“I’m developing an act,” she said. “That’s how you get a following. That’s why I like Monday nights. They’re lousy for tips, but you get a chance to try new things. This place used to be nothing much, but it’s getting a lot classier now that Mike’s running it. They’ll wake up when I go out there—you watch. Some say I’m the best in the city. They say I should go to Vegas. You should see it in here on weekends.” She stood in front of me holding her hair up, and I tied two ties, one at her neck and one down her back.

“Busy?” I asked.

“Insane.” While she put on her shoes, each one of which needed to be laced up to the knee, Grimshaw chattered about the money and opportunity and fascinating people that the Over Easy had brought into her life. The dressing room was long and rectangular. Gunmetal gray lockers, just like the ones at Colchis High, lined two walls. Mirrors lined the other two. A cigarette burned in an ashtray among the pots and tubes of makeup, adding to the tobacco smoke already embedded in the air. The smoke got into my brain and clouded it over, and I couldn’t remember anything or make sense of anything. Even if I did tell her what happened, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t take his side, like she did before. Nobody had invited me out here, after all. All I got was a postcard with an address—the rest was my doing. When I sat down on a metal folding chair, all the coffee that had been artificially holding me up drained out through my feet and into the floor.

Grimshaw told me how much I inspired her by challenging myself at school. “You just did it,” she said. “You just decided and did what you had to do. That’s actually when I decided to leave, when you made the high honor roll like that. I thought, wow, I guess that’s how you do it.”

“So it was your idea to leave Colchis?” I asked.

“Mine. I said to Mike, let’s go.”

The smoke in my head cleared enough to let one thought through: Go home. “Could I use your phone?” I asked.

“When Mike comes in,” she said. “Mike has it.”

When she said his name like that, twice, it came like a one-two punch. I felt so defeated. All I wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up in my own bed in Colchis.

I had just enough strength to say, “I hope you’re not giving him all your money.”