I noticed their hair first as they came around the bend in the hall, the same jarring red on both of them. Not a natural red, but the color you’d get out of a Kool-Aid packet, concentrated and fruity. Ripe. Even from that distance their bodies hummed with want. They had the flashing, attentive eyes of stray dogs, of scavengers. I couldn’t tell right away what they were hungry for. All I knew was that they seemed more intense, more alive, than anyone else around them. Next to them, the other casino patrons seemed as inanimate as furniture: the tripod stances of old men resting on their canes, the woolly-haired women pushing through on their walkers, the ends of the metal legs capped with tennis balls. It was in the way they moved down the long hallway, switching their matching boys’ hips, narrow and square. Their tangled gold necklaces and clanking bracelets. The thick wedges of eyeliner that made them look haughty and exotic and bored, high priestesses displeased by their retinue. Right away I could recognize that part of that magic had to do with sex: their long legs exposed in tiny pairs of denim shorts, their concave midriffs revealed in crop tops, the WonderBra cleavage edged with lace. But they had something else, too, something interior, something the spa was trying to promise people could be found in a bottle of expensive serum or in a series of treatments. It was the particular confidence of knowing who you were and of knowing what you wanted. I recognized it right away because I’d lost it. Or maybe I’d never had it at all.

Emily paused, having felt my attention drift. She must have followed my stare. “Oh God, those two. And on your first day. Well, you better start getting used to this shit.”

“Who are they?” The two redheads flipped their hair, pouted. They clearly relished the attention, even the looks that they got from the women nearby, women wearing terry-cloth visors and pleated khaki shorts cut to the knee. Women who sneered as they passed but then looked down at the paper cones of french fries in their hands with a little less pleasure than before.

“Scam artists, as far as we’re concerned. One of them will try to read you your cards while the other slips products into her purse, or they buy a day pass and try to hustle the few clients we’ve got. You have to keep a close eye on them; they’ll take anything and everything while you’ve got your back turned. Last time they were here the younger one managed to pry the hairdryer off the wall in the ladies’ lounge.”

“How often do they come in?”