She’s studied the photos: the wooden platform sixty feet above the boardwalk. The horse being led up the narrow ramp. The elegant woman in the bathing suit and dark lipstick, waiting, crouching, springing up and getting a leg over the horse, and then the dive—woman and horse tucking their heads, falling face-first through the air. The splash as they hit the pool, the gasps forced from the crowd. The woman—ta-da!—throwing her hands in the air. How good it must have felt to perform that way, Jane #2 thinks. To have a moment in each day when you could raise your arms and demand to be praised.

JANE #1 doesn’t remember a time before the casinos and the hotels. To her they had always been there, the same way the ocean had always been there, the sand, the marsh. But Jane #2 remembers when they went up, her older brother going off to help build them, the new shadows the towers cast on the streets. She rode her bicycle along the boardwalk to watch the ribbon cutting ceremony when Resorts opened in ’78, pushed her way through the crowds and gripped the rails of the boardwalk tight. Before, it had been an old hotel, then a Quaker meeting house, a plain three-story structure made of wood, and now there was this: a palace, practically. Large and clean and white.

Jane #2’s older cousin, Louisa, was one of the first women hired as a cocktail waitress, and she got to go into one of the ballrooms early, before the place opened, and practice carrying trays of drinks without spilling anything over the rims of the glasses.

She used to watch Louisa shimmy into her uniform: the bustier lined with so many black sequins it looked wet, the way she flicked her Zippo, ran her kohl pencil through the flame, and drew dark lines, slowly, patiently, around her eyes. The nude stockings that were like skin but prettier, satiny. Number 2 knew that this was what she wanted when she grew up: getting paid to be so glamorous, to play dress up.

And she did. By the time she was eighteen, six more casinos had opened. She got a job at the Taj Mahal. By then, things had changed a little. The newness had been buffed away and carpets had faded. The crystal chandeliers had lost some of their shine. But she liked the girls she worked with: they looked out for one another. Pitched in when one girl was swamped with orders. Loaned stockings whenever someone else had a run. Grumbled over salads and Diet Coke in the cafeteria. The casino had rules for them to follow: monthly weigh-ins if you were a cocktail server. Gain more than 10 percent of your weight and you got stuck on the day shift, when everyone knew the good money was in the 6 to 2 a.m. slot.

That’s where the drugs were meant to help.