Twelve
Walking into Pole Kisses felt like an exhale. Gucci sat on the chill room couch with a laptop perched on her knees, arguing
refresh on her hair color so it was an even brighter shade of blue, the right side shaved almost to the scalp. Her skin must’ve
cleared up because she was down to one star-shaped yellow pimple sticker. I felt a surge of affection for her. She’d had a
horrific upbringing and had somehow risen above.
But there was no sign of Shade.
Zhang Xiu spotted me. “You’re alive!”
“Nikita!” Gucci said. “The girl who wields a vodka gimlet as a weapon.”
“The girl who wields her fingernails as a weapon!” Zhang Xiu said. She fluttered her coffin-shaped nails at me. “Respect.”
I winced. Luckily, Layna burst into the room behind me, giving Gucci and Zhang Xiu big, no-holds-barred hugs. The Bettie Page
wall clock read 6:01. Still no Shade. But we seemed to be missing a teacher too. “Where’s Salma Hayek?” I asked.
Everyone shrugged.
Gucci snapped her laptop shut. Standing up, she pressed her palms together overhead and bent her torso into a half-moon. “I’m
so fried from studying.”
“You at Boise State?” Layna asked.
“Yeah. But I’ll be lucky if I get to do any real field work before I get my master’s.”
“How come?” Zhang Xiu said.
“My advisor has sidelined me because I don’t flirt with him,” Gucci replied.
“Ugh!” I said. After all she’d been through with her terrible uncle, she shouldn’t have to deal with a vile professor wrecking
her studies.
“Salma Hayek’s out today,” a voice said.
The substitute teacher stood in the doorway wearing a cropped T-shirt that said Your Boyfriend Follows Me on Instagram. A tattoo of a brontosaurus slithered up from undies I now knew were technically called pole shorts.
“Hey, Olympia!” Gucci said. “I love your cross-stitch.” She gestured at a framed rectangle of needlework hanging on the wall
over the couch that read SEX WORK IS A VALID CAREER CHOICE.
“Thanks,” the substitute teacher said. “I made it while talking on the phone to some of my favorite clients.” She spun and
headed to the pole studio, revealing cheeky bottoms with garters that stretched right under her buns.
“I think I need to go,” I said. The reminder that a whole bar full of people had seen me rake my nails across the dead guy’s
face made me feel sick. It was so unlike me it begged the question: What if I’d killed him too?
In the pole studio, Olympia idly grabbed onto the pole with her outside arm. “I have the biggest bruise in my armpit from
doing teddy bears last night,” she said. “They don’t call them pole kisses for nothing.”
“That’s why I don’t get rid of this.” Shade sauntered in dramatically, lifting one arm to show off a thatch of armpit hair.
A bluebird of hope landed on my shoulder.
Olympia laughed. “I wish I could get away with that at the club.”
Luckily, Shade took the pole next to mine.
“Can I talk to you?” I whispered.
“After class!” Olympia boomed.
Shade shrugged apologetically. “The queen has spoken.”
“Today we’ll mostly be doing floorwork,” Olympia decreed.
It didn’t take me long to figure out floorwork was French for crawling around while trying to look sexy. I suspected it was a talent that couldn’t be taught. Either you
had it or you didn’t. Olympia had it.
“First we’re gonna learn the Vagina Monster,” she said. Lying on her back, she propped herself up on her elbows and raised
her legs into a giant V, so that her cookie—as Salma Hayek would’ve called it—was pointing right at us. When she waved her
legs in the air, an optical illusion occurred. Her knees turned liquid, the entire length of her legs rubbery as octopus tentacles.
“And if you get good, you can crawl it across the floor,” she added. With each wave of her boneless legs, she scooched her
hips from side to side, advancing across the floor, cookie first. She really did look like a giant Vagina Monster ready to
devour us. “Easy-peasy. Now your turn.”
My efforts made me look like a beached sea lion on epinephrine. Meanwhile, Layna appeared to be having a seizure while making
the lewdest pass in the history of the world at an invisible paramour. But my inner comedian was beyond pleased with the absurdity.
If I ever was going to work on a new set, this could be interesting.
As class ended, I snapped back to the fact that I was there for a reason. I hurried up to Shade, who was wiping down his pole.
“If it isn’t Little Miss Houdini,” he said. “You make it home okay Sunday night?”
“What do you mean, ‘Miss Houdini’? Wasn’t I with you?”
“We were outside waiting for my Uber. But I ran back in for my gloves. When I came back out, you were nowhere to be seen.
I figured you grabbed a Lyft or something. You get home okay?”
“What can I say?” I managed weakly. “I’m a woman of mystery. Even to myself. What about you?”
“At the last minute I decided to meet friends for karaoke at the Neurolux. Did I do an impromptu version of ‘River Deep, Mountain
High’ that Tina and Céline would’ve approved of? Yes, ma’am.”
So Shade had been hitting high notes in front of hundreds of people. Meanwhile, I now had no hope of figuring out where I’d been from 9:30 p.m. to 4:16 a.m. the night in question.
Shade nattered on, oblivious to my distress. “I swear on my granny’s grave it’s almost time for me to debut my drag queen
persona, Ida Hoe. But I don’t want to lip-synch! I want to SING!” He belted out the last word like Lady Gaga at her Vegas
residency.
But I wasn’t listening. Pinpricks of sweat had broken out all over my body. I excused myself and stumbled into the chill room.
After yanking my coat and shoes out of their cubby, I burst out into the cool night air, my breath coming short and fast.
My one chance at answers about Sunday night was shot. A frozen, rigor mortis-ed dead guy was still crammed into my trunk and
heaps of evidence pointed to me as the killer. This was a disaster, a nightmare of epic proportions. The sort of thing that
would give you a delicious thrill of horror to watch on-screen because you knew deep down it could happen to sad desperate
fictional movie characters but never ever to you. But now it had happened to me. I was deeply and truly screwed.
Layna followed me out a moment later. “So?” she asked.
“A total bust,” I managed.
“Oh, hon,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She unlocked her car.
As I sank into the ridiculously luxe leather seat, an idea came to me. A flimsy, improbable idea. But it was something. “Do
you think it’s weird Salma Hayek didn’t show up to teach?”
“Not that weird.” Behind the wheel, Layna snapped down the mirrored visor to admire her cascading pigtails.
“Salma Hayek did bring the first shots to the table,” I said.
“You seriously think Salma Hayek roofied you while she was proselytizing about how pole would give you a chance to reclaim
your zest for life?”
As Layna gunned the engine, I gripped the door handle in anticipatory terror. “For all we know she had a long-standing vendetta against that jerk,” I said.
“I suspect lots of people might’ve,” Layna agreed.
“So say she murdered him and stuffed him in my trunk. She could’ve left the country by now. She might plan to lay low until
the whole thing blows over. Or until after I’m convicted.”
“That is dark,” Layna said. But she didn’t say it was unlikely.
“Yeah, well, this whole thing is dark,” I muttered.
We spent the remainder of the drive in gloomy silence. I directed Layna to pull into the alley behind my house. As she cut
the lights and the night enveloped us, a phone dinged inside my coat. The dead guy’s phone. After charging it last night,
I’d kept it in my pocket on the irrational pipe dream a clue might come in. (Like what? A text from someone apologizing to
the dead guy for murdering him?)
I whipped out the phone before the alert disappeared.
“It’s a voice memo,” I said. “From someone called Ralphie the Lizard.”