by Sam Tschida
“Aww. Poor baby.” He hugs me tighter and kisses the top of my head. It’s sweet and comforting.
He’s consoling me for all the wrong reasons. I should probably tell him I’m crying because of him, but…I can do that in the morning.
Before I fall asleep, I check Jules’s Instagram. He’s posted a photo of him and Crystal on a moonlit beach. They look beautiful. I see #GoldRush at the end of the caption.
51 Let’s hope.
52 I almost threw away life with a French chocolatier who lives in a pink house. A PINK HOUSE FILLED WITH CHOCOLATE. Somebody slap me.
53 Frosted Flakes, straight out of the box, right before we watched that dumb show about the universe, and it was perfect.
54 Shut up, Mia!
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
I wake up to the sound of my phone buzzing. It’s Crystal. Can I have a ride?
I doubt that I’m normally this excited to give someone a ride at six in the morning, but today…I look at JP. He’s passed out naked next to me. Sexy, naked billionaire with a French accent, and I’m a red-blooded American girl—I shouldn’t be so excited to run out of here like someone is chasing me, but here I am.
I slide out of the covers carefully, trying not to fan him or disturb him in any way. Poor JP. He mentioned waffles and coffee in the morning, like that’s something we’d do. It sounds nice.
I’m lying to everyone, JP more than anyone, and I’m tired of it. In the hall bathroom, I freshen up and text Crystal. Send me the address. Omw.
JP gets one too: Back in an hour. Crystal needs a rescue.
Crystal actually sounds fine. I’m the one who needs a rescue, but no need to get into it.
Before I get on the freeway, I remember the Kardashians last night, how all these women love and support each other, even while they’re being epically dumb. Maybe I could have that kind of relationship with someone. Maybe even Crystal. I pull the Ferrari up in front of Cuppa Cuppa and walk to the register.
“Hey, Mia!” the barista calls out. “The regular?” Little sparks of joy light up my being for a fraction of a second. I belong here.
“Actually, make it two of them to go.”
“Is the second coffee for that cute guy?”
“I wish,” I say, sighing into the words with full angst. “He’s mad at me.” I shake my head. “I’ve been sort of a jerk.”
She makes some sort of sympathetic cooing noise. “I’m sorry.”
“And I don’t know. What do you think, can you fall in love with someone after three days?” I think I’m unloading a little too much on her, but someone has to help me.
“Umm, I don’t know. I don’t think I believe in love at first sight.” We’re both quiet for a minute, and then she adds, probably to make me feel better, “Maybe because it’s never happened to me.”
“I’m probably confused,” I say.
“You’re not talking about that tattoo guy, are you?”
I laugh. “No. I definitely don’t love him. The other one.”
“Phew. He was a little scary.”
Now there’s an understatement. “That’s what happens when you forget to feed the snake, Pedro” echoes through my mind. As if it was Pedro’s own fault for dying. She doesn’t need to know all of that, though, so I steer the conversation elsewhere. “How are you doing?” I ask, and I suddenly realize I haven’t uttered those words many times this week. I’ve been in crisis mode, but that’s probably not going to help the whole isolation problem.
She tells me some things about her life and I realize that she’s becoming my friend. Holy shit. It’s like I’m turning my life around already. I could give this woman a hug.
“What’s your name?” I ask. “I see you all the time. I should know your name at least.”
“Roberta.”
At least one of my relationships has improved since the head injury. And things are a little better with Crystal. She’s texting again and might have even had a good time with Jules. He liked her at least. Jules posted a selfie this morning at the airport. Miss her already. #Babe #GoldRush #JulesBrand #Dating #TrueLove
By the time I see it, 1,245 people have liked it. There are tons of comments, mostly asking if he scored and if she gives good head. Men are idiots, especially on the internet. Anonymity is the enemy of civility.
Turns out Crystal needs a ride because Jules had to leave for Fiji at the crack of dawn (#roughlife)—he offered to take her with him but she isn’t the type who can leave in an instant. She could have taken an Uber, but I owe her $5,000.
The minute she’s in the Ferrari, she starts talking as if we’re in the middle of a conversation. “I have rent due and I need to pay the sitter and…that’s why we started this whole business—so we could pay for things and make our lives better. I never should have cut my hours at Rush. Walmart can’t even come close.”
“What’s Rush?”
She leans back and looks at me. “You serious, girl?” When I nod solemnly, she says, “You don’t remember a thing, do you?”
“You could say that.”
She rolls her eyes. “Figures. You always have to be the center of attention. I hate you sometimes.”
“We’re best friends, aren’t we?”
She says, “Bitch, you crazy,” and gives me a look to match. “You don’t have a best friend.”
I want to change that. I think I want a best friend in life this go-round, or at least someone to drive to the police station with me. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I still think Crystal is an option. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I’m going to figure out the money.”
“I really need it now. Can you borrow some from JP?”
Not if we break up…
“Did he give you this car?” she asks, making a not-so-subtle point.
“Umm. I’m borrowing it.” Come to think of it, I didn’t ask to borrow it.
She looks at me skeptically. “Is it worth it with JP?”
“Don’t know. I just met him yesterday for all I know.”
“So you were for real about the memory loss thing?”
I nod. “How did we meet?” I ask.
“Um, work.”
“Walmart?”
“No. The strip club. We’ve been through a few of them together.”
A strip club! I shoot my hand over my mouth. In a loud whisper, I say, “I was a stripper?” I’m like the old lady next door, totally shocked by strippers, except I’m the fucking stripper. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Facts have been pointing this way for a while.
“No. You only wish you were stripping. Hostesses make shit.”
I’m starting to feel lightheaded. “Is that how I got into this?”
“Uh-huh. We were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if some rich fucker came in here and he wasn’t an asshole and we could get married and live happily ever after?’ ”
Makes sense.
“And you were like, ‘Let’s make it happen.’ ” A sad look crosses her face. “I loved you for that, you know.”
So we were friends! I knew it.
“Are all the GoldRush girls strippers?” I recall the advertising language—California’s most sophisticated and elite women. I totally billed these women as actresses on the cusp of winning Oscars.
“Exotic dancers,” she corrects, and then laughs. “And some other randoms.”
“So I’m just a hostess?”
“You also do the books for the club.”
“And now I’m a freaking scam artist.”
“Or a social activist. You hooked us up.”
Sort of. I hooked her up with a drug dealer who killed a guy in front of her—accidentally, but still. Jules, though—maybe he made up for it, if anything can make up for that. “Tell me about Jules,” I say.<
br />
Crystal smiles a faraway smile like she’s reliving last night.
“He didn’t mind the Walmart apron? Did you tell him you have a kid?”
“I kept it one hundred,” she says. “Told him the truth, that I was just in it for a free meal and to pay off a favor to you.” While she’s talking she digs through her purse for makeup and starts doing her face up in the flip-down mirror.
“Dude couldn’t stop laughing. Like he thought I was joking. He livestreamed the whole thing.”
Wow, that is way more publicity than I paid for. He was only required to do two Insta posts. A hundred grand is starting to seem like a deal.
“While you’re explaining my life to me, do you know where I live?”
She stops putting on her lipstick and looks at me with a shocked expression and only half her mouth painted. “OMG girl. You really don’t know shit, do you?”
“Do you?” I ask.
“I don’t know where you’re crashing now, but you have some stuff at the office.”
My jaw drops. I have an office! My own space. “Will you help me find it before I drop you off?”
“When I say ‘office,’ I don’t mean ‘office,’ if you catch my drift.”
“Sure, whatever. Take me there.”
I turn up the music and start belting out some tunes. I’m going to my office, baby! This is the best news I’ve had since finding out I’m a mogul.
“Don’t get too excited, girl. It’s not that great. And I need to pick up Kai from my mom so we need to hurry.” Maybe that’s why she’s doing her makeup and hair in the car.
“Do you want to get him on the way?”
She gives me a weird look. “I’m not bringing my baby there!”
An office not fit for children—that’s interesting. “Just tell me how to get there.”
She shakes her head. “Take a left at the next light.”
“It’s one way. Do you mean the next one?” Between going through her purse to look for something, texting Jules (at least I think that’s what she’s doing), and giving me directions, she spills her coffee all over the place.
“OMG. This isn’t my car!”
“I thought you were locking this mofo down.”
“Really?”
She shrugs. “You mentioned something about getting engaged.”
“We’ll see. I’m not who I was last week.” Right now, I want to return the Ferrari to JP and move in with Crystal, wherever she lives. I feel such a kinship with her. Not to mention Kai seems sort of like he might know me. Like he knows I suck at giving him bottles and stuff, but he’s used to seeing me. “You were just teasing me before. We’re besties, right?”
“Bitch puhlease,” she says.
The way she says it, I know we’re besties. “Do we talk a lot?”
“Ugh, just drive.”
When we pull up to my office, I gasp in excitement. “Is that it?” We’re in front of a low-lying building. It’s not fancy, but it’s big. If I own all that space, I’m not going to complain. It looks like a relic from the ’70s with a flashy marquee that spells out GOLDRUSH in yellow lightbulbs. I own an entire building. I thought it was going to be a classy little office next to a nail salon, not a full-on club with its own parking lot.
Sophisticated and elite dancers! Studied dance at the Royal Ballet! Former beauty queens! Best of California! And then…All nude!
Everything on the marquee is pretty much what I have on my matchmaking app, except…the all-nude part. “Um, what’s with the all-nude thing. Is this my building?”
Crystal laughs. “Oh my God. You know nothing, girl.”
“I’ve been telling you that.” I notice that the building has no windows. “I don’t get it. This looks like a strip club.”
“That’s because it is a strip club.”
Posters on the side of the building show the same girls from the GoldRush app. Tatiana the Russian ballerina. Real tits! On my app she’s described as a Russian ballerina looking for a soulmate. No mention of her tits.
Brandi, Miss Orange County 2016, is also on my app, except that in her headshot she’s wearing a dress instead of titty tassels.
And there’s Crystal.
“It all started when management asked you to make a website for the place and then decided not to pay you.”
“Assholes,” I mutter.
Crystal explains it all to me. All of the GoldRush girls were sick of our jobs, sick of getting groped by customers and management, sick of working as independent contractors with zero paid time off, no benefits, and long hours. “Stripping is sexy and all, but the job sucks,” she adds.
“So I decided to get us all sugar daddies?”
She nods.
The GoldRush matchmaking app is just the GoldRush strip club with a makeover. “You just glossed us up online.”
I look at the club. I didn’t even change any of the marketing. “Does the club know?”
“They didn’t until a couple of weeks ago when that article came out about you being one of the hottest young entrepreneurs in SoCal.” She laughs. “That was pretty fucking funny.”
Crystal seems to be softening toward me a bit. “Sorry I snapped at you about Kobra. That wasn’t your fault.”
She holds a big metal door with chipped paint open for me and ushers me in. “Welcome back.”
Like a lot of strip clubs, GoldRush probably looks better at night. A strip club in the day is like a living room decorated for Christmas in February—completely wrong. Maybe it looks sexy when the lights are low, the music is pulsing, and a girl is booty-popping on the runway. At the moment, it’s Christmas in February. Someone’s kid is running up and down the stripper walk and fooling around on the pole.
“I thought you said this place wasn’t for kids.”
She shrugs. “Not my kid, I should say.”
As I walk through, a big greasy-looking dude shouts, “Where the fuck you been, Mia?”
Crystal says, “Cut her some slack, Jake. She got beat up.”
Somehow that sounds sadder in the dull light of a strip club at eight a.m., the sun filtering through a few small dingy windows, while I stand next to a Budweiser sign and a poster advertising happy hour lap dances. Of course I got beat up. Getting knocked around is just an expected part of my life. I want to run away, back to a couple of days ago, when I thought I was a hot young Millennial on the verge of finding her condo on Ocean Boulevard, flirting with a cute scientist.
Ten seconds into this life, and I’m pretty much done. I’m going back to Ocean Boulevard. I’m going to be one of the hottest entrepreneurs in SoCal if it kills me. A little voice in my head says, Maybe that’s what happened last time.
“For real, Mia, you need me to beat him up?” he offers.
“As soon as I figure out who did it, you can totally beat him up.”
“So where’s my office?” I ask Crystal.
Jake laughs at my use of the word office. I saw that coming.
My office is just a storage room in the back of the club. A desk with a computer on it is tucked among boxes, papers, and costumes.
“I think some of your stuff is in here,” Crystal says.
“Where do I live?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I think you slept here some nights. JP’s sometimes. I know you had a place with Jesse for a while, but I’m not sure if you still do. I think you moved out when her boyfriend moved in. That was just last month.” I peek inside the boxes, which appear to be filled with the contents of my life.55 It seems like I might live in the back of GoldRush.
I sift through the boxes until Crystal says, “I have to get back to Kai. Will you drop me off?”
“Sure. And I better get back to JP’s.” Looking around, I can’t help but think that his proposal will be the quickest way out of here.
“
You and JP—I just can’t, still.” She starts fanning her face to keep from laugh-crying.
“Why? What about him?”
“How much do you remember about JP?”
“Nothing. I only know what I read online.”
She laughs. “Oh, girl. JP owns GoldRush.”
55 Clothes, shampoo, makeup, a couple of wigs, a leather jacket. I’m not surprising myself with any medical textbooks or volumes of poetry.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“What?” JP can’t own this place. He’s the king of chocolate! He donates to charities and good causes and…
Crystal stares at me. “Mia, for someone so smart, you are so dumb. Men like JP don’t just own a business. They have a portfolio of investments. You didn’t think he made a billion dollars off of chocolate, did you?”
I look at her, mouth agape. “Actually, I did.”
She laughs.
And why shouldn’t she? It’s comical. I was sheltering him from my reality when he was the secret money behind my abusive employer, GoldRush. I had everything so wrong. So, so wrong. I look around the room, trying to reimagine it with JP walking the floors. “Does he sit here every night in a shiny suit in his very own corner booth?”
“Nuh-uh. Never seen him here. Dude owns a lot of businesses, but his full-time focus is the chocolate company. He has minions who run these side hustles. He doesn’t even know about us. That’s how you scammed him.”
So that means I worked for him in a roundabout way, stole his business name and all of its advertising material, and now I’m dating him? I guess it makes sense that we were fighting in that flashback, especially if the club told him what I was up to. I can barely wrap my mind around it, so I say it out loud and slow. “Let me get this straight. He signed up for the matchmaking app and paid $35,000 to date me,” I say, “when he was already paying me to do books in this club?”
She puts her hands in the air like I’m Beyoncé belting out the lyrics to “Formation” and strutting. “You’re a genius. Straight up!”
I didn’t even take this dude to Red Lobster. Of course, if I’m following Beyoncé’s advice, he hasn’t earned that yet. Maaaaaybe later.