Epilogue
A Saturday in Early June
With my first check from HBO and my steady stream of Substack cash, I finally had more than enough money to move back to LA.
Instead, I’d paid off my credit cards and two of the mortgages on my mom’s duplex, which felt like an amends to her. My one
splurge was on an outdoor projector and speakers so we could host outdoor movie nights in our backyard.
Now the twins were begging me to help them spread blankets and set up camping chairs. Nate was pinning a sheet to the side
of the shed to use as a projector screen. He looked adorable in the three-quarter-length pants he’d bought for wearing to
the climbing gym, where he was taking classes with Phoebe and Alice.
As magic hour suffused the sky with a purple glow, our found family began to arrive. Oat Willimena and Emmylou appeared through
Emmylou’s sliding glass back door carrying giant bowls of homemade popcorn. Miranda came next, looking happy and peaceful,
Tater Tot swaddled against her chest, Chauncey in tow. She was asking me for advice on signing up for classes at Pole Kisses
again when Tina, the principal’s assistant, blew in with her eight-year-old granddaughter and a Tupperware full of baked goodies.
Miranda, Tina, and I were chomping rainbow brownies and talking baby sleep hacks (lightly stroke the baby’s eyebrows, play
the original White Lotus theme music on a loop, et cetera) when Miley O’Riley showed up with her daughter, Bam-Bam.
“Have you made your list?” Miley asked as Bam-Bam scampered off to join the other children. Miley had invited me to headline a fall festival she was putting on, and wanted me to create a lineup of up-and-coming comedians to open for me.
“I’ve been working on it!” I said. “Let’s have a playground date tomorrow so I can show you some reels and see what you think.”
Then I had to run off to say hi to Principal Cruz and Maricela, who’d made a big entrance with inflatable beach balls for
the twins—which I predicted Little Sister would pop within the hour.
Johnica, her mom, and both of her mom’s sister wives appeared right before Layna sailed through the gate holding hands with
a muscular hottie. With his tight fade and dimples he looked very, very good for his age, which I figured to be old-but-not-grandpa-old.
I recognized him instantly.
“Retired astronaut Kendrick B. Johnson!” I said. “Not a catfish!”
He smiled a little warily.
“Tilly thought you were catfishing me,” Layna explained. “She said you for sure were not DMing me from outer space.”
“Well, she was right,” he said. “I absolutely was not DMing you from outer space. I haven’t been since 1998.”
“That’s exactly what your Wikipedia page said!” I cried.
“If I’d met you, I would’ve known you were teasing,” Layna protested. “But how was I supposed to understand your sense of
humor?” She gave Kendrick a playful swat and they beamed. It looked like Layna’s time to heal was going to turn out to be
a sexual healing after all.
Kendrick volunteered to help Nate set up the projector.
All the Pole Kisses gang had arrived—except for Zhang Xiu—and we clustered together to share good news.
Gucci had a fantastic new grad school advisor now that Professor Bidelspach had been forced to resign.
Shade had been tapped to emcee Drag Night at the Balcony Club.
Cheyenne held hands with Salma Hayek as she told us Cheyenne’s Sentient Strippers were on back order all over the country.
“That would never have happened if those clips of your comedy set hadn’t gone viral,” she said.
“I wouldn’t’ve had material for my set if badass women like you hadn’t developed pole into a high art for some and a very
funny hobby for others,” I said.
I was chatting with Layna about her first week at beauty school when Zhang Xiu came through the back gate with a slender woman
in a flowered sundress. The young woman shared Zhang Xiu’s straight black hair, flawless skin, and bowed upper lip.
“You must be Zhang Xiu’s daughter!” I said. “Wait, is it weird when I call your mom that?”
“My mom has always needed an alter ego. She’s never really seemed like an Ingrid,” she said. “I’m Peony. Nice to meet you.”
“Zhang Xiu! Your name is Ingrid?”
Zhang Xiu shrugged. “Spiritually? Not really. But legally? Sure is.”
I hadn’t forgotten what Zhang Xiu had told me that night at Barbarian Brewing, about how some degen had assaulted her daughter
in the parking lot of a bar three years ago. And here was Peony, looking at ease in her strong, willowy body. It made my chest
ache to think of what she must’ve had to overcome, of how much strength it takes sometimes just to survive.
“Zhang Xiu told us you work for . . .” I wracked my brain, trying to remember.
“Allergan Aesthetics,” Peony said. Off my blank look she added, “It’s a drug company.”
My head clanged between cartoon cymbals. Every Los Angeleno worth her salt knows of Allergan’s most famous product.
“B-Botox,” I stammered. “Allergan makes Botox.”
Gucci stared at me, eyes as big as manholes.
“God bless Allergan,” Layna said, gesturing at her forehead. I’d eventually told her Connor had been stuffed to the gills
with Botox. Still, she wasn’t catching on.
“Botox is what we’re known for,” Peony said. “But we also manufacture Juvederm, Kybella, CoolSculpting. Everything a modern gal needs to be flawless.” She said it with an ironic twinkle in her eyes.
“Isn’t CoolSculpting where you use paddles to freeze someone’s saddlebags off?” Layna said. “You can have mine. Just please
don’t freeze my juicy butt off!”
“Zhang Xiu, can you help me in the kitchen real quick?” I said. “Sorry, Peony, I’ll bring her back.”
Before Zhang Xiu could protest, I dragged her inside, Gucci on our heels. The kitchen was blessedly empty; still, I pulled
Zhang Xiu all the way into my bedroom. Gucci shut the door behind us. But before I could speak, Layna burst in. She wasn’t
clueless at all. Just a better actor than I’d given her credit for.
I turned to Zhang Xiu. “It was you, wasn’t it!” I asked.
Zhang looked panicked. “Tilly, what are you talking about?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out before,” I said. “You have a dragon tattoo! I mean, you’re literally the girl with the dragon tattoo. You got revenge against a sexual predator who more than deserved it. Only he didn’t hurt
you. He hurt your daughter.”
All color drained from Zhang Xiu’s face and her knees buckled. I helped her to my mom’s old Eames chair dupe.
Zhang Xiu stared at me. “Is Connor—is he . . . all right?”
“If by ‘all right,’ you mean ‘dead,’” I said, “then yes.”
Zhang Xiu let out a strangled noise. “I just wanted him to be violently ill. For a minute. To be afraid. To suffer a little.
He deserved that, at least. I didn’t mean to—”
I wanted to judge her. But when I thought of my own daughters, I couldn’t.
“We won’t tell,” Gucci said. “But I have to know how you did it.”
Zhang Xiu covered her face with her hands, then brushed them back through her hair. “Like I told you, before my daughter got sober, she met this guy at a bar. The Dutch Goose. He said he wanted to walk her to her car. But instead he—” She choked up. “He’d drugged her.”
“Oh, Zhang,” I said, sinking down to the edge of my bed. Gucci was already cross-legged on the floor and Layna joined her
there.
“She didn’t call me until two days later,” Zhang Xiu said, speaking as if in a trance. “The police said there was nothing
they could do. She’d spent hours in the shower by then. But she knew his name. I looked him up. I’ll never forget that face.
That was three years ago. Tilly, the instant I saw you fighting with him in Huckleberry’s, I knew. Knew it was him.”
I barely dared to breathe in case it broke the spell.
“I was driving Peony’s car that night, since my Kawasaki was in the shop,” Zhang Xiu said. “She always has drug samples in
her trunk. Swag hypodermics that say Allergan too. To give to doctors. While you all were having another round, I went out front. He was still out there, staggering around,
holding his head, ranting about Salma hitting him with a beer bottle. I was like, ‘I remember you! We had fun that night?
Do you still like to party?’ I could see him thinking he didn’t remember me, that I was too old. But I convinced him to meet
me in the alley. I grabbed Botox out of Peony’s trunk, peeled off the label. I told him it was morphine and I watched him
inject himself. He shot it right into the big blood-draw vein.”
Miranda would be so relieved to know for sure what happened. That she truly hadn’t been responsible for Connor’s death. This
was a secret just for Pole Virgins, but Miranda (aka Pumpkin Spice) might be joining us in classes soon enough.
“How’d you know how much to give him?” Gucci said.
“One time I was joking with Peony about Botox being a toxin. She said it’d take a couple bottles of the stuff to kill someone.
She said it in passing. But I remembered. She must’ve been wrong, though.”
“Then how’d you get away from him?” Layna said.
“I pretended I’d eaten a bad fish taco.”
“Bad fish taco!” I said. “The holy grail of excuses!”
“After that night, I got so anxious,” Zhang Xiu said, rubbing her hands on her thighs. “But I read the Idaho Statesman every day. The front page. The obituaries. There was no mention of him.” She paused as if groping for a shot of denial. “I told myself
he was fine.”
“Yeah, not fine,” Layna said.
“Like he went home and maybe slept it off,” she pressed.
An eternal sleep, I wanted to say. Instead I gently covered her hands with my own. “I know it’d be more evolved to say that there are better
ways to heal, to move forward. But if some scumbag did that to one of my daughters, I’d chop off his dick and make him eat
it like a Vienna sausage.”
“Amen,” Layna said.
Zhang Xiu squared her shoulders. “Then at Pole Kisses, when you asked if anyone had seen anything weird out back at Huckleberry’s,
it made me nervous again. Real nervous. But I put everything that happened in one little box and buried it in the back of
my mind.” She hesitated. “I can’t believe I killed him.”
“You didn’t,” Gucci said.
Zhang Xiu, Layna, and I all looked at her as if she’d said our Salma Hayek was the real Salma Hayek’s long-lost daughter.
“The corpse had near-lethal levels of botulinum toxin,” Gucci said.
“Exactly!” I said.
“Near lethal!” Gucci said again. “Near lethal is not lethal. My new grad-school mentor warned me civilians never hear what
the experts are saying when it comes to cause of death. And she’s right!”
“Then what killed him?” Zhang Xiu asked.
“He had heroin in his system. But not lethal amounts. Then he grabbed Salma Hayek’s ass, so she hit him over the head with
a bottle of Dos Equis. Again, the blow wouldn’t’ve killed him on its own. Zhang, you encouraged him to shoot up with Botox
in revenge for the evil shit he did to your daughter. Which normally would’ve only made him very, very sick.”
I interrupted, excited. “Then someone else stabbed him twice with a pair of scissors and tased him because he assaulted her in the alley behind Huckleberry’s.”
“Not one of those things would’ve done him in by itself,” Gucci said. “But all together? Lethal as fuck.”
“Death by a thousand counts of being an asshole!” Layna cried.
“Not an official forensic finding, but that’s basically it,” Gucci said.
“And by the way, Zhang,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about Connor’s body coming back to haunt you. It’s gone. Like ashes-to-ashes
gone.”
“Thank god,” Zhang Xiu breathed. “Thank god. Thank god.”
I grabbed one of Zhang Xiu’s hands and one of Layna’s. Gucci closed the circle.
“You promise you won’t tell?” Zhang Xiu insisted.
“Pole Virgins promise,” I said and Gucci and Layna echoed the same. Our entwined fingers were unbreakable as a pinkie swear.
We all startled when the bedroom door swung open.
“Y’all closing out a private AA meeting in here?” Shade said.
“Jesus, Shade!” I said. “You scared us.”
“Tilly, your hunka-hunka-burning-love says he can’t start the movie without you. And why are y’all having a moment without
me?”
We motioned for Shade to join us. For a moment the five of us stood there, holding hands. “Before we go back out there,” Shade
said, “I have a million-dollar question.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“Now that we’re done being Pole Virgins,” he said, “should we do the Pole Kittens series together?”
When we all stepped back outside, darkness had fallen. Smiling groups of people I loved chatted under the twinkle lights.
The air was clear and not too chilly. Trees arched green and graceful overhead, sheltering us from the vast night sky.
Boise was showing off.
A strong arm slid around my shoulders. Nate smiled down at me, his eyes warm. “Do you think it’s time to start The Parent Trap?” he asked.
“How about in five?” I said. I wanted to enjoy the moment a little longer.
Beach balls floated overhead, bouncing between the twins and their friends—Maricela, Bam-Bam, Johnica, Tina’s granddaughter.
Little Sister leapt and twirled in the middle of their circle, wild to catch the floating orbs. For a moment, I could hear
my mother’s voice in my head, kind and familiar, saying, “Now those are some very happy girls.”
She would’ve meant Phoebe and Alice.
But she also would’ve meant me.