Bold

Chapter 1

The weirdest thing customers say to me isn't, I think the way your ribs stick out is sexy, or, how much is it to buy your panties?

The answer to the first one is a big smile and thank you, because I thank people when they compliment me, that's how I was raised. The answer to the second one is no, you can't do that, and by the way that's fucking weird.

But the weirdest thing I get told is, you don't look like a stripper. They say it to explain why of all the girls working the floor at Le Secret tonight they picked me, small, scrawny, flat, tattooed, pink-haired me, pale and pasty like the watery Minnesota peach that I am. Apparently that's not what a stripper is supposed to look like.

At first I thought it was insulting, then hilarious. Now, like most things, I don't give a fuck.

I also get asked my "real" name a lot. No one buys that an exotic young thing like me could really be called Sky. That's why I have a fake real name, Alaska. I lean over, letting the bleach-fried tips of my pastel hair brush their shoulder just so, and whisper it in their ear. And just like that, I'm their new best friend. They love me and that means they'll gladly hand over the entire contents of their wallet, so for me, it works.

I also have fake biographies for myself that I thought up during dead Sunday nights while sitting at the bar dangling my six-inch heels into emptiness. Sometimes I take them farther, test their limits, see how much bullshit I can get away with. You'd be surprised.

My real biography is boring as fuck, just like my real name.

Maybe one day, one hypothetical day that I'll probably keep putting off till I'm old and too wrinkled to strip—one day I'll quit and change my plain old name to Blue, for real.

For now I'm just trying to make the best of the late-August slump. The weather's still good, the hockey games at the arena adjacent to the downtown core haven't started yet, it's a Sunday and the club is so dead I wonder why I even showed up. I could have stayed home except the manager would have given me crap or threatened to fire me. Maybe I should have stayed anyway—fuck him. But I don't want to have to get used to a new club, to learn everyone's names and shit. I have other things on my mind. School starts tomorrow, and I haven't set aside quite enough for tuition over the summer.

I've been slacking. The apathy of not having to wake up and be somewhere at a specific time every morning, of not having things to hand in and deadlines to meet, has sucked me in like a black hole. I killed the summer away day by day in my empty loft, sweltering with the faulty AC—she makes several bills a night and she can't afford a new AC, that's what you're thinking, I know. I just wasn't in the mood to go to the hardware store. I'd need a car to bring the new AC back home, and for that I'd have to go and be nice to someone who has a car.

I'd rather lay on top of the damp bedsheets, fan directed right at me, and only crawl out at night when the heat had abated.

Tomorrow is August 31st, and I have to get my ass in gear for another year. I'm ready to embody the cliché of the stripper-paying-for-her-education.

Although no, for that cliché to work I'd have to be in med school, or law, or at least engineering. And I'm in the Fine Arts program—it's at Mackay, which is prestigious enough, but still.

Almost two years have passed since I filled out the online application forms and mailed my hopeful portfolio, which I was still convinced was pure genius, to every school in North America with even the smallest art department. My grades had slipped in the last semester, with all the shit that went down, so of the slew of applications, only one fat envelope came back: Mackay University, Montreal.

My mom threw a fit. She wanted me to stay home and reapply to the local college or at least one in Minneapolis. She threw stuff and threatened to cut me off. But I went. I still went because I knew there was no way in hell I was staying in that town for even a heartbeat longer than I had to.