CHAPTER 2
My little sister has been “Mud Pie” in my contacts forever. She may have grown out of her need to make fake food out of the clay and rocks in the backyard, but that’s only because an art teacher was paying attention and got her into a ceramics workshop when she was seven.
She drops her bag onto the chair next to me and flops into the one across.
I watch the coffee in the cup in front of her as it sloshes a little.
“You have no idea how happy I am to see you.” She sighs and wraps her hands around her cup. “How are you?”
“I’m—” I’m startled enough I almost tell her I’m just fine. But she seems to actually care, and I don’t feel like lying. “I’m doing really well.”
“Good.” She takes a long drink. “Did mom tell you what’s going on?”
“She accused me of asking you to stop talking to her.”
“Of course she did.” She yawns, and I yawn, setting off a small chain reaction around the coffee shop. “Sorry, I have like three papers due, and none of them are easy enough to just whip up last minute.”
“School’s going well then?” I try not to sound too sarcastic.
She makes a disgusted face. “School is annoyingly time-consuming, and that’s about it. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“It’s probably a more pleasant conversation.”
“So, you know that she took us to Hawaii.”
“Yeah.” I try not to sound bitter, and I’m pretty sure I fail, even though it’s only one word.
“The entire time we were there, she kept telling me you were on your way, you were going to join us when your work thing was done.” She looks down at her cup, nose scrunching. “I am ashamed to say I believed her for a little too long to be excusable.”
“You can’t control what she does.”
“I know, but I didn’t have to trust her. And when we got back, and you were gone… I was so mad, I left and I haven’t talked to her since.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I don’t talk to her. She still talks to me. A Lot.”
That sounds about right. “And she told you I was coming home.”
“She said you were going to fix everything.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.” She sighs and clutches her cup, already empty. “Do you want another one?”
“No, I’m okay.”
I watch her go up to the register, order another latte and something else, and I wonder if she really needs any more caffeine.
She comes back, balancing her cup and two plates. “I got you the cheesecake crumble. I can’t see anything with streusel on it and not think of you.”
It is one of my favorites. “Thank you.”
“I miss you,” she says, tearing apart the pastry she bought herself. “But I am really glad you aren’t going to go back to being Mom’s personal bank account. I mean, after you paid for the trip and she didn’t even ask you to come with us.”
“I didn’t pay for the trip.”
“What do you mean? She said you did.”
“She thought I would.”
Tearing the pastry into even smaller pieces, Anne asks, “What does that mean?
“I think I need to clarify some things.” I tell her about the mortgage and the car and everything else that happened on Earth, and she looks madder and madder.
“She’s going to lose the house?”
“Probably.”
Cursing under her breath and tapping the side of the cup with her nail, she says, “I’m not going to lie to you. I also need money, but I’m not here to ask you to give it to me.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot and your job…” She leans forward. “Is it a sex thing?”
I take the moment required to chew my bite before I say, “It is.”
“I want in.”
It makes me laugh a little. Not at her, but at the memory of those words in so many other instances. My friends and I decided to go to Coney Island, just to see if it was as boring as other friends had said. Anne wanted in.
A cousin and I had gotten our own cabin at a family reunion in upstate… Anne had wanted in.
“You don’t really know what I do. Jumping in feet first isn’t the best way to approach something like this.”
“You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe.” She takes a deep breath and looks at me like she’s practiced this. “That’s one constant I have always had in my life. You are safe. I’ve known that since I was three. Hell, it’s what I wrote my college admission essay on.”
“Safe is a relative thing with this.”
“Wait… are you okay?” She scoots forward, her voice even lower. “No one’s forcing you to do things, right?”
“No, no one’s forcing me.” This time, I do laugh, imagining what Phantom would do if someone was.
“Okay, then why is it not an immediate yes? You’re not harboring some weird puritanical hang ups are you? Because you’ve always been super open-minded.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to do what I do. Heaven knows it’s better than if you were going to do it here.”
“Wait, you don’t do it in New York?” Her spine straightens.
“God, no.”
“Where do you do it?”
“You would not believe me if I told you.”
“Sheboygan?”
“What?”
Anne shrugs. “You said I wouldn’t believe you, so I picked a place so random, it couldn’t be right. Is it right?”
“No.”
“Fine, we’ll get to the logistics later, but I can not keep going to work at a place I want to burn down with people I would love to see on a missing persons’ list.
“You’re twenty-one and in college. Keep going to school.”
“I can go to school when I’m older.” She drops her voice to a whisper again.
“This body is in its sex work prime. Besides. If you cut Mom off, no money, no tuition. Come on. If you’re doing it, it’s safe, right?
I’m not going to wind up dead in a back alley because I tried to sell feet pics online and didn’t know how to keep my address secret. ”
Exhaling, I know I’ll give in, not because of any argument she might make, but because I trust her to make her own decisions, and if she wants this option…
“I’ll ask my employer.”
“You have a pimp?” She asks it a little too loudly and immediately clamps her mouth closed.
“Let’s talk about terms and language first, okay?”
She grimaces. “He’s not a pimp, is he?”
“They are not a pimp. They’re a manager and they provide opportunities within a safe space. You can take or pass on any of those opportunities, and the work is fun… but I can see several ways it would not be fun.” I can’t tell her the whole truth, but… “The clients are not normal men and women.”
“There’s only one way to find out if I like it!” She smiles at me the same way she always has when she’s waiting—hoping—for me to agree.
“Is it really what you want to do?”
“What I want to do is throw pots and sit in a studio all day, but I can’t afford to do that, so I was getting the business degree to handle all the annoying stuff.
If I can get a job that’s easy and fun and clearly makes a boatload of cash, why wouldn’t I do that for a while, at least until I can do what I actually love? ”
“I can get you the money to start up whatever you want.”
“No. I was an asshole to use tuition money to guilt you. I want to work for what I get. It’s part of the reason I haven’t been home either.”
“Finish out the semester. There are only a few weeks left, right? I’ll talk to Phantom, and if they’re willing to hire you, I’ll make it happen.”
“Phantom,” she says their name with a bobbing nod of her head. “Cool.”
“It’s not a guarantee.”
“Still, thank you.” She squeezes my hand. “We both know I owe you more than I can ever repay.”
“And we both know I’m not going to make you settle that debt.”
“Oh, I’ll find a way.”