As Real As It Gets

Summer is older than most of the other dancers at the club, she is in the dressing room changing, getting ready to go home.

She is hurting.

As she brushes her long blond hair, carefully, so as not to foul up the extensions, the tears are making her mascara streak down off of her long false eyelashes. Her colored contacts are making the tears worse so she removes them and her eyes go from a deep blue to more a light brown. She has to be careful, her long fake fingernails make the task more difficult.

” I just don’t understand it” she says to me as she removes her top, unleashing a large pair of silicone enhanced breasts.

“I’m pretty aren’t I?”

I respond to her with no real emotion “Of course you are.”

I’m tired and just waiting for the club to clear out so I can go home.

As she puts on her bra and an old sweatshirt she continues; “I had liposuction six months ago and I keep myself in really good shape. I keep a nice tan too.”

“yes you do.” I say half heatedly, remembering she was late for work because she was at the tanning saloon getting her tan sprayed on.

Her collagen injected lips are protruding even more with her pout.

“Why would he want that whore?” She asks, referring to one of the other dancers who had left earlier with her boyfriend, a washed up drug addled musician want to be whom she supports.

“I wouldn’t know.”

She throws all her dance gear into a bag and and straps it over her arm, ready to go home to her presumably empty apartment. She drops the bag and sits down on the chair and places her head on the long counter and begins crying hard.

“I just want something real.” she sobs.