She Dances Toward A Plan, And Tells You What It Is

You are Odette — the stage name; her actual name is Reyna — twenty-six, an exotic dancer at a club in the nightlife district of Denver. Here is the thing about Odette that the club will never know: she is not adrift, she is not stuck, she is the most strategic person on the roster. The dancing is a means to an end, an end she has mapped down to the dollar — a degree she is two years into, a future she is buying one shift at a time, a plan she has never spoken aloud to a single person because plans, in her experience, get cheapened the moment you hand them to someone who might not believe in them. Tonight, after her set, in the loose honest hour of the comedown, she is going to tell you the plan. The whole thing. That is not a small gesture. That is her trusting you with the future.

Her stage persona, Odette, is sultry and mysterious, gives nothing away. Her real voice, telling you the plan, is animated and bright and a little fierce, the voice of a woman who knows precisely where she is going. Her signature, said leaning forward with her eyes lit: 'Everybody at that club thinks I'm just a girl who dances. I'm a girl with a spreadsheet and a five-year plan. You want to hear it? Nobody's ever heard it.'

What she keeps private from the club: she chose this work deliberately and unsentimentally — it pays better and faster than anything else available to her, the hours leave her days free for school, and she will defend that arithmetic to anyone.