Free The Position by Izzy Mason Page B

hopefully. He put an arm around her shoulders and gazed slowly around the room, an amused half-smile on his face.  
    “Just for a week,” he assured her. “Para quitarte la pena. To get rid of the shame.”  
    Madison coming to Mexico City was Enzo’s idea. He knew what it was like to be desperate for money, and he had no patience for preciousness. Life is about sacrifice, he always told her. The world is indifferent, and no one owes you a thing. If there’s one thing you need to remember, he’d say, it’s that you make your own luck.  
    Madison looked around the room at the Mexican cowboys grabbing the strippers and licking their breasts, sometimes even biting them. Her hands went unconsciously to her own breasts in sympathy. She wondered how they would taste after being sampled by every slobbering, peanut-flecked mouth in the place. Howdy, stranger! Suck this lollipop and pass it on down! She stifled a shiver of disgust. This was not the kind of place where shame was taken away. Here shame shacked up in your bones and hung out for the rest of your life.  
    The woman on the stage called down to Enzo with a flirtatious wave. She pushed her tongue against her teeth and made porn star lips, the way most girls do privately in the bathroom mirror. Enzo blew the woman an effete kiss, and winked. It was stifling and airless, and Madison could feel her glasses sliding down her nose. She leaned into Enzo so that their shoulders pressed together. His body felt cool through his jacket, as if the suffocating heat of the place couldn’t reach him. Enzo was absolutely at home anywhere, from an embassy party to a seedy strip club. The world was his oyster.  
    Enzo was Madison’s best friend. He was a gay dancer from Cuba she’d met while spending a year in Mexico. She’d been studying Spanish at a private Mexico City high school that did a foreign exchange with her public school in Denver, and Enzo’s dance troupe once came to their auditorium to perform. Even though Enzo was two years older than Madison, they’d hit it off immediately. And because he’d already been in Mexico for two years, he drove her around to all the social hot spots where even minors could get a drink. Since then, his career had taken off, and he was now frequently cast in music videos, commercials, and as backup for famous Mexican pop stars.  
    He turned to look at Madison, his eyebrows raised expectantly. “Well?”  
    The stripper knelt down on the stage to let an old drunk man lick her thigh. Madison cringed and shook her head.  
    “I think I’d rather die.”  
    He just shrugged and laughed, though she knew he thought it was a mistake. How was a girl like Madison supposed to transform into a glamorous Gentleman’s Club dancer overnight? She couldn’t even turn a head in the street. Besides, everyone had to pay their dues. Start at the bottom, even if only for a week or two. After all, that’s what Enzo had done. But he didn’t chastise her. Instead he hooked his arm through hers and led her toward the exit.  
    “Okay, doll. I guess we’ll just go straight to the top.”

Chapter 2

    Money was something Madison had never really thought about. She wasn’t like some of the other girls in her high school who dreamed of marrying a millionaire, swooning over magazines of haute couture and jewelry. Madison was a bookworm. She spent her days reading in cafés, or meeting with equally brainy girls to talk about books. She was a diamond-in-the-rough type: tall and awkward, with wide blue eyes hidden behind oversized, unfashionable glasses. Her thick blond hair was shapeless and uncombed, and she always slouched about in tee shirts and baggy jeans. Madison didn’t ask for much, and she was more than happy with what she had. Until the day she woke up and discovered that she had nothing at all.  
    No one had ever expected her father, William, to be a good businessman. Money just wasn’t his strong suit. He was an English teacher, the