Could I have sabotaged her at her costume fitting? Sure! Could I have put her in some poufy number that hid her figure and stunted her numbers? Yes! But that’s not what we were about at the Hop. We were family there. We were sisters.
And anyway, once I figured out that Lady was Daddy’s new Willa, I knew there was nothing I could do to change her destiny at the Hop. He already had his money on her—she was already something special.
Daddy had a set cast list, you see, and whenever one Bunny was out, he looked to fill her spot, and not just with any girl, but with the exact same girl, or as close as he could get to her. We were all just replacements of replacements of replacements there. A movie that’d been remade and remade and remade until no one knew who the original actors were anymore.
White girls had it easier, because Daddy seemed to think he could have twenty identical blond white girls so long as they were in different costumes, but he didn’t like having two Black girls at the Hop. Thought it’d confuse the guests. That it was redundant, or something. Daddy thought in stereotypes and white was the only thing that transcended categorization.
I took the place of a Vietnamese girl who’d aged out, and we were both told to call ourselves Japanese. You could tell when Daddy was about to replace you when a girl of your race, or someone from the same continent, or someone that a white person might think was from the same continent as you, whatever, came in for an interview. It meant Daddy was looking for a newer, younger, more virginal you. It meant you’d better start looking at your options.
And, see, the biggest problem with working at the Hop was that once you were out, it was all downhill from there.