“What you up to, girl? I know you not old enough to be in here.” She says it with that beam, the one that don’t seem to stop.
I never really knew Lacy, at least not like Marcus did. She was his sidekick back at Skyline High and I never saw them apart, not for almost four years. Then both of them dropped out a few months before graduation because neither of them had nobody to push them into fighting the hallways for that diploma, stuff them into the cap and gown. School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.
“You know, living,” I tell her, because I don’t wanna lie like Marcus would, but it seems too intimate for this room to hear: how everything seems to be fraying.
“And your brother?” I watch her face turn inward, twist at the corners of her lips.
“You know, the same.”
Marcus dropped Lacy the moment he found Cole, the moment he realized the real world don’t hand us shit like he thought it would. Uncle Ty made Marcus believe that miracles would come to us and he seemed to think Cole was the way in, that staying with Lacy was a segue to a life of hoping without no reward. She got a job and was working forty-hour weeks and Marcus didn’t want no part in it. All he got is half a dozen SoundCloud tracks and no paycheck and here we are: her with her hair tied up in two buns on top of her head, piercings lining her face, and looking like she owns the place. Like she don’t need no light to see. And Marcus still out here waiting, like something’s gonna change.
Lacy stands up abruptly. “You want a drink?” She’s wearing the classic bartender black, but she still shines. “I won’t tell.” She winks and returns to the side of the bar where the man was. He slipped into the back at some point and even if he was to come back, something tells me Lacy’s got more sway than him. Something about the way she moves: spine erect like redwood trees, like she’ll just keep growing upward.
I nod. “Sure.”
“What you want?”
“Surprise me?” I don’t know how to order a drink for myself, not used to anybody asking me what I want. Usually, somebody just hands me a bottle or a plastic cup and I don’t pause long enough to question it. Lacy grabs a bottle from behind the counter and then another one, pouring and shaking and stirring it all up into a glass with one of those straws that’re so skinny I wonder how anything’s supposed to get through them. She adds a cherry, one of the ones too sweet to believe they come from a tree, and pushes the glass toward me. The drink is a soft red, bordering on pink if it wasn’t for the way the cherry draws out the color.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She leans forward. “It’s a surprise. Don’t worry, you gonna like it.”
I bend my head down until my lips touch the straw and suck. It hits my tongue and it’s euphoria spreading across my mouth, like all the flavor in the world combined into a brilliant heat. “Shit,” I say after I swallow, looking up at Lacy.
She laughs. “You always loved something sweet.”
“How long you been working here?” I ask.
“Started as a stripper around the time Marcus and I fell out, but money’s a little more stable at the bar so been bartending the past few months.” The door swings open again and a small group of men in ties comes in. Lacy straightens up. “Place about to fill up, but feel free to stay. Let me know if you want a refill. It’s on me.”
Lacy smiles and leaves to follow the men to a table right in front of the stage. One of them is wearing this polka dot tie that he’s loosening and he’s looking straight at me, the corner of his mouth tilted up. I don’t know why, but his face is interesting to look at and part of me wants to touch it, feel if he has stubble, if his skin is soft enough that it would turn pink just from my fingertips. I return to focus on my drink and I wonder if I should stay, if being a young girl alone in a strip club with no money could make this night worse. But a free drink is a free drink and I’m tired of the endless walking and rejection from every employer in Oakland, so I take a sip. And another. And another. I slurp until the sugary red is gone and then ask Lacy to make me a new one.
Marcus can’t stand nothing red after Mama. It’s not like he was the only one who had to see it, but he was the one who tried to clot Mama’s bleeding wrists, pick the razor up from the floor. He was the one who told them not to take me, his newly eighteen-year-old body lengthening as if his height could give him the ability to make it through the night without thinking about the color of the water. Since then, Marcus won’t step foot in the bathroom. He showers at friends’ places and pisses at the liquor store across the street.