“Only the girls can dance,” he said. “But here.” He pulled a vial from his pocket, twisted the cap. A lever unfolded from the top and became the smallest spoon. He dipped the spoon, removed a mound of powder from the vial, showed me how to bump it. It was my first time doing cocaine.

“Tip your head back,” he said and lifted my chin with his fingers like I was a kid with a nosebleed. I tasted chemical drip. My throat felt full and numb. Every month or so my mom would drink too much Yellow Tail and talk about my dad’s coke habit, the powder he hid in his sock drawer, how he’d cut lines before business meetings and dinner parties. I could see her, balled up on the sofa, sipping her Chardonnay—the one controlled substance she didn’t avoid—her crew-socked feet tucked under her butt. “He was always looking for escape,” she’d say on nights like these, evidence that losing him wasn’t her fault only.

Jake’s eyes drifted to the stage.

“I have to pee,” I said and walked to the women’s restroom, found it empty. I checked my phone. There wasn’t service and I put it away, widened my mouth for the mirror. My throat was open. I was fine. I swallowed, touched my face, my neck, and it was like touching another girl’s face or neck, smooth and unfamiliar, and this time, I was the confident one. I swung through the door and into the hallway. I found an ATM and fed it my debit card. Jake had been paying for everything, and I wanted him to pay. Moving to LA had cost me; my phone bill, my six-week stay in the Airbnb, paid upfront and in full, had cost me. I selected “check balance.” I only had four hundred and seventy-six dollars left. Unless Jake got me a sponsorship and I earned enough, and quickly, I wouldn’t have a place to stay. As it was, since he messaged me, I had slept most nights at his condo.

I pictured my mom again, seated at the computer in the kitchen this time, checking her accounts. The room came into focus in fragments: her coffee cup, filmy with cream; her stacks of unpaid bills, coupons, bank statements. She had four credit cards, each one always spent to the limit. The child support money, like her paycheck, was never enough and when I turned eighteen, it had run out anyway. She dog sat sometimes after that but cut her customers too many deals and we argued about it.

“You don’t value your time,” I often said. Her response was always the same: “Honey, I am many things, but a user isn’t one of them.”