amelia?” Joe says, his voice grating on my nerves already.
“Holy crap,” is Quentin’s great addition. “You work here?”
“I waitress in my spare time,” I find myself admitting though the reason why escapes me. Other than my parents finding out do I really care anymore? I mean is the fact that I work as a waitress in a strip club that bad?
Oh, who am I kidding of course I care. My mother would die of a heart attack and my father would lock me in my room and throw away the key despite the fact that I’m twenty-three and can take care of myself.
“You’re not a dancer?” Joe asks.
“Nope, I just deliver drinks and break up the occasional argument,” I tell them.
