2. nova
nova
Survival Mode
The Weight She Carries Home
Four flights. The elevator has been broken since March and the super swears the part is on order and I stopped believing him around July.
I count the tips by touch as I climb. Fives are soft.
Tens are creased. Twenties I fold lengthwise so my fingers find them blind.
Two hundred and fourteen dollars. Plus the three hundred that the owner — Romeo Rivas, with his unbuttoned collar and his green eyes and his voice that went quiet when I told him to fix my money — transferred back into my account forty minutes ago.
Five hundred and fourteen dollars. Nine days until rent.
I hip-check the apartment door because it swells in the humidity and the landlord does not return calls. Inside, the kitchen light is off but the stove light is on and there is a pot of chicken soup sitting on the burner, cold, untouched. A single bowl beside it with a spoon laid across the rim.
Marisol. Thirteen years old and stubborn enough to outlast a siege. She will not eat dinner without me. I have told her a hundred times — eat when the food is warm, don't wait, I will be late every night because that is how this works. She waits anyway. Every single night.
She is on the couch now. School hoodie, textbook facedown on her chest, asleep with her mouth slightly open. I pull the throw blanket over her legs and lift the textbook — algebra, chapter nine — and set it on the coffee table. She does not stir.
Tomás's door is cracked. I push it open with two fingers.
He is curled around his pillow, the dollar-store rocket nightlight casting blue shadows across the wall.
His sneakers are on the floor beside the bed and I can see the left sole from here — split open along the ball of the foot, a folded napkin stuffed inside to cover the gap.
He did that himself. He did that so I would not see it and worry.
He is ten.
Last Tuesday he was on the bathroom floor at school, chest locked, hands tingling, convinced his heart was stopping.
The nurse called me at the club. I drove there in my stage makeup with my jacket zipped to my chin and held him on the tile until his breathing came back.
The ER doctor said panic attack. Handed me a pamphlet and a referral to a pediatric therapist. A hundred and eighty dollars a session.
I close his door and sit on the hallway floor between their rooms. Back against the wall. The apartment is quiet except for the radiator ticking and a dog barking somewhere below us.
Phone out. Calculator open.
Rent: twelve hundred. Nine days.
Electric: eighty-seven. Past due. The shutoff notice is in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus because I cannot look at it every time I open the drawer.
Tomás's shoes: forty dollars if I find them on sale.
Marisol's graphing calculator for algebra: sixty. She has been borrowing one from a girl named Dakota and I can see what it costs her every morning — the tiny swallow before she asks, the way she holds the borrowed calculator like it might shatter.
Five hundred and fourteen dollars in my name. Eight hundred and twelve in the coffee can above the refrigerator.
I run the numbers. I subtract. I move things around. I give Tomás the shoes and push the electric bill another week and tell myself Marisol can keep borrowing Dakota's calculator until next pay cycle.
The math never works. I run it again anyway.
Back to the Club, Expecting Consequences
I walk through the service entrance at nine-fifteen expecting to find my locker cleaned out.
That is how it works in places like this.
You scream at a floor manager in a hallway at two in the morning, the owner hears it, and by the next shift your name is off the roster and your tips are forfeit and no one says a word because everyone on this floor understands the math — you are replaceable and the man who signs the checks is not.
I spent the entire day preparing for it. Went through the job listings on my phone while Marisol did her homework at the kitchen table. Waitressing gigs. A cleaning company in Midtown that pays cash. A nail salon looking for part-time front desk. All of it paying half of what I make here.
But when I walk into the dressing room, my locker is untouched. My name is on the rotation board. And the first thing Destiny says to me while she is lining her eyes in the mirror is, "Girl. Marco is gone."
I stop with my bag half off my shoulder. "Gone."
"Reassigned. Whatever that means in this place." She caps her liner and looks at me through the mirror. "Happened this morning. New guy on the floor — Anthony something. And get this — payroll is being audited. Every dancer's account. Going back six months."
Six months. Every dancer's account.
I hang my bag in the locker and say nothing. But I can feel the other girls watching me. Brianna at the vanity. Jade stretching by the back wall. They know what happened last night — this building has no secrets, just delays — and they are doing the math the same way I am.
Marco is gone because of the hallway. The audit is happening because of what I said to the owner. The man I accused of running a house where managers steal from women is tearing his own books apart the morning after I said it to his face.
I do my set. Three songs. The usual rotation — opening slow, building through the second, finishing hard.
The floor is busy for a Wednesday. I do my job the way I always do it.
Disciplined. Precise. Eyes forward, body working, mind somewhere else entirely.
Tonight my mind is on Tomás's shoes and Marisol's calculator and the eighty-seven-dollar electric bill, and none of those thoughts show on my face because this stage is a machine and I am the operator and the machine does not have feelings.
I am toweling off backstage when the new floor manager — Anthony, tall, polite, nervous in the way new hires are when they know the last guy got erased — finds me by the lockers.
"Nova Vasquez?"
"Yeah."
"Mr. Rivas would like to see you in the back office."
My stomach drops straight to the concrete floor.
Mr. Rivas would like to see you. Said like a summons. Said like a death sentence.
I toss the towel in the bin. Pull on my jacket. Zip it to my collarbone. And I walk down the same hallway where twenty-four hours ago I told a man worth more than my entire building that he was complicit in theft.
My pulse is hammering. My face is still.
I have been walking into rooms that scare me since I was eighteen years old. One more will not kill me.
His Territory, Her Refusal to Shrink
The office smells like leather and whiskey and money.
I clock the room in two seconds because that is what you do when you walk into a space that belongs to someone more powerful than you — you map it.
Desk, heavy wood, probably costs more than a year of my rent.
Two surveillance monitors mounted on the wall showing the club floor in grainy blue light.
A bottle of Macallan on a shelf behind the desk, three-quarters full. One glass. He drinks alone.
And Romeo Rivas, leaning against the front edge of that desk with his ankles crossed, sleeves rolled to his forearms, watching me walk in like he has been waiting.
He has been waiting.
"Close the door."
I close it. I do not sit. There are two chairs in front of the desk — leather, angled toward him like an audience before a king — and I ignore both of them. If this conversation is going to happen, it is going to happen with me on my feet.
"Marco is gone," he says. "Effective this morning. Every dancer's account is being audited back six months. Anyone who was shorted gets paid in full by Friday."
He delivers this the way a man delivers news he expects applause for. Chin slightly lifted. Eyes on mine. The faintest shift in his posture, like he is leaning toward a reaction he has already predicted.
I give him nothing.
"That's what should have been happening already."
Something moves across his mouth. The beginning of a smile that he catches before it fully forms, like a reflex he did not authorize. It changes his entire face for half a second — cracks the expensive composure, lets something underneath breathe — and then it is gone.
He is handsome. I noticed it last night in the hallway and I am noticing it again now and I resent both observations equally.
He is handsome the way designer things are — crafted to make you want them and punish you for reaching.
The kind of face that opens doors and ruins lives with the same easy grin.
Green eyes. Giovanni's green eyes, according to every tabloid and gossip column I have never admitted to reading.
Dark hair pushed back like he ran his fingers through it twenty minutes ago and forgot about it.
A watch on his left wrist that catches the overhead light — heavy, gold-edged, the kind of piece men like him inherit from fathers they do not talk about.
He is looking at me the way he looked at me in the hallway. Like I am a problem he has not figured out yet. Like the usual tools — charm, authority, wealth — are the wrong keys for this lock and he finds that interesting instead of insulting.
I keep my arms at my sides. I do not cross them. Crossing your arms is a tell. It says I am protecting myself. I am not giving him that.
"You didn't call me in here to tell me about Marco," I say.
His mouth twitches again. That almost-smile.
"No," he says. "I didn't."
The Offer She Should Refuse
He pushes off the desk and stands straight and the distance between us shrinks by a third.
"I have a proposition," he says. "And I need you to hear all of it before you react."
"I don't make promises about my reactions."
That almost-smile again. He kills it faster this time.