Bryan is not my boyfriend. He is a fifty-six-year-old man who pays to use my body. He sits on the edge of the bed and waves me over to him.

“I’m not here to talk,” he says. Some weeks he is like this. Cold, quiet. “I’m here to let off steam.” The men often tell me things like this. Explain my job to me.

There are better days with Bryan. Days when he smiles. Days when he brings in a little bag of coke to share. Days when he calls me Gigi and we run around the room chasing each other like two people who are really in love. Today is not one of those days and that is OK. I do not always have the energy for Bryan, and my name is not Gigi. It is Myra.

There are twelve of us that work for Sylvia: Terra, Sharon, Colette, Chloe, Erin, Georgie, Aimee, Jennifer, Rose, Alana, Julia, and me.

Then there are thirteen. Lucy is the newest. Lucy is the youngest. Lucy is the brightest. Lucy is eighteen years old — Sylvia plays by the rules.

When Lucy appears for the first time, Sylvia introduces her to each of us. We hug her, one by one. She learns which room is hers to use. How to call for help. What we’re allowed to ask clients, what we’re not. Then Sylvia gives us all the same old spiel that we hear every time a new girl joins our club. She says that all the johns have their fetishes. Things that they want us to do and that we can’t do. Things that they’ll want us to do, and that for some under the table cash, we can do. “The men need different things,” Sylvia says. “They come in all different shapes and sizes — just like us.”

We get to know Lucy quickly. She is never late. She is sometimes early. Lucy is always dressed in maroons. She is a winter, she says, and maroon is her color. Maroon blouses, maroon skirts, maroon dresses. We cannot see her underwear, but if she is wearing any, we know it is maroon.

“I have to look my best,” she tells us. “The better I look, the more they love me. The more they love me, the better off I am.”

When we roll our eyes at her, she does not see us. If she does, she does not care. She tells us that the clients want to please her. That it makes them feel good. She is what we call a lifer.

Sylvia tells us all to be more like Lucy. Julia and I think this is a load of crap.

I’m closest with Julia. She started the same week as me. Comes from the same suburb. Julia has a kid she leaves at home with her mother every morning. The dad is one of Juila’s clients. A redhead that comes in every few months and asks for her. She tells me that he doesn’t know. I tell her that she could get child support. She tells me to mind my own business and always use a condom. This usually shuts me up.

I have parents, but they haven’t spoken to me since they found out I break the seventh commandment on a daily basis. They do, however, still accept the Kobe steaks and pear basket deliveries every Christmas. They mail me a thank you card with a picture of two green cacti wearing red sombreros every December. It reads Happy Holidays from Nevada! They live thirteen miles from me. Sign the card, love.

◆

On my blanket I lie reddening in the sun, the coolness of the lake already evaporated from my skin, and I am without a cause or a purpose. I’ve hidden a small flask in the sand beside me, claiming this morning as my own. I’ve taken off its cap, have it resting on my bellybutton. And as the blanket scratches my back and tells me that I am burning, my skin warms and my body relaxes: I do not have to work for the next six hours.

Julia’s daughter picks up an ice cube from the grass and holds it in her fist, sticks the tip of it in her mouth, sucks. It’s hot outside. High nineties with a dryness that seeps into the shade. Julia is digging through her bag for a diaper, sees what her kid’s got and spends a minute trying to pry the cool cube from her hand. Yells at her to drop it. Tells her to stop sucking on other people’s trash.

The shoreline is filled with families, fathers lighting barbecues, mothers handing out dill pickles and hamburger buns. Julia sits in the sun drinking a can of spiked seltzer, rubbing pasty white lotion on Lenny’s back.

Lenny doesn’t talk much for a three-year-old. When she sits, it’s with her legs sprawled, her diaper browning from the grains of wet sand sticking to its synthetic rubber shell. Lenny picks up a Barbie that’s been left behind on the shore, hair bleached and missing in some places, like a child has taken a pair of scissors to it. She sticks the sand-coated head in her mouth.

I pull out my pack of Camels. Light one up. Inhale and enjoy the momentary lightheadedness. This is my first today. I’m trying to quit. I’m tired of smelling like ash.

I look back at Lenny. She is combing her fingers through the Barbie’s hair, now sticky with saliva. I raise my flask, wave it at her mother.

A few young couples lather lotion onto each other’s backs while everyone pretends not to look. Some retirees read their romance novels, their oiled torsos glaring under the midday sun. Julia now holds a freshly printed tabloid.

“I’ve started watching this new show on Netflix,” she says to me. “You should see it.” Julia is always telling me to watch new shows. She took a film class at a community college once and now thinks she is an expert on camera angles and dialogue and cuts to black. “All the women start disappearing in it. One by one, they’re just gone.” She turns the page of her magazine. “There’ll be a woman in the kitchen, flipping a pancake, and next frame, she’s not there.”

I nod. I take another swig from the flask when she uses the word frame.

“And the pancake, it keeps cooking, starts to burn, and then before you know it, the apartment where she lived is on fire. Then it cuts to black.”

“Sounds bleak.” “It’s good.”

Lenny puts the doll down and I pick it up. A bottle blonde stares back at me. “Looks kind of like Lucy,” I say, fingering the doll’s hair.

Julia lowers the magazine she’s holding. She takes the doll from me and throws it towards the water. It lands fifteen feet from us, just where the shore starts to dampen. Julia lifts her magazine back up.

“Now what’s Lenny going to play with?” I ask Julia. “I don’t want her playing with other people’s trash.”

But Lenny becomes fussy, and today it seems Julia doesn’t have the patience. She packs up the umbrella, rolls up the towels, tells me she’ll see me tomorrow. While Julia is repacking her cooler I take Lenny in my arms. She stops fighting for a moment, buries her small head in my shoulder. Her skin is softer than mine, feels like a peach, like if I squeeze her too hard she might bruise.

“Your mom is crazy,” I whisper to Lenny. She burrows further.

When the two of them leave, I walk over to the doll and save it from the lake’s reach. I stop at a drugstore on my way home and choose an outfit for her, a golden dress that crinkles when I touch it. It is ninety-nine cents, made in China. I’ll give her back to Lenny.

◆

Bryan has been a regular client of mine since the week I started here. He arrives at 5:15 every Tuesday. Like clockwork he points to me and I guide him to my room that always smells like discount candles and detergent.

Today, though, Bryan doesn’t show up at 5:15. Then 5:20. Then 5:30. Then it is 5:45 and a guy named Kurt is here and telling me he has a thing for golden showers. This is one of those requests that I won’t do for some extra cash. When he doesn’t let up on the golden shower idea, I send him to Lucy. Lucy, I know, will do anything.

Julia and I whisper about it later. What type of woman would let a man pee on her? we say. Sylvia overhears us. Tells us that Lucy will be winning the crown this week.

Sylvia holds weekly meetings. She calls them tea parties. She announces numbers. Reports who earned the most tips for the week. It’s supposed to be a motivator. Supposed to bond us. It usually just ends with us hating Lucy.

This week Sylvia reads off our earnings. Most of us break three-thousand. Some of us hit five-thousand. Lucy makes six. Because of this, Lucy is handed a plastic tiara that has been painted to look like silver. She wears it for the rest of the meeting. The house takes 50% of our earnings, and she’s done them well this week. We all have, Sylvia says.

As Sylvia talks to us about doing more to promote ourselves on social media, Lucy looks at her reverently. Sylvia was once one of us, before she earned enough to buy this place. Now she is a greying old woman who has girls like Lucy looking at her like she is royalty. And she is, in some ways.

Before the meeting ends, Sylvia makes us go around in a circle and say what our favorite part of the week has been.

“A regular showed up with Starbucks for me,” says one girl.

“I booked an overnight stay,” says another. We all clap for her, an overnight stay earns over a thousand, before the house takes its cut.

“I had three returning men who I think are going to become regulars,” says Julia. “Every one of my clients told me I was beautiful,” says Lucy.

“And you are,” says Sylvia, like a queen. “You all are.”

When it’s my turn to speak, I’m not sure what to say. I didn’t receive any gifts this week, no overnight stays, so I lie, “My favorite client brought me dahlias.”

As we leave Sylvia gives the weekly bath set to Lucy for being the highest earner. This week it’s Lavender Mist. Lucy walks out of the meeting smelling like a chemical garden.

Julia grabs my wrist and we follow Lucy to the parking lot. We hide behind a row of cars and Julia picks up a stone, a small one. It won’t hurt Lucy, it may perhaps scratch her windshield. Julia rolls it around between her fingers. “What are going to do, stone her?” I ask.

When Lucy’s car pulls out of the lot she throws it at the plate. Lucy doesn’t notice, doesn’t even glance into the rear view mirror.

“Come on,” Julia says to me. “Let’s get out of here.”

Julia offers to buy me a late dinner. We head to the local diner and sit across from each other in sticky blue booths. I order blueberry pancakes, and Julia gets a plate of fries.

“I’m thinking of leaving Sylvia’s,” she says to me as I coat my stack thick with processed syrup.

“The Homestead has a lower commission.” “No, I mean, I’m thinking of leaving all of it.” “And doing what?”

I reach for one of Julia’s fries. She pushes the plate towards me.

Julia’s said this to me before. Every few months she tells me that she wants out. But we know the facts. Julia worked as a cashier at a corner store just off the strip before this. The numbers were never enough, not what they are now.

But I let her talk. I shake my head. I listen to her say that just because Sylvia follows all the rules doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is kosher.

Though, despite her protesting, I know that tomorrow she will be in. That she will be sticking her ass out as much as the rest of us to compete for the walk-ins. That though she’ll talk bad on Lucy, it will only be because she is jealous.

I finish my pancakes and Julia’s fries. We walk out of the diner in silence. When I ask her if she’s angry she says that she’s not. She says that she’s just tired.

◆

Julia tells me that she thinks she caught something. That’s she’s been all red for a week now. Itchy. I go with her to tell Sylvia, who calls in a doctor. It’s nothing, the doctor tells her. Just irritation. Switch to cotton underwear. Or better yet, the doctor says, no underwear. Julia nods.

When the doctor and Sylvia leave the room, Julia tells me that she is scared. That she is afraid something will happen. I tell her nothing will, and that even if it does, they’ve got cures for that.

When we’re in the parking lot I take the Barbie, in her new dress, from my car. I hand it over to Julia, tell her to give it to Lenny.

“No,” she says, refusing it. “She doesn’t want that.” “Well what am I supposed to do with it?”

Julia tells me to throw it out, but when she’s not looking, I take the doll inside. I straighten out her dress and smooth out her hair. I try putting her in the corner of the room, and then on the window sill. Eventually, I decide on the dresser, positioning her legs so that they hang over the top of it. I name her Cecile.

Cecile stares back at me with a look of concerned optimism. I tell her to fuck off. Then I apologize. I tell her not to worry. I tell her that everything we do here is legal.

◆

The following Tuesday, Bryan is again a no show. So instead, I spend my evening with some other johns. A guy named George is a first-time client. He tells me that his wife just had a baby and you don’t even want to look down there. He doesn’t know yet that we don’t need a reason. That sometimes the reasons make it worse. That rarely do they make it better.

After this, a man named Tommy is already waiting. His pants are off, the sheets are on, and he’s smiling. Not at me, but slightly beyond. At the old floral wallpaper that floats behind me. At the stained walls. Or maybe at the clock. I can’t be sure.

Gregory is next. He asks me about the other men. He asks me if there are women. He asks me what I do for them and that is when I tell him to stop asking me questions. He casts his eyes down. We fuck in silence.

Last is Harrison. He’s nervous. He is the man that would only pay for sex where it’s legal. He is the guy that drove six hours from the Arizona border to do this. The guy that psyched himself up for this moment. The guy that now can’t get it up.

I run into Lucy in the bathroom. She is wearing a maroon dress that barely covers her ass. If Julia was here we would ignore her, but she is not, so instead I ask Lucy how the golden shower was.

“What?”

“You know. The client that I gave you the other day.” She stares at me blankly.

“The one that peed on you,” I say. “I know what a golden shower is.”

She holds out a pack of menthols to me. I’m still trying to quit, but I don’t want to turn down the olive branch. Lucy gives me a light, tells me to blow it out the window so Sylvia won’t find out, but I know the smell will stick to the walls.

To Lucy this is glorious, I can tell. She is young, and if she stays in this business, she can go far. She’s already being profiled by Penthouse. Already gets more requests than the rest of us combined.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Her voice cuts the silence. “We can come here and we can fuck and we can get paid for it?” She isn’t looking at me. She is looking at herself in the mirror, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. She has already forgotten about the open window.

“It sure is,” I say to her.

She smiles at me through the smoke.

◆

Julia stops wearing underwear. She says the redness is gone now. When she jokes about what kind of things Lucy has growing between her legs I laugh quietly.

She updates me on the Netflix show she wants me to watch, where all the women start disappearing.

“They’re all gone now,” she says to me. “All the women have gone.” “Where do they go?” I ask.

Julia shrugs. “Too bad that can’t happen to Lucy,” she says, but then takes it back, noting that Lucy is a slut anyway, not a real woman. But as we stand in the bathroom applying fake lashes and drugstore pinks, I think for a moment that Lucy seems more woman than both of us.

“It stinks in here,” Julia says. She opens a window.

Back in the lobby a petite brunette woman points to me. We don’t often get lady clients, but they do show up from time to time. Julia and I like getting women, not because we swing that way, but because we feel safer with them. A woman’s not going to give you a black eye, or a baby.

I take the lady to my room. She does not sit down. When I try to remove her clothes, she does not let me. I realize suddenly that she is not here to fuck, and that makes me unbearably sad. Her name is Shanelle.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asks me. Already I don’t like her.

“What do you want to do?” I say.

Shanelle stares down at her knees. “I want to ask you questions.” “That’s not how this works.”

I walk towards the door, ready to show her out. “I did this once, you know.”

I can tell by the way she carries herself that she is lying. I can tell by the way she talks to me that nothing she says is true.

“I got out of it, too,” she whispers.

I am not in the mood for a sermon. I do not want to be saved. I call down to Sylvia who escorts the young woman out.

After Lucy hears what happened she finds me in the bathroom, offers me another cigarette. She tells me that girls like that are the worst kind of girls. Julia walks in as she is saying this.

“She’s not so bad,” Julia replies. “That girl was just trying to do what she thought was right.”

Lucy and I are not convinced. We cross our arms and blow out smoke.

Julia sighs, “I mean, we are whores after all.” The room becomes smaller. Sylvia doesn’t let us use that word in the brothel. Brothel, another word she doesn’t let us use.

Lucy puts out her cigarette, only halfway done. Sprays herself with a mist from this week’s bath set.

“No,” Lucy says turning to me, “That’s not what we are.” She walks out, leaves a floral scent in her place. The sweetness of it is at once everything and nothing at all.

◆

Bryan is back. While he lies on the fresh sheets, I try to look for clues. His wedding ring, bruises, a new tan — anything that can indicate to me his two week-long hiatus: a spousal fight, a surgery, a family vacation. But nothing about him has changed. He is still the same old sack of flesh and bones, blood and sweat, dirt and money. He still smells like soy and salt and vinegar.

“Where’ve you been?” I ask him. We’re not supposed to ask these kinds of questions, but I’m feeling bold.

“Trying a new place. A new girl.”

“Not happy here?” I ask him, unzipping the side of my dress. “Just wanted some fresh blood.”

The idea that he thinks any of us are fresh makes me laugh. He takes my laugh to mean more. He thinks that I am jealous.

Later, when he goes to put on his pants by the dresser he sees her, in her golden formal wear. He lifts her up by her hundreds of peroxide hairs.

“Who’s this?” he asks as he dangles the doll from his fingers.

“Cecile,” I tell him. He swings her a few times from her head and drops her back on the dresser before leaving me a fifty-dollar tip.

◆

Julia starts bringing me clothes, stuff that doesn’t fit her anymore. She’s lost weight and it

shows. Every week she appears with trash bag after trash bag of polyester dresses, denim cutoffs, and ribbed tank tops. When I ask if she’s sure she wants to give all this to me, she is insistent.

When I pull a menthol from my purse she snatches it from me.

“Thought you were quitting?” she says. “And since when do you smoke menthols?” “Who are you, my mother?”

Julia hands the cigarette back to me and I light it.

“How’s your week been?” I ask her, feeling OK as the smoke plumes in her face. When she coughs I tell her not to stand downwind of me.

“I sleep with strangers for a living. That’s how my week’s been.”

She is being dramatic again. Many of are clients aren’t strangers. I blow another smoke puff into her face before she moves, then I tell her about eight hundred Lucy made from a golden shower. She scoffs.

“No amount of bath sets and floral sprays can cover the smell of piss in your mouth.” “I don’t think she opens her mouth.”

Julia raises her eyebrows at me. “You watch that Netflix show yet? With the missing girls?”

“No, not yet.”

She tells me more about it. How once all the women are gone, the men don’t know what to do with themselves. How they pillage and kill and reject all the laws. All the commandments. But I’m not interested in the men. Of course the men would do that.

“Where do they go, the women?” I ask. She still doesn’t know.

◆

The following Tuesday Julia doesn’t show up for work. Sylvia says they found her body in an offshoot pond of the Washoe Lake. The rope she’d used deteriorated after two days. When they pulled up the weight, the detectives said they’d never seen anyone do it this way. She’d used a suitcase full of rocks.

When Julia’s regulars show up the next day they are at first angry that their girl isn’t there to service them, but after ten minutes of complaints they say they’ll take another. I see Lucy straighten up on the velvet couch, preparing for the lineup. But I am wearing the leather skirt and deep green tank top that Julia had given me. I am wearing clothes that, I’m sure, these men have seen before. And while I cannot know whether they are conscious of this familiarity or not, I am not surprised when each and every one of Julia’s johns point to me.

Her clients are kind. Some are rough, but always asking if that’s OK. Others are gentle. There is nothing about them that is remarkable. Nothing about them that is monstrous, unforgivable.

The day times out perfectly, and I’m able to double up my usual numbers. At eight I have a surprise last client. Bryan has showed up, and though Sylvia tells me that she smells liquor on his breath, I tell her that it is alright.

In the bedroom Bryan is more talkative than usual. Wants to do more. Calls me Gigi. He picks Cecile up from the dresser and takes off her golden ensemble, then puts her at the head of the bed. Says he wants to let her watch. When I tell him no, that it’s weird, he offers me an extra two hundred, so I let him.

His skin is clammy, covered in a cold sweat. This time does not feel like all the other times. It is like a wet animal is on top of me, not a man in love with my warmth. When Bryan’s body is holding mine down he grabs the doll. I tell him to put her back. Instead he tries to put her inside me. With his hand on her legs and mine on her head, we pull. She falls apart.

◆

Cecile is gone, but I’ve bought three new dolls and take them with me to the lake. I lay them on my towel next to me. I take a drink of whiskey from the flask I’ve brought along. We pour one out for Julia. Another for Cecile.

I take the three Barbies, dress them in their finest clothes, pieces I’ve picked up from the drug store. A red satin dress, burgundy velvet pants, a maroon hand-knit sweater. I try to explain things to them. I tell them that Cecile was just a freak incident. An anomaly.

They don’t say a word.

On the way home the three dolls ride shotgun. I buckle them in.

◆

There is a blacklist, it keeps out the dangerous ones. I tell Sylvia that Bryan doesn’t have to be on it. That Bryan can just be given a warning. But it doesn’t matter, because Bryan does not come back the following Tuesday. It would have been OK if he did.

Lucy is in the bathroom when I walk into it. She is brushing her wavy blonde hair. She is penciling in her lips. She is humming a tune softly to herself. She is beautiful.

“I bought a Jeep,” she says to me through the mirror. She holds her hand in the air and rubs her fingers together.

“What color?” “Maroon.”

“Of course,” I say.

“Of course,” she says.

She wears a plastic crown at that week’s tea party. It looks good on her. Sylvia gifts her another bath set. Vanilla sugar. Lucy puts the lotion on while we’re all still talking business. She hands it around to share. I rub it into my knees. Press it into my elbows.

After the meeting I take the Barbies to Franktown Cemetery. We find Julia. I sit them against her stone. I tell them that they’re not cut out for this. That I could see the way they judge me with their light blue eyes. That I don’t want them to get hurt.

I bag them up and drive twenty minutes into the suburbs. I leave them on Julia’s mother’s doorstep with a note. For Lenny, it says. I decide that they will have a better life here — that the worst Julia’s daughter will do is stick their heads in her mouth. I place them beside three casserole dishes and a basket of white lilies.

When I get home I start watching the show Julia told me about. It is a world just like ours, there are women just like us. Not prostitutes, just women. Women flipping pancakes. Women driving to work. I watch the entire season, see them disappear one by one. They never find the women, not even in the final episode. Never figure out what is making them disappear. When I look up reviews of the show online, I read that the point is not where the women go. The point, according to FilmBuff862, who writes in all capitals and without punctuation in a discussion forum on Rotten Tomatoes, is that the women are not coming back. ABSENCE IS 2 LOVE WHAT WIND IS 2 FIRE XXXXXX. I scroll down to the bottom of the thread and learn that the show didn’t get picked up for another season.

When I sleep I dream that Julia is one of the disappearing women, but even she won’t let me follow her. Won’t tell me where it is that all the women go.

◆

Bryan comes back. He tells me he is sorry about the doll. Tells me he will say nothing. Will do nothing. That he will be on the bottom and that I can be on the top. I lay down and tell him to climb on top of me. He presses too hard on my stomach with an elbow, and I squirm. He apologizes profusely until I tell him to stop. To be quiet. Slowly, he places each cold, wet extremity of his body on top of mine like a mirror. I rub his back until it warms, open my legs and let him inside. When he can’t finish, I ask him if he’s ever given a golden shower. He tips me well.

The next day I win the bath set. Frosted Cranberry.

After the tea party, I follow Lucy into the parking lot. I ask her where she is going, and if I can come too. I ask her for a ride in her maroon Jeep.

When we’ve been driving for long enough, Lucy turns to me.

“Did you see it coming?” Her voice is quiet. She is talking about Julia.

I tell her that she has nothing to worry about. That it will never happen to her. That it will never happen to us. We pull into a drug store, the same one where I had bought Cecile a dress.

When we walk out, we are wearing crowns. We are spraying each other with a muddled strawberry mist. We get back into Lucy’s maroon Jeep and drive for hours. We go nowhere.