… I wanna hear it from you? … And why?”

Tonya didn’t know where to begin or what to say. When she was initially approached with the idea of stripping she thought it was a joke. She only agreed to it to silence Todd. She never thought that he would actually call his cousin. She couldn’t believe that he actually took her seriously. But he did. So here Tonya was, on the spot, face-to-face with Kat.

“Yeah, ya cousin told you right,” she bashfully admitted. “I wanna strip.”

“Girlfriend, you gots to speak a li’l louder than that,” Kat said, as she took a good look at her body. Tonya was stacked. She definitely had that in her favor. There was no question about it, she could be a stripper on looks alone. But it took more than that, it took desperation, desire. “Yo, Todd, excuse yaself while us girls talk.”

Excusing himself, Todd went back to his room and closed the door.

“Have a seat,” Kat told her. “Relax, we ’bout to have a serious talk. Now, what’s da deal?”

Tonya sat down at the small kitchen table, directly across from her, and looked her in the eye. She automatically felt something real about Kat, something sincere. Whether this vibe was real or imagined, she didn’t know. All she knew was she was at ease around this stranger.

Kat reiterated, with a stern look on her face, “So you ‘really’ wanna strip, huh?”

“Yeah!” Tonya spoke up.

“Are you positive you wanna do this?” Kat asked again, questioning her motives. “You gotta have confidence to strip. You can’t have any hang-ups about ya body. Can’t be no shame in ya game. This definitely ain’t fa everybody ….”

Telling her no, she couldn’t or wouldn’t was a luxury Tonya didn’t have. It wasn’t as if she even knew where her next meal was coming from or where she would lay her head. She straddled an imaginary fence, caught between what she knew was wrong and what she had to do. Somewhere in the middle of the two, lay reality—her fate.

“I’m sure I wanna do it,” she stated firmly. “I got to. I take care of myself. My family don’t fuck with me. It’s a long story.”

“Well,” Kat said. “I got a minute or two. What’s up?”

“See, what happened was, my mother’s boyfriend gave me a joint of weed. Only it wasn’t weed, it was dust. Before I knew what was goin’ on, he raped me. And after dat, things with my moms been goin’ from bad to worse.”