We would leave the room in heats, Ella announced. While I waited my turn, I did a short line of a sparkly pink powder someone called 2CB, synthetic cocaine. It made me dance in place for a few minutes, my body like a marionette, compelled. I waited, snorted, danced. I talked to every girl, suddenly social, overeager, my hands fluttering to help: this one with an errant eyelash, this one with her tit tape, this one with her angles. I interlaced my fingers with this one’s fingers, took her phone to take her picture, gave her mine and posed, and posted.

“What’s your name?” we asked each other and didn’t hear the answer.

Ella came with a basket. “It’s that time, ladies,” she said and we each put our phone in. I saw the basket drop with the weight each girl deposited. They’d be kept safe, Ella said, returned in the morning when the work was done. She smiled and her tooth gap gaped. She paired girls off, a buddy system. She gestured at the girl closest to me, her name already forgotten. “You’re a team,” she said. We took hands, giddy, and swung them as we walked. Out of the room, down the elevator. Out of the elevator into the crowd of men, which opened up to have us.

18.

Girl and I, good at our job. Girl and I chopped by strobe lights, on the dance floor, sucking vape pens, kissing smoke. Girl and I made immortal by our kiss, the cameras, the men who cried out yes as if Girl and I were both a game and its players, and they wanted us to win. I had felt sick before, I had felt scared. But now I felt outside all that, like a girl I didn’t know.

As we left the room upstairs, Ella had warned us not to get sloppy. We were there to stock the party, give @Chrisss material, make Blaze Cannabis followers hungry from afar. Men were there as Blaze’s guests. They were there to indulge in the Product, invest in the Product, buy stock in the future of the Product; they should want what only Blaze could have. They were everywhere, the guests, the men, standing around tables of artisanal glass bongs shaped like assault rifles, standing around cases of Blaze Product, fat green clusters sparkling under glass like engagement diamonds. The men were cleanshaven, baby-faced in jackets sewn with record label patches. They were scruffy in suits with skinny black ties. They wore designer hoodies slung with diamond chains. They wore beanie hats, baseball hats and fedoras. They were watched by security guards, stationed at every exit. And still, the men tried to get us. They waved dime bags and diamond wrist watches, patted breast pockets of Cialis. “Don’t worry, baby,” they yelled. “Don’t be scared.”