Once I clawed my way to the top of the club, Jack actually seemed proud of me for a moment and bragged to all his friends that I was the new top dog at the Crazy Horse Too. We celebrated one night with dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Venetian. Sitting next to him, without all his asshole biker friends around, I remembered how I’d felt the first time I saw him in the tattoo shop. Waiting for the food to come, we began making out. He placed my hand on his pants, and I felt him growing hard. I unzipped it, and began to play with it. And then, seized by some sort of mad-genius inspiration, I scooped a handful of whipped butter off a plate on the table. It softened quickly as I stroked him with it until, minutes later, we had made such a mess of his pants that we had to clean the butter and cum off with San Pellegrino water.

So our relationship got its second wind, which lasted for about a week. The problem was that in the biker crowd he hung out with, women were treated as subservient beings. And after my education at the club, I began to resent not having the permission to be myself around Jack and his friends. The only person I could even talk to was Matt, who worked at the tattoo shop with Jack and had given me that oddly understanding smile on the boat.

Eventually, I made the mistake of telling Jack that I was feeling uncomfortable and that he needed to stick up for me. I should have known that Jack would react by doing the exact opposite —treating me even worse around his friends and leaving me alone constantly while he went on motorcycle runs to California. Of course, his behavior just made me more obsessed with him, as I kept trying to find the sensitivity that I believed he had. I was like a religious zealot. There was no evidence: my belief was based on faith alone. No man at the club could get the better of me, but Jack still could.

I hadn’t talked to my dad since I’d left home. All he had to do was call and ask me to come home, and I would have. He’d been the sum total of my world since I was a little girl. But I wasn’t surprised by his behavior: it was not in his character to reach out to me in any way or make an effort to talk about anything.

Before I met Jack, I was never much of a partier. I just had a few drinks. Whenever I saw him snorting various white, yellow, and pink powders, I always told myself there was no way I was putting that stuff up my nose. It wasn’t that my father had raised me well. It just seemed gross and pointless —and it probably stung. Of course, that didn’t stop Jack from trying to force his drug of choice on me: crystal meth. The conversation usually went like this:

Jack: Try a bump.

Me: I don’t think so.

Jack: It’s just like a cup of coffee.

Me: It’s not my gig.

Jack: Just a little bump?

Me: I said no, Jack. Stop it.

Jack: You’re missing out.

And then one day, the conversation ended like this:

Me: Okay, a little bump.

Between my experience on Lake Mead and my encounters with the men at the strip club, I had become a little more nihilistic. Jack dumped some powder on a Metallica CD case and spread it with his driver’s license. The shape it formed was clearly a line, not a bump —unless a bump was just druggie talk for a line. He handed me a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. I bent over the black CD case and tried to snort as little as I could. To accomplish this, I took a little sniff and then messed up the tail of the line with the end of the bill, so that it looked like I had snorted it all.

Within moments, my nose was burning and my head was pounding. It hurt, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to sniff this nasty dust. Then I swallowed the saliva in my mouth and, slowly, the migraine transformed into euphoria. My blood surged and my heart pounded. It was as though my spirit was too excited to stay in my body and wanted to leap out and dance among the stars —or at least vacuum the whole house. For the first time since leaving home, I didn’t think about the pain of being away from my father; I didn’t think about Preacher; I didn’t think about whether Jack liked me or not. Nothing mattered.

“Jack,” I said. “Can I have another little bump?”

So I did one more bump-line. A full one. I felt invincible. A few hours later, a thought suddenly occurred. I shared it with Jack.

“How am I supposed to go to sleep?”

He just smiled at me wickedly and said, “Enjoy it.”

I crawled into bed and shut my eyes. They popped back open instantly. A day and a half later, I was still awake, shaking from exhaustion and hunger, and I couldn’t stop grinding my jaw. I was miserable. I pledged never to do it again.

That pledge lasted about a week. And, as an added benefit, Jack’s house never looked so clean. I tried a couple sniffs before work one day because I thought it would help me hustle better, but instead I found myself layering on so much makeup and doing my hair for so long that I walked onto the stage looking like Liberace.

Once I hit the stage, I grabbed the pole and didn’t let go. I just stood there dancing as my knuckles turned white and my teeth ground together so hard that sparks were practically flying out of my jaw. Note to self: work and drugs do not mix.

Around this time, Vanessa started drinking more heavily, losing her temper, and bursting inexplicably into tears. Every now and then she’d say something strange, like she didn’t feel safe at home alone, and would beg me to spend the night at her house. Gradually, she began canceling plans and pulling away from me. Something bad was looming over her. And that something bad was Preacher.

Vanessa lived about five miles away from her father. Sometimes when I was at Vanessa’s, Preacher would stop by drunk. I would stay upstairs, for fear of seeing him, but often I could hear them quarreling. One night, while I was downstairs doing a bump-line with Vanessa, Preacher barged into the house. When he saw me, he froze for a moment. His face contorted into a threatening scowl, then he turned and left.

After that night, Vanessa stopped talking to me. She wouldn’t even return my calls. I couldn’t figure out what the matter was, so I stopped by her house unannounced. When she saw me, her face blanched.

“What’s gotten into you?” I asked.

“Are you fucking my dad?” She glared at me with pure hatred.

I stood there shocked for a moment. “Jesus Christ, Vanessa. What are you talking about?”

“My dad told me you were fucking him!” she said. “You are such white trash, Jenna. How could you?”

I had never planned on telling Vanessa anything, but the mind does funny things when it’s put on the defensive. “You’ve got it wrong,” I told her flatly. “Actually, he raped me.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, Vanessa burst into tears and crumpled to the floor.

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I’m not going to turn him in. I won’t do anything, all right?”

“That’s not it,” she gasped through her sobs. I looked at her and suddenly, I knew. Not only had she been through the same thing with Preacher, but she was still going through it.

“He’s been raping me my whole life,” she confessed and then just exploded. Tears flew out of her eyes, snot gushed from her nose, and her wails pierced my eardrum. All the defensive walls she had put up from being victimized her whole life suddenly crumbled in front of me. He was her father; he still had control over her.

“That bastard is creeping around here again, and I don’t think I can handle it,” she said. “I’ve spent too much of my life trying to find the strength to stand up to him.”

She buried her face in her knees. Her blond hair streamed over her legs. “My first memory is him coming into my room and climbing into bed with me,” she said, her voice muffled. “And he never stopped. He broke into the house and climbed into the shower with me last week. It’s been going on for so long I don’t know what to do.”

We talked for hours. Actually, she mostly talked. I just listened. She didn’t need any advice; she simply needed to tell someone about all the times he would wake her in the middle of the night, trying to touch her and fuck her. Often people make the mistake of thinking that when others open up to them, they are looking for advice. But actually, they’ve heard the same advice hundreds of times and never acted on it. Logically, they know the advice is right, but emotionally they can’t tear themselves away from their set patterns. And emotions always overpower thoughts. So I let Vanessa talk, and watched as the anger, confusion, and impotence slowly settled in her, so that she could go to sleep that night.

Worst of all, she had told Jack about it. And what did Jack do? The same thing he had done when I told him about my rape: nothing. It pissed me off so much: he loved Vanessa as much as I did. How could he not stand up for her?

“I swear to God I can’t believe my family is betraying me,” she said. “I just want to get my life back.”

I felt so helpless listening to her. I had never gone to the police to report my rape because it would just have been my word against his; but I told Vanessa we could go together. However, she said she just wasn’t ready to face the shame of everyone knowing. Before I left, she promised to confront her father and put a stop to it. I hugged her until we both couldn’t cry anymore.

The next day she was dead.

What made it so hard was that I felt I hadn’t been there for Vanessa. As soon as I saw her hanging from the shower, I realized that I should have stayed with her. But, strangely, I didn’t cry. Even though I was freaking out on the inside, I stayed calm, just like my father would have, while Sharon returned with the knife to cut her down. My father had always described his mental state during shootouts as extremely crisp and lucid, as if everything were moving in slow motion. And that’s how it was for me.

Sharon ran around like a psycho while I kept telling her, “Cut her down!”

When Sharon finally did, Vanessa came toppling down on me with a loud hissing sound, like air escaping. I thought that maybe she had just breathed, maybe I could save her. I slid out from under her and laid her on the bathroom floor. Her tongue was hanging out and there was foam all over her face. Her skin began breaking out in purple, blotchy patches before my eyes.

I wiped the foam from around her mouth with toilet paper, which kept flaking off and leaving white pieces of tissue all over her face. I tried to place her tongue in a normal position as I bent over her mouth. Sharon just stood there, with her own mouth hanging open. Over the music, I could hear Frou Frou still barking outside. She was panicking too.

“Jesus, call 911 or something!” I shouted at Sharon.

I had never actually performed CPR, but in an emergency situation, it’s amazing how you just automatically know what to do. I pinched her nose and breathed into her mouth, then leaned over her chest with my full body weight and pumped it with my hands clasped over her heart. When Sharon returned, I told her to rub Vanessa’s arms and legs to get her circulation going. I’m sure this all would have been very helpful if it hadn’t already been far too late.

When the police and paramedics arrived, they pronounced her dead after five minutes.

“It’s really strange,” one of the paramedics told me. “Because she doesn’t look dead.”

I looked at Vanessa, and the color had returned to her skin. The purple blotches had even started to fade back to flesh. Only a pooling of blood that had settled and flattened out the skin of her back along the floor betrayed the reality of the situation. “Well,” I told him, “that’s because we’ve been rubbing her for the last ten minutes trying to get her circulation going.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “You two worked her blood back to the surface.”

Sharon and I waited there while they called Preacher, who arrived with Jack. He told the police that she had been doing a lot of drugs lately and had lost her mind. Instantly, a light went off in my head. That motherfucker. After all Vanessa had been through, she wasn’t the type of person to just give up like this. What clinched it was when Preacher told the police that he didn’t want a drug test or even an autopsy.

I imagined him and Vanessa arguing, and her threatening to go to the cops. I looked at his hairy-knuckled hands and thought about how easy it must have been for him to strangle her; how cold-blooded he must have been to hang his own daughter afterward to fake a suicide. But I just stood there silently, wishing I had the guts to say something. That guy intimidated the fuck out of me.

Two days later, her mother, Sadie, flew in from Michigan for her funeral. I stood there, watching everyone weep for her, but I still couldn’t bring myself to shed a tear. She had suffered for so many years, and no one had ever cared or helped in any way. And now, when it was too late to do anything, they were putting on this great show of love and remorse. It seemed so hypocritical. But, more than that, it seemed eerily familiar, and I realized that my life would probably also end with everyone caring too much too late.

I wanted to stay strong. If I lost it over Vanessa, I felt like I would unravel entirely from all the things I had never dealt with: the death of my mother, leaving my father, Preacher raping me, and my anger at Jack for doing nothing about his uncle. So I just kept everything pent up inside, like I always did. It was such a terrible end to her hard life. And she was such a great girl inside that it didn’t seem fair. At best, she was better off, because she didn’t have to live in the same world as her father anymore. Since then, not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought of Vanessa and the look on her face when I last saw her.

The next day, I sat in Vanessa’s bedroom with her mother, going through Vanessa’s possessions. There were so many little things that I wanted to keep as reminders of her friendship and beauty. But her mom, who had never been there for her before, took everything. All she left me with was a little antique sake set, which I keep in my bedroom to this day.

Afterward, I discussed Vanessa’s death with some of the women around the tattoo shop, most of whom had heard stories about Preacher molesting girls.

“Somebody needs to do something about it,” they kept saying.

Even though they had no idea what had happened on the boat, I felt like they were talking to me. But, after all my character-building in the strip club, after all I had learned about the world and myself, I realized that I was still a little girl. I just didn’t have the strength.