I felt the steady stare of non-male eyes at my back. And yes, I can tell. When I turned around, there she was, looking up at me with that ironic, crooked half smile, the tiny diamond eyes in her memento mori skull pendant flashing in the dimness. She wore the blond cornrow wig. I was almost at the end of my shift, and all I wanted to do was climb down, throw on my clothes, and run out with her. I was getting so used to dancing virtually naked that I nearly forgot about it. I mostly liked the girls, their don’t-give-a-fuck attitudes, their toughness mixed with the vulnerability of being exposed in front of fully clothed males. There’s a solidarity among them that nobody on the outside would imagine. Most customers likely viewed us as interchangeable units; one goes up for twenty minutes, climbs down, and a replacement component is issued from a storage area in the back.

I did this thing on a rope vine bolted into the ceiling that was very popular. I would maneuver my body upside down, work my way around it like a snake. I never crossed a line—never catered to freak tastes. Even if you don’t, they imagine scenarios of what they’d do if they had you at their mercy, which for an unknown segment of the male population could include, but not be limited to, forcing you to watch them jerk off, pissing on you, putting cigarettes out on your chest, or slicing you to ribbons.

I’m getting more like Khalika every day, and it’s about time. Take me or leave me; it’s all the same to me. I think of them the same way they think of me—interchangeable and disposable—no replacement wanted or needed.

I was expecting her to appear, so I wasn’t surprised seeing her perched on a barstool, martini in hand. All my resentment drained away; I was just relieved she’d finally decided to check in. I noticed a gauntness that hadn’t been there the last time I saw her. Khalika always appeared to subsist on air, alcohol, and cigarettes.

I was picking up her habits, and quickly.

She ran her long index finger around the rim of her glass, smiling up at me. Her nails were painted a deep, glittery purple. She snaked her head back and forth and tapped the bar with her fingernails, which I knew meant that she approved. I turned, grabbed the backs of my calves, peeked through my legs, and waggled my tongue at her. A blubbery guy with a spray of acne on his face and neck—a double-bacon cheeseburger in a yellow polyester shirt—decided it was for him and passed up a twenty. I shoved it in my G-string, smiled and checked the clock: 1:58 a.m.

Khalika downed her drink and slapped a tip on the bar. She jerked her thumb toward the exit, held up five fingers, and split. I climbed down, got my cash from the manager, threw jeans and a shirt over my costume and stuffed my tips into my rucksack.

By the time I met Khalika out front, it was a little after two. She flicked a cigarette butt into the gutter and blew the smoke through her nostrils in a long plume that the wind carried away.

“Happy hatch day, Sparkles. Let the festivities begin, for the witching hour is long gone. It’s been too long since we’ve spoken—I mean in the quivering flesh.”

There was something about Khalika that night, from the very start, but I didn’t dare ask her what was up; I mean, besides our birthday. She was fully capable of erupting on me when she was in one of her blacker moods. This time I was having a hell of a time reading her mood. Sparks were practically flying from her fingertips, as the song goes.

“Where the hell have you been? It’s like you dropped off the face of the Earth!”

Khalika didn’t respond.

A few stragglers left the bar behind me. One was a regular—one of the weirder little creeps who, I was told, arrived and got taken home in a black limo. He always called you “Miss” followed by whatever you called yourself. The guy called himself Taffy, and he craved discipline and humiliation. He would ask permission to go to the can. He was some kind of executive with The Daily News and the night barmaids said he’d leave huge tips if they were mean enough to him. He was all of five feet, four inches in his elevator shoes.

Khalika rolled her eyes as the chauffeur came around and opened the door for him. He slid in, not acknowledging us, like the street outside the bar was a different world. He glanced briefly at us before his coach pulled away from the curb, his pale eyes popping behind coke-bottle-thick lenses.

Another testosterone giant emerged in a leather motorcycle getup, the jacket covered in studs, “Aliens” lettered across the back. He saluted us, mounted his chopper, and roared off.

“Tasty,” said Khalika. “Bet he’d like to show us his clubhouse, do us on the pool table.”

She has never been a hugger, so we just stood there grinning for a few seconds before she spun on her heel and headed north on Lexington. Khalika joked that I should get Taffy to come over and clean the loft after she’d dropped in, that while he was at it, he could lick out the bowl, but only if he was a good boy. I laughed and said it was not out of the question, that I could imagine him in his maid uniform.

Then Khalika said, all nonchalant: “Remember when Dick-o said that if you didn’t get your act together, he’d sell Mercutio or ship him off to the killers? I remember the look on your poor little face, like you were imagining all the terror your friend would go through before they put the air gun between his eyes. The same look his recruits probably had when they realized what was up. I knew you’d have that shit in your head for the rest of your natural life.”

“How could I forget? Nothing the fucker ever said to me compared to that one.”

“But look at you now! I mean, anybody who saw us separately wouldn’t be able to tell us apart, except for the wig and my macabre jewelry. Even your eyes are starting to look like mine—your windows to the soul.” She smiled wolfishly. “You’ve dropped a little weight too, but it’s all good. It looks like you’re laying off the potato chips. That’s what I’ve always hoped for—that you’d finally see that accommodation and placating doesn’t work. Ever. There’s always more they want to carve out of whatever’s left of you. I told you, you must always do what’s necessary, Violet, sometimes more than that.”

Khalika fingered the skull and spoon on the black cord, stopped for a moment and faced me. “I’ve wanted to see you for the longest time, but I’ve been engaged elsewhere. It takes a lot of planning to arrange these meetings. People are looking for me.”

When I asked what people, she just set her jaw and continued burning up the pavement.

“I hope you liked what I left at the loft. You must know I’d never abandon you for too long. So, let’s embark on our journey via the lower intestine of this crumbling metropolis, for ’tis the shank of the morning, and we are entering our final year as mere sprouts, tender bait for all the untethered freaks roaming this wasteland of plenty.”

I gathered my courage and told Khalika about the incident on the subway platform with the beautiful Black dude, the hidden figure in her painting. She seemed unfazed. Her casual response shocked me.

“Oh, that’s just Daddy visiting. It’s quite a feat, and the conduit usually freaks out. I knew all about it, even what he said. He’s right about something big coming; I’m just not sure what it is myself. I mean, you can feel it in the air. I’m going to share something with you soon, and these visitations are only a small slice of the bigger mystery. Daddy is, or was, only an extension of it, as we are. But for this morning, let’s just be two sisters celebrating their birthday. Deal?”

“Deal,” I whispered, and the word was taken by the wind.