I didn’t start school again, even though I only had a few months left. I got a job with a catering company, working parties. I liked making myself look pretty. I put my hair in two long braids down my back. Dora had taught me how. She always hurt my head when she did it, so I learned as fast as I could how to do it myself. I liked the way people looked at me at those showbiz parties. If you were pretty enough, people always thought you were hiding something. They got drunk and told me their secrets. I was good at listening. I got big tips.

My mother knew that money didn’t come from nowhere. Money only showed up, she said, from someone wanting something. I told her I never let men touch me, which wasn’t quite true. I just never let them pay for it. All it takes is someone thinking you’re a whore, she said. Then you are one.

We lost track of that first moment on the porch—her paper hands, our wordless grip, the hope. We had terrible fights. She thought I didn’t have much self-respect. “Or if you do,” she said, “you do a good job hiding it.”

Nearly every night my throat got swollen from crying. I poured the liquor down the ache, closed my eyes, and let the darkness swim. I brought home leftover booze from my gigs. I’d drink anything, but I got to like gin the best, tart and sweet and bitter at the same time. It did the job quickest, felt like, and sent flu pangs all across the surface of my skin. Everything touched me a little sharper when I was drunk—blankets, wood, smoky air, hairy carpets—as if they’d been tucked right around the shape of my body. The whole world fit, and I was folded inside of it. I had a few blind moments of peace before passing out. I woke to the liquor I hadn’t drunk the night before. Drinking on an empty stomach glazed the inside of my body like a clay pot.

One day my mother found me like that, bottle perched between my knees above the covers. “Look at yourself,” she said. “Just look.” She grabbed my arm and pulled. “Get up, get up, get up!” She shoved me in front of my full-length mirror and held my shoulders, shaking. “You see this?”