Uh-oh.
He still thinks there’s hope.
You’re giving me GoldRush. Why?
You were right. Whatever happened to the employees at that place happened under my watch. I just wasn’t looking.
I spend a crazy long time staring at that text.
He says,I know you’ll do a good job.
I’ll buy it.
You don’t have enough money.
Technically true. I could put a lot of cash down with the money from the new bachelors Jules has brought in.71Maybe buy it contract for deed. I know that goes against the kind of advice dads give, but it’s not like I care. No dad to object in this case.
No more discussion. I’ll have the papers drawn up tomorrow. It’s a gift. Do whatever you want with it.
I start to tear up. JP is being so good to me, so good to everyone. He doesn’t seem to want to break up. I think he’s trying to win me back and I’m posting selfies in the Forever 21 dressing room for a guy who might not want me.
I don’t know how much that place is worth, but it’s got to be at least hundreds of thousands of dollars—maybe even a million.
“Crystal, it’s time to break out the champagne.” I want to celebrate, but I also feel like the mantle of responsibility has been passed to me like I’m about to take my place on the Iron Throne. Is this moment too solemn for champagne?
An hour later we’re at our new office. I don’t know what we’ll do with it but it has a bar, a kicking sound system, and a stage. “I think we should keep the club running and maybe set aside a certain amount for office space,” I suggest to Crystal.
“I like that. We could have singles’ events.”
It’s going to be awesome.
I take a selfie of us making crazy excited faces and caption it:Guess who just bought a strip club?!
“So should I quit stripping tonight?” Crystal asks.
“Probably wait until JP gives me the deed, or however that works.”
Now that I almost own the property, I think it’s fine for me to start a fire in the parking lot—just a small one, in a trash can. It’s the last thing on my list for the day. I call out to one of the security guys, “Yo, do you have a light?”
“I got a book of matches,” he says. Everyone who works at GoldRush smokes, which is fine by me. I’m not going to be a fucking health evangelist, even though I’m a vegetarian.
He waits for me to stick a cigarette in my mouth so he can light it for me. What a gentleman. “Can I just have the book?” He hands it over, mystified.
In one corner of the parking lot there’s a metal trash can. It looks like an old oil barrel, black with bits of rust and empty except for some beer bottles that should have been recycled. Not a lot of environmentalists at the strip club. GoldRush 2.0 will have a recycling bin.#dolphins.
I hold the yellow dress close to my heart for a moment and shut my eyes tight against my emotions as I think about the last week, about the person I was. I’m not mad at her. She did the best she could and she brought me to where I am today, ready to officially move on. Hell, I already have moved on. I’m wearing a brand-new dress from Forever 21 and some pretty cute shoes. I’m a bona fide business owner and I have a damn good friend in Crystal, even if she did try to kill me. Even JP—I never expected him to care about something just because I do. Is that love, or just an awakening?
One kiss, and I drop the dress into the barrel on top of cigarette butts and Budweiser bottles, their blue labels peeling from exposure. I douse my old life in Everclear taken from behind the bar and light a match. The flame goes out before it hits the dress. I try again and again. By the fourth match, I’m practically in the trash can so I can hold the flame against the yellow fabric. It won’t ignite. I’m getting streaks of rust on my new dress from leaning into the can to light the old one.
“Fucking dress!”
After I use the entire book, the dress looks slightly blackened in a couple of spots where some old paper burned on top of it, but the dress isn’t going unless I take it to a crematorium, and it’s not quite that serious. I really wanted to take a picture of the flaming dress for Instagram, but I have to settle for a plain old shot of it in the trash. I caption it:Moving on.
Maybe it’s symbolic. The old me isn’t gone. I just threw her in the trash with a few other bad habits—lying, cheating, and red meat.
I almost take the dress out of the barrel. Imagining the once-beautiful garment being picked up by trash collectors and tossed in with food waste and dirty diapers makes me cringe, but what am I going to do with a partially scorched Prada gown? It doesn’t spark joy. My old self doesn’t spark joy.
So it has to be good-bye. I have things to do and places to be. I blow a kiss to the can and walk away. I have a date at a taco truck.
