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"A little more," Lisa says. "I can take it."
She stands up straighter, carefully using her hands to hoist her boobs higher without disturbing her pasties and sucking in a deep breath as Jennie yanks the laces of Lisa's corset tighter.
Lisa lifts her arms like a music box ballerina and tilts her waist. The corset isn't too tight to move like that, and the shape it makes is beautiful, perfect.
"That looks nice," Jennie says. She puts her hands on Lisa's waist, and Lisa tilts again between them.
They're both quiet, talking little and low, but it's loud in Lisa's dressing room. The roars and stamps of the men in the audience are loud over the lilt of Rosie's music, and a couple of stray cats are yowling underneath the window. Jennie feeds them, so they keep coming around. There's a big, loud orange one with a cut in its ear that she always says she's going to bring when they move to their cottage in the country.
Jennie moves her thumbs up and down Lisa's waist, but Lisa can barely feel it. The boning of the corset is elastic but stiff, and both the lace and the skin-matched fabric underneath are thick. There are dance tights sewn into her thong, too—she looks almost naked, but she's covered toe to chest in smooth, shining fabric to make her look perfect under the stage lights.
Jennie's garment is technically a dress, but she's wearing much less than Lisa is. She'll be too close to the customers for that kind of illusion to work.
"All set?" Jennie asks.
Lisa nods. "Thanks."
Jennie makes eye contact in the mirror without smiling. "A little more," she says.
Lisa's lipstick is as dry and firm as spackle, and doesn't budge as Jennie presses her lips against it before she disappears down the dark hall and Lisa turns to the stage door.
-
The thrum of the stage moves under Lisa's skin. She feels the music instead of hearing it, each pulse and whine a part of her that instinctively moves. She feels, rather than sees or hears, the attention of the audience. Hundreds of mouths cry with one roar. All those eyes stare with one gaze.
The hands reach, too, but those are too far for Lisa to feel. She perches on a swing and the guys working invisibly in the rafters glide her above the crowd, just out of range of all those hands.
Until the lights catch a likely sparkle. Lisa points and her rafter angels move her closer, and just a touch lower, so Lisa can arch her back and reach down to the crowd. Fingers brush her arm, nameless and desperate, and then something cool and heavy drops over her wrist.
Lisa snaps back up, flipping her hair, and a necklace drops down to her elbow as she wraps her hand around the swing's chain. Who knows, it's probably glass and not diamonds—these men love to show off, but they don't make their money by giving it recklessly away to girls like Lisa. Still, it feels weighty and it's lovely in the interlacing darkness and bright light. It looks like something that could cover an awful lot of the cost of a cottage in the country.
The swing pulls her higher as the lights swirl and Lisa catches sight of Jennie at one of the balcony tables. She looks bored, chin in her hand. Jennie is very good at looking bored, and it has the man next to her enchanted, hand on her bare thigh as he ignores Lisa's show in favor of begging for her attention.
Lisa laughs out loud, though of course she can't hear herself under the music and cheers. Lisa has never once been bored when Jennie is in the room.
The swing takes her back to the stage, high above it. Lisa clasps the necklace around her throat and lowers her hands, pulling the first hook down the front of her corset open.
The music swells and the crowd noise rises and the thrum under Lisa's skin burns.
She laughs again as the corset falls to the stage floor.
-
Lisa lost rock-paper-scissors, so she's got Rosie's feet in her lap, digging her thumbs into the arches as Rosie counts out cash into two even piles. They're both in leggings and fraying sweatshirts now, the layers of luxury and decay around them flipped over so Lisa's dressing room looks tawdry and crowded with thinning feathers and loose sequins.
"What about that necklace?" Rosie asks.
"Glass," Lisa says.
"Aren't they always?" Rosie sighs.
She finishes sorting the cash and drops her head back, arching her toes in Lisa's hand. Her foot is sweaty and she has weird calluses from dancing, but her little feet aren't nearly as fucked up as Lisa's are, and they're cute enough to make Lisa feel very fond.
One day soon, she's going to miss Rosie a lot and she's not going to be sorry about that. So she has to apologize now, even though Rosie doesn't know that's what it means. It's complicated, sort of, or anyway it would be complicated if Lisa was the type to twist herself in knots about it. She's not. She's the type to grin as she digs into a tender spot that makes Rosie squirm.
The door swings open and Jennie is there. She's in a sweatshirt now, too. Her face is sallow now that her makeup is gone—she has dark circles under her eyes so deep and heavy that Lisa notices them even before she registers that the bag under Jennie's arm is writhing and meowing.
"I like absolutely do not want to know," Rosie says, floating her feet out of Lisa's lap and rising in one smooth motion. She picks up her cash and carefully avoids Jennie's bag as she moves past her and out of the room.
"You know how we talk about moving to the country?" Jennie says. "Is that for real?"
Lisa blinks. This is the first time it's occurred to her that either of them might not have been for real.
"Because," Jennie says quickly, "I think I have enough now." She chews her lip. "And I think I've had enough."
Lisa stands and opens one of the drawers in her dressing table. The necklace feels bigger in this small room than it did onstage, heavy like an anchor in her hand.
She scrapes the pendant down the center of the mirror. Jennie gapes at the fine line it leaves behind.
"For real," Lisa says.