I adored him.

I went back out into the living room. “He’s passed out. I don’t think even Teddy can manage to be angry in his sleep.”

“Well, he wasn’t asleep earlier,” Yolanda said. “He kept muttering to himself, and when I went in there to see what the problem was, he screamed at me until I left the room again. So then I put the blanket on him.”

“God, he’s such a pain,” I said. “Sorry, Yo. I don’t know why he’s such a jerk.”

“He’s a one-woman bird,” she said. “I understand. I get my love and validation in other ways.”

“You should get a dog,” Tanya said.

“What a terrible idea,” Yolanda said, and they launched into their well-worn argument about the pros and cons of dog ownership. Tanya had one of those little yappy dogs, I didn’t know what kind, and she liked to carry him around in her purse, even on the subway. I thought it was kind of weird.

They wound down, finally, and Yolanda said, “So you said Poppy’s giving you trouble at work again?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. She’s got that thing, what do you call it, like that guy in France—”

“Napoleon Complex,” Yolanda said. “That’s only if you’re really short, though.”

“She’s not that short, so I guess she’s just an asshole,” I said.

“Why don’t you just quit that job?” Yolanda asked. “You don’t want to be a stripper for the rest of your life, do you?”

That was easy for her to say. She had a college education and a real job, and she didn’t understand that my circumstances were different. “Maybe someday,” I said.

“Someday, what does that mean?” she asked. “You can do it whenever you want. I told you I’d help you. It’s easy. Tanya knows a guy who just got his GED, so we could get you in touch with him and he’ll tell you all about how it works.”

I really didn’t feel like listening to a lecture on my life choices. “I’ll think about it,” I said, and then the doorbell rang, thank God, and I got to escape and go pay the delivery guy.

* * *

It wasn’t like I set out to become a sex worker.

Nobody did, except maybe a few spoiled rich girls who thought it would be empowering to have men pay them for sex. But the women I knew did it because they actually needed to, because they had no other options.

It wasn’t like any five-year-old’s list of dream jobs included “high-class stripper.”

Mine sure didn’t. I wanted to be a nurse, from the time I was old enough to have some vague notion that nurses existed and did things. I wanted to wear a little white uniform and a cap and bandage people’s boo-boos. That was my dream. I took all the right classes in high school—calculus, biology—and I didn’t exactly ace them, but I did well enough to get by, and I thought there was a fighting chance I would actually graduate and go to college and get out of Wise County and escape.

I wasn’t unhappy, growing up. Pretty much the opposite, really. We were poor as dirt, but my parents were loving and attentive, and I spent most of my childhood playing in the woods behind our house with an assortment of neighbors, cousins, and siblings. We mostly had enough food. There weren’t any dark secrets. There wasn’t anything for me to escape from, other than poverty and a backwoods nowhere life. Well, I wanted a somewhere life. Nursing was my way out.

And then my dad got sick, partway through my junior year of high school. He worked in the mine until it closed, and smoked like a chimney every day of his life, and it didn’t come as a surprise when he got cancer. But it still changed everything.

He couldn’t work. He hadn’t really worked for years, not since the mine shut down, but he’d done enough odd jobs to keep us afloat. But he went downhill fast, and was forced to spend most of his time watching television with his oxygen tank nearby, and there was nobody else. My mom was helpless, sweet as a child and dependent on my dad for everything, and my older brother was stationed in Okinawa and couldn’t do much. I had three younger siblings, and someone had to keep food on the table. My mom’s disability checks weren’t enough.

So I dropped out. Maybe there was some other way, something I could have done to stay in school and still keep a roof over our heads, but I couldn’t think of anything, and I didn’t have anyone to turn to for advice. The guidance counselor was so accustomed to kids dropping out that I didn’t even cross her radar.

I was seventeen. There were three kinds of legal work in my hometown: Wal-Mart, waitressing, and running the cash register at the gas station. None of them were enough to support five people and pay the mortgage. My illegal options were selling drugs or stripping, and I picked stripping as the less morally repulsive of the two.

The money was good. Or I thought it was good, at least; it was good to me, then, the half-starved girl I was, hungry for life and experiences. The owner probably knew I wasn’t eighteen, but he didn’t look too closely at the fake documents I gave him, and nobody else cared. I could make a hundred bucks a night, on a good night, and it was like manna from heaven. I bought my sister the first new pair of shoes she’d had in five years, and I almost cried at the expression on her face: ecstatic disbelief, like it was too good to be real.

You didn’t start stripping because you wanted to. You did it because you couldn’t do anything else.

The problem with making money was that once I had a little bit of it, I wanted more. There were so many things that I could pay for, if only I could make more money: my one brother’s medication, my other brother’s baseball uniform, a new chest freezer to replace the one that broke. I realized pretty quickly that there was an upper limit on how much money I could make if I stayed in the boonies and worked at a third-rate hole-in-the-wall strip club. It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off, and then I started dreaming of bigger and better things.

And then my sister got into college, and dreaming turned into planning.

I didn’t even know that she had applied until she came to me with the acceptance letter: admission to Tech with enough financial aid to cover her tuition, and I was so proud I could have cried.

“Don’t tell Daddy,” she said, the two of us sitting at the little kitchen table, alone in the house for once—the boys still at school, and our parents gone down the road to the store. “I know I can’t go. I just wanted to—I don’t know. I guess prove to myself that I could do it.”