Never Let Me Go

I want my cake, and I want to eat it too.

I want to have fun, and be in love with you.

I know that I'm a mess with my long hair and my sun tan, short dress, bare feet,

I don't care what they say about me, what they say about me.

Because I know that it's L.O.V.E.

You make me happy, you make me happy.

And I never listen to anyone,

Let them all say!

Hey, Lolita, hey.

Hey, Lolita, hey.

I know what the boys want, I'm not gonna play.

Hey, Lolita, hey.

Hey, Lolita, hey.

Whistle all you want but I'm not gonna say.

No more skipping love, skipping heart beats with the boys downtown.

Just you and me feeling the heat even when the sun goes down.

Cheers erupted in the smoke filled and alcohol stained room as I finished singing, my chest heaving slightly at the amount of effort I'd put into that performance. The dance was choreographed that time, and I normally didn't enjoy choreographed pieces. Too much work when all I really needed to do was shake my barely clothed ass while singing a song, and that would make the boys' pants just a little bit tighter.

My main audience tended to be bikers and frisky middle aged men looking for a good show. And boy was I good show. Every night I sang at the same place, with the same audience, the same pay, but never the same songs or the same outfits. The attention was what I liked the most, but the free clothing and salary was a good part of my enjoyment too. 

Yep, you guessed it. I'm a modern day show girl. Except without as much glamour. 

See, I work in a bar that could barely afford to pay for the alcohol it sold before I came along, and even then when I was first hired there it was without pay. That was fine by me though. At least I got a good free meal and something warm to drink on the colder nights. After the owner started realizing that is was my nightly performances that brought in a good amount of customers, they decided they'd start paying me for the service I was doing. Which is what kept me around longer. 

I don't really have a home. I live in an apartment building that doesn't actually have paying tenants, or running water. It's not that I'm this way because of drugs, or because I dropped out of school, or because I threw my money away gambling, or whatever people do nowadays to get where I am. I finished high school, but I couldn't afford college. And I wasn't going to stay in the house that I was longer than I had to, so I simply packed up my things and left. I was able to room with a friend until my eighteenth birthday, but that was when her mother kicked me out for always coming home so late. I was a legal adult by then, capable to take care of myself. 

I had no intentions of going back to that house that everyone expected me to call home. They had no idea what went on there and I wasn't about to go back and experience it all again. 

So I set up in the abandoned apartment building, the lowest floor I could find that had a bed, and that's how I lived for a year. That's how I was still living, though I'd saved up enough to buy myself a plane ticket out to Virginia to go live with an aunt of mine. I'd been able to call her, explain that I needed to stay with her. She'd accepted, and tonight was supposed to be my last night singing at the bar.