“You know, the same.”
Marcus dropped Lacy the moment he found Cole, the moment he realized the real world don’t hand us shit like he thought it would. Uncle Ty made Marcus believe that miracles would come to us and he seemed to think Cole was the way in, that staying with Lacy was a segue to a life of hoping without no reward. She got a job and was working forty-hour weeks and Marcus didn’t want no part in it. All he got is half a dozen SoundCloud tracks and no paycheck and here we are: her with her hair tied up in two buns on top of her head, piercings lining her face, and looking like she owns the place. Like she don’t need no light to see. And Marcus still out here waiting, like something’s gonna change.
Lacy stands up abruptly. “You want a drink?” She’s wearing the classic bartender black, but she still shines. “I won’t tell.” She winks and returns to the side of the bar where the man was. He slipped into the back at some point and even if he was to come back, something tells me Lacy’s got more sway than him. Something about the way she moves: spine erect like redwood trees, like she’ll just keep growing upward.
I nod. “Sure.”
“What you want?”
“Surprise me?” I don’t know how to order a drink for myself, not used to anybody asking me what I want. Usually, somebody just hands me a bottle or a plastic cup and I don’t pause long enough to question it. Lacy grabs a bottle from behind the counter and then another one, pouring and shaking and stirring it all up into a glass with one of those straws that’re so skinny I wonder how anything’s supposed to get through them. She adds a cherry, one of the ones too sweet to believe they come from a tree, and pushes the glass toward me. The drink is a soft red, bordering on pink if it wasn’t for the way the cherry draws out the color.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She leans forward. “It’s a surprise. Don’t worry, you gonna like it.”
I bend my head down until my lips touch the straw and suck. It hits my tongue and it’s euphoria spreading across my mouth, like all the flavor in the world combined into a brilliant heat. “Shit,” I say after I swallow, looking up at Lacy.
She laughs. “You always loved something sweet.”
“How long you been working here?” I ask.
“Started as a stripper around the time Marcus and I fell out, but money’s a little more stable at the bar so been bartending the past few months.” The door swings open again and a small group of men in ties comes in. Lacy straightens up. “Place about to fill up, but feel free to stay. Let me know if you want a refill. It’s on me.”
Lacy smiles and leaves to follow the men to a table right in front of the stage. One of them is wearing this polka dot tie that he’s loosening and he’s looking straight at me, the corner of his mouth tilted up. I don’t know why, but his face is interesting to look at and part of me wants to touch it, feel if he has stubble, if his skin is soft enough that it would turn pink just from my fingertips. I return to focus on my drink and I wonder if I should stay, if being a young girl alone in a strip club with no money could make this night worse. But a free drink is a free drink and I’m tired of the endless walking and rejection from every employer in Oakland, so I take a sip. And another. And another. I slurp until the sugary red is gone and then ask Lacy to make me a new one.
Marcus can’t stand nothing red after Mama. It’s not like he was the only one who had to see it, but he was the one who tried to clot Mama’s bleeding wrists, pick the razor up from the floor. He was the one who told them not to take me, his newly eighteen-year-old body lengthening as if his height could give him the ability to make it through the night without thinking about the color of the water. Since then, Marcus won’t step foot in the bathroom. He showers at friends’ places and pisses at the liquor store across the street.
The sirens that day left us sitting in the only unmarked spot of the apartment, the center of the rug behind the sofa, both Marcus and I staring at the neon tape signaling another spot of DNA, as if the whole apartment wasn’t made up of us and our blood. The social worker left with the police, after an hour of questions following Mama and the ambulance. Marcus had his arm around my shoulders and every time I started shaking again, he’d scratch my arm to remind me he was still the same. I was two months from fifteen. He was the youngest adult I’d ever seen and it wasn’t more than a week later that he dropped out of school. Marcus was determined to hustle for me, to be the man.
We settled in the patch of beige-turned-brown rug and Marcus whispered in my ear, “I got you.” It was like the light finally found its way to Marcus’s mouth because he was speaking sun into me and if Mama wasn’t gonna be there no more, if Daddy was already no different than infertile dirt, then I needed my brother more than anything. He asked me what I wanted for dinner and when I told him I wasn’t hungry, he found Mama’s emergency fund in the pillowcase and ordered us three different kinds of pizza. He ate two slices of each, picked all the sausage off one of them, and left me his plate to wash up. Maybe I should’ve known it’d be like that, me washing up his dishes, cleaning up his ruins, but his arm around me, his whisper was enough for it not to matter. Marcus had claimed me. I was his.
I thought Marcus was gonna be everything I needed after that. He held my hand through Mama’s trial, through Uncle Ty leaving town, through visits to Mama in the overcrowded Dublin prison. And then, two years later, he let it go. Marcus took off to Cole’s, stopped looking me in the eye, left the newspapers he used to pore over in a pile by the door. I’ve been chasing him ever since, trying to get him to look at me.
By the time my fourth glass has emptied out to only ice, the club is full of crawling bodies, every stool and table occupied, the music thump-thumping even though I can’t place a single distinct song. All three poles are in use and dollar bills make their way into the thong of each woman giving a lap dance. There’s something about the buzz of the place that makes me feel alive, not like a girl barely scraping by but a woman free. The way the lights remain just the perfect mix of warm and not-quite-there. The way the music combines with the chatter to produce a chorus of muffled fuzz, like a melodic static. The way every time the door opens to let another cluster of bodies in, the Oakland outside seeps in: a drumbeat, somebody shouting about how we gotta beware the cracks in the sidewalk, a siren.
Lacy comes back from making her rounds with a tray of half-empty wineglasses and it don’t make no sense to me why anyone would pay for something just to not drink it. I catch her eye and point to my glass, but I can’t seem to locate the words to ask her for a refill.
She laughs. “I think you’re done, Ki,” she shouts.
I pout, spinning around on the barstool. Polka dot tie catches my eye again. He’s talking to his suited friends but staring right at me. I come back from my spin to see Lacy mixing drinks and the room suddenly feels overcrowded, like every pocket of breath has disappeared in that single spin. I shout out to Lacy across the noise. “Gotta get out of here.”
She raises her eyebrows, her figure even taller than I remember it being when her face elongates like that. “You sure you can make it home?”