Part 2:
Behind her, up high, the only light the street light shining in the window, a sweet girl curled up tight, holding onto a young man who adored her. She didn't know about her antithesis. She only knew the comfort of a warm chest against her back, of legs curled into hers, of warm arms cradling her. Miles Davis grew, swelled and ebbed on the radio, drowning out the rain, the insistant buzz of the yellow light.
She didn't know, that her story had begun, like the old whore's, who was really in her mid-thirties. She only knew... it was ending differently. She knew only the rocking motions he made, as he soothed her, told her everything was OK, as he let her cry for the past, and hold him until she calmed down.
Not quite fifteen years ago, a prom queen left the midwest, carrying an old cardboard suitcase and a dirty ragdoll with patchy red yarn hair, and one button eye left. She was going to be an actress! Her name, Missy Lewis, would be in lights! Or perhaps, as her friend, Carrie had told her, the pen name she'd made up of her dog's name and street name, or of her state and a shape.
She'd decide on the bus, Missy thought. Or find it in the ragged copy of Vogue she'd gotten from a hair salon.
"Dakota Starr," she decided on. In three years, her young face peered up at older men from cheaply made videos, her eyes wide and innocent. Before then, she'd waited tables, serving bad coffee and runny eggs. Then a trucker took her home, ostensibly to give her some books and things...at that point, during her breaks at the truckstop, she read whatever she could find. College Girl, they called her, and she'd smiled.
She lost it, that night. In a shabby motel room. She'd awoken, late at night, and struggled into her now torn uniform and tiptoed out, carrying her little boots, and stifling her sobs, as he lay, snoring now that the deed was done...
But she didn't know...couldn't conceive of doing things different. When she'd started losing her beauty, having to pile on more makeup, when drugs, alcohol and chronic use of her body caused her to age faster, she'd gone deeper... from cheap soft core pornos, to hardcore, to clubs and bars, and all in between. Now she went from in-calls and "massages" to hooking. She hoped to be able to bartend one day. Her dreams of her name, "The Fabulous Dakota Starr!" in lights had diminished. No one knew the tiny, doll-like girl with wide Raggedy Ann shoe-button eyes and porcelain skin from the greasy used up, wrinkly woman whose eyes had narrowed and become flat like a shark's.
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