The crowd started clapping and Brittany pointed up at the stage. Her mouth fell open as the spotlight shone on a sister who was squatting with her back to the crowd. The girl was named Honey Dew, and dollars was being thrown up on the stage like mad. Honey Dew bent over and spread her butt cheeks and picked up a full bottle of Coke using just the muscles in her pussy.

“Oooh! Did you see that!” Brittany and everybody else was going crazy. “I gotta learn that move!”

“I don’t know if she’s giving lessons, but drink all you want.” I turned away from the scene on the stage. “Go on, Britt. Order another round. Whatever you want is yours tonight.”

I wished I could say the same thing about myself. I couldn’t get what I wanted if I tried. None of the men in Harlem were crazy enough to touch me. G would never cheat on me, and he played me so close I couldn’t cheat on him either. He allowed me go to college three days a week, but that was only to keep me from getting bored.

“A busy mind will keep the devil out of you,” he said. So I went to Fordham University in the Bronx and studied dance. My dance instructor said that although I had never taken classes before I was one of the best students she had ever seen. She said I moved my body like it was for sale, and in a way it was. G paid all the bills for me and Jimmy, even for Jimmy’s special doctors, and I gave up my life in return. Since he was letting me go to college I had wanted to enroll for a minor in political science. But G said that would only make me sound like one of those smart-mouth bitches who needed their tongues cut out. And whatever G said was exactly what went.

Even though I was in school, G liked to take me out with him to the club every night, just to show me off. He’d pick out my clothes and tell me how much makeup to put on, then march me around in front of his friends. “You a fine chick, Juicy. Pretty hair, caramel skin. You got the finest body I’ve ever seen. Don’t make me kill none of these motherfuckers over you.”