I often read the Mirror Box dancers’ birth charts for free or sometimes for a lap dance. But I need the money right now and I’m bored as hell. I think about Cinnamon giving me a lap dance and feel repulsed, despite how desperately I need to be touched.

“Yeah?” she says. I was expecting her to ask how much, but she’s hardly here; maybe she even forgot what we were talking about.

“Two hundred,” I say.

She laughs, exposing a childish gap between her two front teeth. Then she pulls out a wad of cash from her thong. A few Benjamins fall on the floor. I wait for her to pick them up, but she doesn’t budge. I lean over and grab them, put them in my pocket.

“I want the reading first,” she says, suddenly morphing from a baby into a sophisticated businesswoman. “To prove you’re worth it.” She removes the two bills from the pocket of my Juicy shorts.

I want to argue, but I don’t have the luxury. I need to pay rent.

“Fair,” I say.

She coos her birthday, morphing back into a baby just when I was starting to find her moderately less repellent. She doesn’t know her birth time, but that’s okay. People think the birth time is crucial, but it’s only necessary to determine the rising and the houses. People are also obsessed with their rising sign, probably because Chani Nicholas is obsessed with the rising sign, and she is a respected astrologer, not a con artist meme-maker like me. My take is that the rising sign doesn’t mean much. It’s how we appear on the surface, not who we are. But then again, I learned astrology mostly from Instagram. And my rising sign is the same as my sun sign, and my Mercury, my Venus, my Mars. All Scorpio. So, what you see is what you get: a horror film of a human being.

I load the information on my phone. I just type people’s information into an online calculator. My clients act like I’m doing something obscure and divine, like they wouldn’t be able to just input the information into the website themselves.

As the chart loads, I try to guess her sun sign. She’s giving me Pisces energy. Helpless and in another world. An alcoholic and a pillhead. Weak as hell.

The chart loads and I gasp. She is a Scorpio stellium as well. Scorpio sun, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Gemini moon. Exact same as me. Revulsion blossoms in my chest. Is this how I come off? Like a total waste of space? What can I possibly have in common with this incapacitated baby? Astrology is bullshit. I stand up and walk out of the bar. I doubt she’ll remember the interaction anyway. The sun is still bright and burns my eyes. I lower my head and charge down Winona.