Love Like Numbers

Cleveland, Present Day: People sometimes ask if I was scared the first time I got onstage and took my clothes off. I honestly can't remember. Every time I went to a new club, I was nervous about being too big or too tatted up for management to hire me, and I was on edge around the other girls until I got a feel for the place. But I can't say I was scared of getting naked, scared of dancing on a man, or even turning a trick. At a certain point, it just became such a routine, it felt like the easiest thing in the world.

What I do know, is that when I started my 'real' job two weeks ago, I was terrified. I set multiple alarm clocks because 6 AM was an hour I rarely saw unless I hadn't gone to bed yet. Even though they told me there was no strict dress code, I wore dress pants and a sweater thick enough to keep any stray ions of my true self from radiating out into the air, my true self being the wild, tatted-up, free-spirited girl who never really felt comfortable with freedom. Oh, and I wore glasses, because I had it in my head that if I ran into someone who recognized me from the club, glasses would be an adequate disguise.

I can say that so far, I love it. And no, even though it pays more than any of the other 'legit' jobs I've had working in food service or childcare, I'm not yet earning enough to afford my tiny-apartment-car-old-enough-to-be-a-seventh-grader lifestyle without still dancing on the weekends. But I've gotta start somewhere, right?

Vegas, December, 2009: Ken slid back into my life with ease, my pockets without even a question, my heart, well, he'd never really left there. He would come to the apartment to chill and collect from me, and one time he brought his close friend, who I'm just gonna call Bay because he was from the Bay. After they left, I walked to the bookstore. That's when Mike called me.

He said a hundred dollars and a Trey Songz CD had come up missing, and he claimed to have heard Bay going through his things while Ken was in my room, although he hadn't come out into the living room to check. I gave him a hundred dollars because I felt like I had no choice. Then Ken came over and he and Mike just yelled at each other for a while with no one getting injured and nothing getting solved.

From then on, I stayed in my room when I wasn't working and Brooke and Mike stayed in theirs. I knew I had to get out of that house. Living with them and being on a different team just wasn't going to work anymore. I dreamed of Ken's mama suggesting I come stay with them, but that never happened. Chandra asked me if I wanted to move into her townhouse and I said hell yeah. I packed my things and Ken came in his mama's van. We got everything down to the parking lot in two trips without Brooke and Mike even noticing. They started blowing my phone up a couple hours later, but by that point I was already at the club and there was nothing they could do because I wasn't on the lease.

Besides Chandra, I shared the house with a small white dog, a passive aggressive cat, and a stray thirty-year-old who'd followed Chandra home from a party and seemed just as reluctant to leave her side as he was to cut his cornrows off. The air was a blend of cleaning products and chronic that quickly became soothing. There was a security gate around the complex, which I didn't have a remote for, and hopped over every afternoon on my way to work, even though I was usually wearing a sundress.

Ken still told me he was busy with school, but he came and saw me when he could. When he did, everything just made sense like two plus two, something so simple, so right you don't even stop to think maybe it could be wrong. Around him, I felt stripped of all the negative things the rest of the world assigned to me, to us, and filled up with what I wanted to be filled with. I felt like I made sense to only him, and we made sense to only me, and what we did was our secret, and the fact that it was secret made us strong. Since I was strong, all figurative muscle for the first time in my life, I finally didn't have to think so much. And that felt just so good.

My mind blank, laying in the bed after he left with that pure, post-sex high floating around me, all I could think was how lucky I was. I just remember that, thinking those words, I'm so lucky.

I don't remember what I went to Walmart to buy, but I remember that as soon as I caught the bus home, my phone rang.

“Do you still fuck with Ken?” It was a girl, but not The Other Girl, the one who'd supposedly gone to his high school. This other, other girl told me her name and I recognized it from that day in the tattoo shop. It was his sister's best friend.

“Yeah, I'm his girlfriend,” I said.

“Well I'm his girlfriend and I stay with him and I'm three months pregnant by him.”

There was a solid moment where I existed inside the awfulness of those words. Then I decided they couldn't be real. “Bitch, he just left my house two hours ago. I still got the condom wrappers on the floor.”

Always classy.

We went back and forth for a minute then I hung up and called his house.

His mother answered.

“Is Ken there?”

“No, but I'll tell him you called.”

“Okay, thanks.” Pause. “This girl just called me talking about she's pregnant and she stays with y'all... she's lying, right?”

“Baby, you know not to believe that craziness.”

“You're right.”

I returned to my zen state of post-sex, post-Walmart run contentment for approximately ten more minutes until I received another call from Born Here (I'm gonna refer to her as that because she was one of few people actually from Vegas; I'm gonna start calling The original Other Girl NY for reasons I shouldn't have to explain.)

“I'm at the gym, 'bout to go talk to him. Just listen.”

I did.

I listened to her ask him if he'd been with me two hours ago.

And I heard him say, “I wasn't with that bitch, she's lying.”

It would be so cliché to say that I felt that the world stopped, or changed, or constricted around me like a giant pair of lips forming the word 'no.'

What I can say is, it's been almost four years to the day since December 21, 2009, and if the world is ever going to be as simple, as logical as it was when I was with him, it has yet to do so.