You decide you’ll scrounge up enough for a bus ticket somewhere else, somewhere farther away. You’ve heard the other women in the shelter talking, talking about sleeping with men for cash as though it were as easy and impersonal as working a shift at Burger King. And isn’t it your right? Your body, at least you get to sell it or rent it out as you see fit. And besides, you would only need to do it once, just to get enough to get out of here, to go somewhere you can breathe.

It’s not that you think there is anything elegant or noble about suffering—pain is just pain, too abundant and easy to come by to mean anything, other than itself. It does not mean redemption, or absolution, and it doesn’t make you stronger. But happiness can be a burden, too. When it comes down to it, you don’t know how to be a human, how to bear either pain or joy.

WITH YOUR mother, you didn’t think of it as prostitution because it was rooted so strongly in need. Cause and effect, no frills or pretenses about it. Prostitutes were women in red dresses and heels, women with too much makeup on, women who marked themselves in obvious ways as available for sex. Women who liked it too much—when you still thought that women weren’t allowed to want sex like men did. You’ve seen those kinds of women around here, too. Like the one with the peach tattoo who got in your face the first time you tried to pick someone up, so you left the bar and were stuck in AC for one more day.

So now you go down to the parking lot of the Sunset Motel. You heard that’s where some of the other girls hang out, that it would be easy—though you couldn’t expect to get paid as much. You spend twenty minutes toeing bottle caps in the parking lot before a man approaches you.

In the room the light comes through the cheap curtains and you let the man touch you. You feel the shadow Julie stepping closer, the gap between your selves growing smaller than it’s ever been, an arm’s length, then a few inches as you take off your clothes, then a sliver as thin as a slice of paper when he pushes you onto the bed. You’re scared and a little bit embarrassed by his want. It’s not your first time—Kevin Luther, last spring—but it’s already so different that it might as well be. Kevin pausing after he entered you to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, like you were something delicate, something that could break.