Johnson was sweaty. Wet orbits sprouted from his armpits. His car had smelled like cigarettes and perspiration, and now he smelled like his car. He was nothing like her father. Jeanette’s father was a drunk, but Jeanette’s father was a neat drunk. She danced a circle around Johnson, gyrating her pelvis. Her father went to work in a suit and changed into his surgical scrubs at the hospital. He always smelled of Listerine and rubbing alcohol. She put her hands on her knees and made circles with her ass. He’d only touched her once when he was drunk.

Johnson grabbed a handful of her ass and slid a finger along the seam of her jeans. That made her straighten. She couldn’t explain why she felt different all of a sudden. Nothing had changed. She couldn’t explain why Johnson kind of disgusted her—in a bad way—now. She wanted to go home. She was so dizzy. Jeanette sat down on a foam-wet plastic chair and felt her shorts saturate.

She pictured what the place would look like with muted sound—all those bodies in ridiculous movement, all those men eyeing convulsing bodies, perspiring, breathing heavy. The one bartender, a woman in a black bustier, looked like she watched the scene with muted sound. She was the only one who saw how funny it all was. Jeanette wanted to kiss her, the only real person left.

Johnson motioned with his chin and grabbed her arm. He dragged her to a corner by the bathrooms. Every wall was a mirror. The tiny space looked like a kaleidoscope and Jeanette smiled thinking of herself as a piece of colored glass that morphed, shifted into different patterns. I’m a star. I’m a Magic Eye. I’m nothing at all.

Johnson took a small baggie of white powder and a key chain with three keys out of his back pocket. He dipped a key into the baggie like he was collecting a teaspoon of sugar. Then he brought the key up to his nose in one quick swoop, snorted deeply, and threw his head back. He shook his head like a wet dog.

“God damn!”

Jeanette had never seen anyone do coke. She didn’t know anyone at her high school who even spoke about coke. She had always assumed cocaine was one of the drug addict drugs, like heroin in a syringe, the kind of drug nobody in her circles would ever do. The kind that existed so her drugs—weed, an occasional ecstasy roll or some bars from someone’s mom’s prescription—didn’t count as real drugs.

“Take a bump,” Johnson said to her, dipping the key again and holding it up to Jeanette’s face.