Objectify Me: A Fireworks Novella (The Fireworks Novellas) (8 page)

“I’m Levi Borovski,” he says. “I called it in.”

“ID?”

“Back pocket,” Levi says. “There’s a little girl under the stairs. You’re scaring her.”

Two of the cops relax a bit. One of them reaches for Valentina, but she refuses to budge.

“I can get her,” I say, as I hand over my ID.

Valentina cowers there until the other two cops are done dragging the big Russian away. Then they frisk us and confirm Levi’s ID. I finally tug Valentina out and put my arms around her.

“I’m going to have to book you for prostitution, ma’am,” one of the cops says. I appreciate that he doesn’t sound happy about it and everything, but jeez.

“She’s not a prostitute!” Levi says. “She’s my friend. We came here together looking for two other friends. They might have been upstairs.”

“Everyone upstairs is being arrested.”

Levi slumps. “Fuck,” he says. “The women, too? You’re not going to arrest this little girl, are you?”

The cops look at Valentina. “Is she a prostitute? How old is she? How old are you?”

Valentina just stares at him.

“
Skol'ko tebe let
?” Levi says.

“
Chetyrnadtsat.”

Levi hangs his head with a sigh. “She says she’s fourteen.”

I’ve never seen a cop look so forlorn. He turns to his partner. “Get child protection down here.”

Valentina starts to cry again.

Levi pats her on the shoulder. “
Ne boysya, Kosmonashka,
” he says.

Chapter Eleven – Levi

Shame is a strange thing. Unlike almost every other thing you might carry, it doesn’t diminish depending on how many people you share it with. So I’m sharing shame with the entire male half of our pitiful species right now, and it weighs on me like a neutron star.

They dragged a Russian interpreter out of bed, and now it’s her job to translate Valentina’s mumbled details about what was happening in that place. I heard enough, though. Enough to never forget. I cried like a girl in the back of the police car. Thankfully they got a lady cop to drive Charlotte back to the station in her own car. Valentina got checked over in an ambulance first; she arrived a few minutes after me. So I only had a big Cajun detective to share my tears with.

“Hey now, podna,” he said, looking back at me in the rearview mirror. “Don’t fret. It ain’t your fault.”

But somehow, the way I looked at Charlotte at the club and the things that happened to those girls in the warehouse got mixed up in my head. I’m trying to untangle them, like a big messed up ball of yarn that a cat got into. But my brain doesn’t seem to be working right. The checkered floor of the police station hallway blurs in front of me.

Charlotte’s beautiful round breasts. Valentina’s bony ribcage. Charlotte’s soft lips. Valentina’s haunted eyes. Charlotte’s warm, inviting pussy…

How many men raped Valentina before we found her?

I pressed my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. These people are busy. No one needs to deal with a grown man losing his shit in a cop-shop waiting room.

“Hey, Leev. I brought you a coffee.”

Omar holds the cup out, tentatively, the way you might offer food to a wild animal. I try to quell the shaking hand as I take the cup and sip the lukewarm coffee gratefully. Across from me, Buck has nodded off, his head resting on his balled-up hoodie.

He and Omar left the party before we even got there, stumbling along the highway until local troopers picked them up. It turns out the cops were already on the way when we called them. As I predicted, Omar got raked over the coals a bit, but in the end, no one got charged. Buck and Omar swore up and down they never touched the girls apart from to take that damn selfie that started all this. I believe them. There’s no reason to think they’d be any less grossed out by the whole thing than I was, once they saw what was really happening.

Three spoiled, upper middle class, West Coast boys walk away scott free again. Big surprise there.

“Where’s Charlotte?” I ask.

“Who?”

“Charlotte. The girl. The other girl I was with.”

Omar shrugs. “I don’t think I met her.”

Last I saw Charlotte, she was holding Valentina’s hand and helping her open up to the interpreter as someone tugged me away. To do something. Sign some forms, maybe? I wonder what I signed.

“I called your mom,” Omar says. “She freaked.”

Sounds about right. I turn my free hand to look at my watch and dimly register searing pain shooting up my arm and across my ribs. Not sure what that means. Probably should get it checked out. But I get distracted by my watch. It’s nearly eleven in the morning. We’ve been here for four hours. Maybe Charlotte went home.

“Bro, you don’t look so good,” Omar says.

“I’m just tired. When are they going to let us go?”

“I think they’re double-checking with some of the girls that we weren’t, you know, customers.”

And here I thought they trusted our honest faces. I lean down and try to rest my head on my hands, but I’m shaking so much, all that does is rattle my brain even more. So I sit back and take another sip of coffee, but it tastes like armpit and smells even worse. It takes me three tries to set the cup down on the side table without spilling it.

“Where’s Charlotte?”

“Dude. You asked that already.”

I press my lips together. Better to not speak if speaking is going to reveal to the world how much I’m obviously falling apart.

Charlotte’s beautiful neck. Valentina’s pitiful, hoarse weeping.

I shake my head, making my shoulder spasm and my vision blur even more. I’d close my eyes, but that makes the room spin. I’m starting to feel like I’m missing a key piece of the puzzle. That sense of having forgotten something washes over me again. Maybe it’s just that I’m tired. Or hungry. Or thirsty. I can’t even tell.

It’s as though I’m not in my body anymore.

Maybe I just need to piss.

Next thing I know, I’m standing, swaying a little, but staying upright. Omar looks at me, alarmed.

“Gotta piss,” I say.

I focus on the restroom sign to keep from falling over on the way there. When I get inside the door, I duck into a stall straightaway, lowering the toilet lid and sitting down. On top of the million things that are making me feel terrible right now is the possibility that Charlotte has gone home without saying goodbye. I wouldn’t blame her. I want to put this night behind me, too, but…

I’m a complete failure as a man. I didn’t get her number, her Facebook, her Instagram, nothing. I don’t even know her last name. And I was so dazed when we went to her house to get her car that there’s no way I could ever find it again. And even if I could, what am I supposed to do? Just turn up at her door? Isn’t that a little weird?

I try to get up, because I really
do
need to piss, but when I lean forward, a bolt of pain shoots through my ribcage so bad that I feel like I might vomit. I look down at my body and realize I’ve been hugging my left side since we left the party. Slowly, I edge my hand out of the folds of my t-shirt. It looks wrong, not like a hand should look. I try to move it, and that makes me nearly puke again. Two of my fingers are pointing in the wrong direction, and the whole hand is swollen and blue.

“
Fuck
…”

That’s not good.

With my other hand, I hoist myself off the toilet and head out of the stall. Standing in front of the mirror, I lift my t-shirt up. One side of my ribcage is bloated and eggplant colored. The minute I see it, the pain actually processes. And that’s when what’s left of my late night snack comes up and splatters all over the floor. The heaving multiplies the pain in my ribs by about a million.

“God…” I manage to squeak out, easing myself down onto my knees so I don’t fall over. “Help…”

The worst part about thinking I’m going to die kneeling in a puddle of my own vomit is that I know somehow I deserve it. That something I did once caused a chain reaction that lead to Valentina chained up in that place. I watched seriously questionable porn when I was younger. In high school I had sex with a girl at a party who turned out to only be fifteen. And a hundred other things. A bachelor party here. A website there. Any one of those stupid, self-indulgent acts might have been the butterfly wing that created the tornado Valentina got caught up in. And how many others are there like her? Maybe I’m no better than the men who chained her up.

“Oh God…” My vision starts to go black at the edges, and I shiver even though I feel like I’m burning up. “Someone help me…” I’m not even hoping for someone to help with the pain, with whatever injuries I have. I think I’m looking for someone to save my soul.

Then, like an angel of mercy, Charlotte is there.

“Levi? Levi!”

I hear her screaming for help and register the blur of several dark figures joining us in the restroom.

After that, things get a little fuzzy.

“…cracked in situ, but the other was broken with peritoneal intrusion, and that’s what caused the lung to collapse. We needed to deal with that first. There was a small bleed on the spleen that we repaired, but no other internal damage, so you can rest easy about that. Now the hand…”

“Mom?”

She’s kind of blurry, but it looks like my mom. Maybe I’m dreaming.

“There are several fractures and dislocations in the hand. We realigned and splinted some of the bones, but one of them is going to need surgical repair, I’m afraid. Orthopedic is pretty sure it won’t need screws, but she’ll need to open it up to make sure. We’d like his lung function a bit better before we proceed with that.”

“We’d like to get him home for –”

“Mom?”

The blur moves closer and comes into focus.

“Oh! My baby boy! Oh, darling, thank god. You’re going to be all right.”

She hugs me delicately, avoiding tubes and wires and the side of my body that still feels bloated and numb.

“What are you doing here?” My voice is a whisper, all air and effort.

“I got the first flight. Right after Buck called. He said you were going to be arrested, but when I got here, you were in surgery!”

“
Am
I going to be arrested?”

Mom strokes my head, smiling down at me in a way that makes me feel about five years old. “No, honey. Buck got that wrong. Usual story.”

I half cough, half laugh, and pain lances through my side.

“Try not to move,” Mom says. “Dad’s organizing a medivac flight.” She turns to the doctor. “He can get back to the west coast? Is he strong enough?”

“On a medivac?” The doctor shrugs. “I’d give it a few hours, but sure. You prefer that?”

“My husband is a surgeon, so yes.”

Dad’s a doctor. I forgot Dad was a doctor. How could I forget that? Filled my head up with law school applications and Yiddish curses and forgot my dad’s job.

Charlotte. Charlotte. Charlotte. Charlotte. Charlotte’s fingers. Charlotte’s toes.

“Where’s Charlotte?”

Mom looks down on me indulgently, still stroking me like a kitten. “Who’s Charlotte?”

“A girl. There was a girl with me. I think she brought me here.”

Mom looks blank. “You were in the OR when I got here. Omar is outside. Buck’s gone back to the hotel to get your suitcase.”

“But was there a girl here? A beautiful girl with long brown hair?”

Mom just shakes her head.

I close my eyes. I remember being in an ambulance. I remember Charlotte with the sun behind her head. She leaned down and kissed me, and her lips tasted like cool water. I don’t remember her saying goodbye.

What was I thinking, anyway, that I was actually a grown man? I’m still a boy. Obviously, I’m not ready to be out in the world by myself. Ditched my friends on a drug dealer’s boat. Picked up a stripper. Got lost at an orgy. Let myself get beaten up, somehow. Not even sure I really remember that happening.

Broken ribs. Broken hand.

Broken heart.
Laissez les bon temps roulez
.

New Orleans, you slay me.

Chapter Twelve – Charlotte

Five Months Later

“Who took my eyelash curler?”

Four sets of fluttering eyes look back at me innocently.

“Y’all, seriously. That’s gross. There are bacteria unknown to science in your eyelashes.”

“Oh, and your eyelashes are disease free?”

“It’s not diseases, it’s…” I let my voice trail off. I don’t have time for a basic biology lesson with three Florida beach sluts and an Australian porn star. Ever since Jack sold this place, the quality and class it was renowned for has slowly degraded into low-grade, processed cheese. Processed cheese
spread
. The kind that comes in a can. All the other girls that worked here when I started have moved on to better venues, or gotten out of this business altogether. I’m hanging on because…well I don’t even really know. I guess I just need the routine right now, the security of having somewhere to go most days. A reason to get up and have a shower, brush my hair and teeth. Some kind of structure to a life that’s lost most of its meaning.

I’m slathering mascara onto my uncurled eyelashes when Rick, the new owner, barrels in, belly first. I never minded when Jack came in to the dressing room – none of the girls did. But Rick is another story. Rick has this way of looking at you that leaves you feeling like you’ve been licked. And not in a good way. I’ve taken to putting on my lingerie at home and coming into the club with it under my clothes just so I don’t have to risk him seeing me pull my panties up.

“Looking good, ladies,” he says. He has a California beach-bum drawl that might be cute on someone half his age. On him, it’s like being accosted by a fat and sweaty Gary Busey. “Charlotte, can I speak to you?”

I try to be subtle as I slip my kimono over my lingerie before following Rick out into the hallway.

“Listen, can you do the floor show tonight?” he asks.

“Wait tables you mean?” Rick has kept the schedule Jack had. Drinks and tame lap dances until eleven, then a much raunchier floor show from eleven until whenever things get too untidy. I don’t like waiting tables during the floor show, because the guys are drunk and disgusting. They’re supposed to leave the waitresses alone and throw their money at the tits and ass on the stage, but it doesn’t always work that way. Still, an extra shift is an extra shift. Beats sitting at home feeling pointless.

“No, baby girl,” Rick says, making me cringe from the spine outwards. “
Do
the floor show. Be in it.”

I stare at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“All the girls are rotating lounge shifts with floor-show shifts now, Lottie. The only one who doesn’t do it is you. It comes across as superior. That’s not good for morale.”

“I don’t do topless, Rick. I explained that.”

“See what I mean?” He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one up, blowing smoke in my face like he’s not breaking several city ordinances. And being a jerk. “What makes your tits so precious?”

They’re real
, I think. “I can’t dance,” I lie. “I’ll fall off the pole and break my neck.”

“No one cares about the pole. You can twerk, right? Shake your ass, hang those fresh little titties in their faces. You’ll be fine.”

I feel that black cloud that’s been hanging over me for a month begin to descend, as though it will release its storm all over me, soaking me through to my soul with cold, sad rain. I should have quit when everything fell apart. I should have quit when Jack left. I should have quit after that night with Levi, after all those times I visited Valentina in the foster home. After seeing her off at the airport to her cousins in New York who were happy to take her in. After their terse message telling me Valentina wasn’t allowed to text me anymore. Because a lap dancer was a bad influence.

After all I learned and all I saw, I should have known that the only way up in this industry was down.

Rick puts his hand on my shoulder, which would be bad enough, but then he starts stroking up and down, which just gives me the willies. “Look, Charlotte, honey. I know you’ve had a hard month. And I’ve tried to be supportive – everybody here has. We care about you. Why don’t we table it for tonight and talk about the floor show again next week. You’d be great for Wednesday – naughty school girl night. Have you got knee socks?”

I don’t answer. I’ve lost the ability to speak.

“Well, we can get you some. Go finish getting ready. It’s getting busy out there.”

I turn back into the dressing room, cheeks burning.

“Hey, Charlotte?”

I half turn back, holding my kimono closed around me. Rick stands there in a cloud of his own stench, looking pretty pleased with himself.

“Why don’t you let me buy you a drink later?” he says. “I’ll leave Paulo in charge of the floor show, and you and I can go somewhere nice. Since you’re not going to do the show, you’ve got your evening free, right? We can make a night of it. Just you and me.”

He can’t expect a serious answer to that, can he? He’s just messing with my screwed-up head. Well, I’ve got a little fire left inside me. Enough for one pathetic spark.

“Should I wear knee socks?” I say.

Rick grins and licks his lips as he stubs the cigarette on the floor of his own club. “That would be nice. See you later, baby girl.” He pushes through the blue-velvet curtain and disappears.

I take a breath. And another one. And my third breath, I push the dressing room door open, breezing past two of the beach sluts on the way to my table.

“Lottie, here’s your eyelash curler,” one of them says, holding the curler out to me. I look at it like I don’t recognize it.

“Keep it,” I say. I pick up my tote bag, and shove my jeans, t-shirt and sneakers inside. Then I sweep the rest of my make-up and other beauty tools into the trash under my table.

“Law-tie!” the porn star says in her Aussie twang. “What ah ya doin?”

I tie my kimono shut. My car is outside, so I only need to make it across the parking lot. And hell, this is New Orleans. There are odder things than a girl walking around in a kimono and heels.

I zip my bag shut and sling it over my shoulder.

“Buh-bye, bitches,” I say, before flouncing like I have never flounced before. I mean, I flounce like a fucking prima ballerina in a ball gown. I flounce right out of there, down the hall, through the velvet curtain, and out into the club.

Rick looks up at me from a table of suits, surprised. I give him the finger.

“Hey! Charlotte!” he yells after me as I continue my epic flounce. “You get back here!”

I pass one of my regulars, an ancient state bench judge who is completely bald except for two pure white caterpillar eyebrows. He waggles them at me.

“How about a dance, Lottie? You’re looking hot tonight.”

“Oh, grow up!” I say.

I blast through the door and into the entry area. Thaddeus looks up from his guest list.

“I can’t do it anymore, Thad,” I say. “I just can’t.”

After a second, he smiles and holds out his hand for a high five. “Good for you, kid,” he says. “You take care.”

I slap his hand, and he holds the door open. The last of the summer daylight infuses me as the door swings shut behind me.

I stride out to my car and don’t look back.

I’d crank some victorious, celebratory song in the car on the way home, but my stereo is broken.

Later, when I’m alone in my crummy little house, I expect to feel regret. Or maybe triumph. But all I feel is empty. Empty like I’ve left Dusty’s room all this time since she moved out. Empty like the fridge. I walk the long passageway from the kitchen to the front door. Opening it, I look out onto the dark, breathing in the sweat of high summer in Louisiana.

Down the street, two kids kick around a soccer ball like they do most evenings when their mom has gotten sick of their chatter. One of them kicks a bit too hard and the ball goes sailing into the air and lands right outside my gate.

“Got it!” I say, stepping out onto my little porch and down the stairs. I put my hand on the bannister and take two steps down before stopping suddenly. Somehow in that act of stepping down with my hand on the bannister, the glow of night around me has rattled something loose in my brain. One of those details that you didn’t know you had filed away, like the kind of thing you can recall only under hypnosis, pops up, bleating out in my mind like a car horn.

“Mr. Borovski!”

The doorman at the LaFleur Guesthouse, looking up at us with resignation in his face, as though he knew we’d be coming down looking for a two AM snack.

“Hey, Miss?
Miss
?” The kid stands expectantly down the street, waiting for the ball. I run down to the sidewalk and give it a good kick back in their direction.

“Nice kick, Miss!” The other kid says as they continue their game. I stand there and watch them for a while, marveling at how the universe works.

Here’s the thing – when they rushed Levi into surgery, I was the only person with him. So they handed me his wallet, keys and phone while the nurse went away to get a belongings bag. I sat there stunned for a few minutes, but when my brain started working again, I figured that maybe, being literally nobody important, I should find Levi’s friends and make sure they call his family or something. Then I thought if the family turns up, I should make myself scarce so Levi doesn’t have to answer a whole lot of awkward questions when he wakes up. And the idea of just walking away without saying goodbye came over me like a cold wave. I knew nothing about him. Not his phone number, or Instagram, or even his last name.

So I opened his wallet and looked for his driver’s license. And that’s when a different nurse came back and got all hostile with me. She grabbed the wallet and other stuff away from me and threatened to call security if I didn’t leave. I guess she thought I was some random thief, I don’t know, but like an idiot, I left. And that was that.

I called the hospital later, but not knowing his last name didn’t help. “He came in with the police. His hand was broken, but he was really sick,” I said. “His name was Levi. I don’t know what was wrong with him. They rushed him into surgery. Levi. A young guy. College kid. I just want to know if he’s okay.”

The voice at the other end of the phone was officious. Cool. “Are you family?”

“If I was family, don’t you think I’d know his last name?”

“There’s no need to be rude. I’m not supposed to release information to anyone but family.”

I was gasping by this time. Sitting in the dark in my hallway, my phone pressed to my head, gasping for breath, because the one possibility that I didn’t dare consider was crushing me.

“Did he die?” I sobbed it out. “Can you please just tell me if he died?”

Then, whoever the woman on the phone was listened to me cry for a few seconds. And I guess she took pity on me. I heard her fingers clicking on a computer keyboard.

“He didn’t die. His parents took him back home on a medivac flight. His condition was listed as ‘stable’ when he was discharged.”

“Can you tell me his last name?”

“No,” she said sternly, and hung up.

And of course I tried the guesthouse, but the manager there was even more stern than the woman at the hospital. And I searched Facebook for “Levi - Seattle,” but about a million names came up, and cyber-stalking all of them seemed a little desperate.

After a few days of obsessing, I decided to just let it go. He was just a hook-up. Sure we had a pretty intensely scary experience together, but so do lots of people. That doesn’t mean they need to spend their lives together. Or even stay friends, does it?

I took my week off from the club, then I went back to my life. Dancing, visiting dad, paying bills, having weekly dinners with Dusty while her girlfriend got more and more pregnant. Jack sold the club and Rick took over. Dusty quit, then Felicity quit. Barbie got back together with her son’s father, and they moved up north. Claire got busted with cocaine and Rick fired her, just like that. And Louise just up and disappeared. Rick thought she might have gone to LA to make porn. Bit by bit, the things that felt familiar and safe were replaced with things that felt custom-designed to pick me apart.

And a month ago? A month ago, I lost pretty much everything.

I leave the boys to their soccer game and go back inside, closing the door behind me. I sit on my bed with my laptop beside me, wondering what to do with the sudden revelation of Levi’s last name. Is this a gift from the universe to make up for all the shit of the last few months? Would it be wrong to squander it?

I open my laptop, go to a Google search, and type in “Levi Borovski Seattle.”

The first thing that comes up is the University of Washington student newspaper, and a recent article entitled “The Truth about the Sex Trade,” by L. Borovski.

“Oh my god…” My voice seems to hang there in the dark, daring me to click on the link. I finally do it, and read Levi’s soul-crushing essay about his inadvertent journey into the heart of darkness, and the ruthless self-examination that accompanied his voyage back. I’m shaking with sobs when I read his closing paragraph:

For every “happy hooker,” there are estimated to be at least ten unhappy ones, unwilling ones, ones who have been forced into it, or ones who are trapped in sexual slavery. In multiple studies, over ninety percent of prostitutes wanted immediate help getting out of the sex industry. Over ninety percent. Imagine if college football was like this, or marching band. Would we be talking about “reform,” or would we just stop going to football games and parades?