Page 4 of A Brother At My Back

1

Tiffany…

I stared into the mirror of the dressing table I shared with my best friend Delia in the boudoir at our mutual place of employment. Sugars was a seedy little strip-club off the old main drag of town, and popular with the locals. It was also, by all appearances, as low-rent of an establishment as they came, but honestly, the seedier-looking the better. Silas wouldn’t look for me here.

I wiped the crimson stain off my lips and stared, all wide brown eyes framed in tatted lace that covered the top of my face and followed the curve of one cheek. It was a gimmick I had adopted to keep me in this line of work. The only thing beautiful about me was my body and the side of my face left unmarred by Silas’ handiwork.

I’d been here three years, stripping and even selling my body for sex to try and climb out of the pit of despair that had been that night – the night the good-looking rodeo star had changed everything and turned me all sorts of ugly.

I’d been a runaway at sixteen, had followed the rodeo working the concessions and had fallen squarely into Silas’ trap by nineteen. I’d barely gotten my GED and I was working hard to improve my lot in life by taking night courses at the community college. Silas had been everything in the beginning. Another handhold up, someone to look up to and he had made me feel so safe, so long as I had fallen in line and didn’t stray. Which I didn’t. I never had, and I never would.

It’d been Delia’s birthday weekend and she’d begged me to go out dancing with her and the rest of the girls. I’d gone, even though Silas had tried to get me to stay home. He’d shown up at the bar, caught me dancing with another fella. He’d been hopped up on drugs, broke a bottle against the bar, screamed something about making it so only he could love me and he had torn into the side of my face with it.

I peeled off the lace mask, the light theatrical adhesive pulling on my skin. I affixed it to the Styrofoam head and sighed, shoulders drooping under the weight of my pathetic reality.

I didn’t usually go down the awful, twisted lane of my memories, but I couldn’t help it tonight. The letter that had come in the mail today changed everything. I was supposed to be safe for five years, not three. Silas had been sentenced to five years, screaming about how he was going to kill me as they had bodily dragged him out of his sentencing hearing. Except, according to the trifold slip of single computer printout from the Kentucky Department of Corrections, they were letting him out early.

He’s going to kill mehad been running through my head nonstop since I’d opened the envelope. I had plucked it from my mailbox on my way in here.

He’s going to find me and he’s going to kill me… It’s only been three years and they’re going to let him out and he’s going to find me and he’s going to make good on his promise. He’s going to kill me.

Except as shitty as my life was, I wasn’t ready to die. I let out a long drawn out breath and threw down the makeup-removing cloth onto the table scattered with makeup. I stared at the scarred wooden top, at the eyeshadows and lipsticks, the wreckage left behind from wearing the painted mask of a stripper nightly.

I felt frustrated tears well up in my eyes but refused to look at my reflection in the glass. I hated it. Hated what he did to me. Hated that I’d been reduced to stripping and whoring to pay for the medical debt, over a hundred grand! I was so close to digging myself out and they were releasing him early.

The door to the backstage slammed open and my best friend Delia came through. I, of course, jumped and froze staring wide-eyed in her direction before I could even think to fix my hair.

“Ah! God, I am so gladthis night is over!” she declared loudly, tipping her head way back and letting out a gusty sigh. She went on to say something else, but she turned to look at me and whatever it was died on her lips. She took a sharp intake of breath and said instead, “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” I lied and she gave me a look like, really bitch?

“Right, you never leave your face uncovered. I scared the crap out of you.”

She was right. I quickly turned back to the mirror and finger-combed my hair over the offending half of my face, covering the wicked, forking seam of scar tissue with a sheet of deep, glossy brown.

“I’ll make it quick,” she said, striding in her platform stripper heels to the bank of lockers. She pulled on clothes over her bare chest and g-string, and unbuckled her heels to pull on some comfier boots.

I was already dressed in jeans and knee-high leather boots, a soft cotton and rayon long sleeved black shirt that clung to my body with a plunging neck and backline. It was hardly modest, but once I added my scarf and jacket it would be.

“I’m ready to get out of here, too,” I said softly, and went back to work on my hair, ensuring it would keep things covered.

Delia, god love her, chattered away about so many things that I just really didn’t have the heart to listen to. She knew and didn’t press, just went on to fill the silence with her random chatter while I waited for her to finish getting dressed to take us home. She was the only one of us with a car. I shuffled every red cent I had into paying off my debt and for school. Online courses had become a godsend. I was almost done with that, too.

Damn him.

I got up and let Delia take my place at the dressing table so that she could change out her lipstick and touch up her eyeliner, tucking the offending paper into my back pocket and going to my locker for my scarf and my black leather biker jacket. It was really a style-over -function thing when it came to the latter, but I liked it. It made me feel tougher than I actually was.

We cleaned up our mess, stowed our makeup in our lockers, and made sure everything was secure before I followed Delia’s bright chatter away from the dim club and pounding music. We moved swiftly through the neon-lit dark of the backstage and both waved bye to Zeke at the back door. A big country boy, he served as our bouncer on the same shift. He swept open the door for us like he always did, Delia and I spilling out into the real dark and nearly empty lot, the crisp night air cold enough to sting our faces. We moved swiftly over to her beat-up Honda and she opened her door, leaning across to open mine.

I got in, clutching my purse in my lap and locking the door behind me, while she started it up. I swept the seatbelt across my chest and clicked it home nervously while she put it in reverse.

He’s not even out yet,I told myself, but it didn’t matter. The fear that accompanied memory was in full effect.

Delia lived the next town over. It was nicer there, while I lived on the edge of this town on its opposite side in a steal of a rundown studio apartment. Delia lived in a pretty complex, but the nicer part came with a price tag I wasn’t willing to pay for in my efforts to get the fuck up out of here.

We were on the two-lane highway headed for home and my mind was on overdrive when I interrupted her shit-talking about one of the other girls, Cherry, by blurting out, “Delia, do me a favor and pull in here up on the right.”

She looked over at me, mouth dropped open in surprise and asked, “In there?” with a squeak.

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