Carmen had a faraway look in her eyes. “It’s like I’m there and I’m not there at the same time, like Cinderella doing a miserable chore but there are birds chirping in her ear? That’s me. I smile and do my thing, but in my mind, I imagine I’m a doll walking through my old dollhouse, and I go room to room. I try to remember everything, from the wallpaper to the little tiny teacups. And when my time is up, I take the money and move on. It’s like it never happened.”

Carmen wasn’t one to wallow. She smiled, reached into her purse, and pulled out a piece of metal jewelry and plunked it on Sherri’s tray. “Here’s a present for you.”

“Is this an earring?” Sherri asked, flipping it around in her palm.

Carmen couldn’t stop laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Honey, that’s a nipple clamp.”

Sherri threw it across the room as if it were a cockroach, and Carmen roared with laughter. The “gift” made her feel even dirtier than she’d already felt after losing her virginity to a relative stranger. She was convinced that people saw her differently now; that the men she waited on could see the tackiness of forgettable sex all over her. She didn’t want to believe that all men were like the guys who wanted Carmen to dance on their laps.

After her shift, Sherri returned to the dorm room, trying to sort through the dissonance of moving between nipple clamps and dollhouses. She was dying to slip between her sheets so she could fall asleep and wake up on the other side of this overwhelming new phase of her life. She found Val in the room, dressed in her fringed, brown suede coat, checking her hair in the mirror. Val kissed her lipstick on a tissue. “Curtis has to work again, and Danny’s having another party. He invited some of the guys from Cheap Trick.”

“For real?”

“It’s not such a big deal. Those guys are around the resort all the time. There’s a world-class recording studio downstairs at the club. You know that, right? Shade Tree. You coming?”

Sherri looked like hell, felt like hell. But if she went to the party, she wouldn’t be alone, thinking about how badly her first sexual experience had gone. “Sure!”

She reached into her pocket and felt the pink slip of memo paper Ola had handed to her at the end of her shift. It was from Roberta, who shared her birthday and never, ever forgot.

ROBERTA SAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TWIN HELLO HOPE YOU ARE FUN.

CHAPTER FIVE