Dead Letters(48)

Another song comes on, and a new dancer appears on the stage. I immediately recognize Holly Whitaker; her crimpy hair and overplucked eyebrows are hard to mistake. Why is Zelda’s closest friend a stripper?

“Wyatt,” I say uneasily, “you don’t think Zelda was…” I trail off.

His eyebrows lurch toward the ceiling. “Jeez. You think she was…dancing?” He sounds physically pained. I don’t blame him. I’m suddenly nauseous, the falafel roiling in my pickled stomach.

“I don’t know. With the debt…She’s always been sort of reckless….”

“It is the sort of thing that would appeal to her,” Wyatt acknowledges.

“It makes for a good story. She gets into stupid amounts of debt, tries to pay it off by dancing at a strip club for a while, privileged girl learns the ropes of seedy underworld…the sort of extreme narrative she would like.” I’m convincing myself. Fuck, Zelda. It could explain what she’d been living off. All that cash. I fish around in my fringed bag for more money and sidle up toward the stage, waiting for the song to end. Holly is upside down on the pole, her inverted face appearing surreal and almost grotesque. Blue eye shadow. A tough look to rock. She rights herself, and I can hear her thighs squeaking along the pole even through the Katy Perry cacophony. I’m uncannily reminded of playgrounds, of sliding down poles wearing skirts, the slight burn of dry skin against warm metal. A sensation maybe only little girls and pole dancers know. The image of the playground in this place seems both deeply disturbing and fundamentally appropriate, especially since Holly is (well, was) wearing a schoolgirl outfit.

As the song ends, I lean forward with my twenty and try to catch Holly’s eye. She sees me immediately, and her stage smile collapses.

“Can you meet me outside? In the back?” I ask in the lull between over-amped pop music tunes.

She regards me suspiciously but nods. “I’ll try. I have to get changed, though.” My hand stays where it is, holding the twenty extended, but she just looks at it, clearly disgusted, before collecting the other bills that have accumulated on the stage. She saunters off, and as she turns I get another glimpse of her neatly waxed nether regions. I wonder how Zelda felt about that. She was fervently anti-waxing. Predictably. She always liked things messy.

I nod to Wyatt and we walk back outside; I flash a pack of cigarettes at the bouncer by way of explanation.

“You smoke now?” Wyatt says in the parking lot.

“France. You know,” I say, lighting up.

Wyatt looks distressed. “I always thought…never mind.”

“What? Zelda smoked,” I say, taking a drag. I smoke occasionally with Nico, because it seems like the right thing to do on a Parisian street while you’re flirting outside a café. But I don’t like cigarettes. I appreciate them as a prop, but there is something essentially dirty about inhaling them. I don’t tell Wyatt this, just watch as he battles disappointment in who I’ve become. “Want one?” I tease.

“No,” he says humorlessly. We walk around the side of the building; I have no idea what’s out back, but I figure there has to be somewhere for patrons to sip inconspicuously out of their flasks. Surely. I’ve driven by this place dozens, maybe hundreds of times, always assuming that it was a bar, imbued with the cozy safety inherent in a public drinking place. Knowing that it’s technically dry transforms its architecture into something suddenly strange, unreadable. It no longer makes abstract sense to me.

We loaf around the back, near a door I’m hoping leads to the stage. The cigarette is making me feel light-headed, a replacement high in the absence of booze. I know it will very shortly lead to nausea, but whatever. We mill around uncomfortably, and I check Zelda’s phone and Facebook again. Could she be here? I scan the exterior walls, as though I might be able to suss her out with some twinly X-ray vision. I tell myself I’m not a prude, that I wouldn’t care, but I really hope she hasn’t been working here.

After a few minutes, Holly walks outside, a cheap kimono covering her schoolgirl costume. My addict reptile brain notes almost immediately that she has a bottle of something under her arm.

“You’re Ava,” she says huskily. The blue eye shadow is even more jarring away from the stage lights.

“You’re very sharp,” I say, before I can stop myself. I need this girl to like me, answer my questions. But I imagine that if she’s friends with Zelda, she has to be used to some emotional abuse. “And this is Wyatt.”

“I know,” she says with a flirtatious smile, and both Wyatt and I raise our eyebrows in alarm. I shoot him an arch look, but he seems as surprised as I do. “I’ve seen pictures,” she explains. She turns back to me and holds out the bottle. “Drink?”

I take a swallow; it’s cheap coconut-flavored rum. It tastes god-awful, like sunscreen, but I’m grateful.

“So,” Holly says after she’s taken a slug. “Zelda’s dead.”

“So it would seem.”

“Idiot girl. I told her to lay off the smack.” I think her expression softens, though I can’t really tell. “I assume that’s what happened?”

“You were friends?” Wyatt asks, not answering her implied question.

“Yeah. Zelda came here looking for Jason a few months back and ended up in the dressing rooms. She brought nice Scotch with her, and we got talking.”