Out of Aces by Stephanie Guerra

frowned and said, “Stop!” so I rolled down the window and watched the 5:00 a.m. crew instead: homeless people, tired partiers straggling home, and the occasional tourist who had just woken up from a Rip Van Winkle spell and realized he’d been gambling for a hundred y ears.
    “Told you it was close,” said April, as she swung into a gravel lot in front of a dirty white building. At the door, a big British flag rolled in the wind. We parked and headed inside. It was surprisingly crowded for five in the morning. I’d gotten pretty good at telling locals from tourists, and this spot seemed pure locals, mostly bar staff who’d just gotten off work, like us. We each got a pint of Guinness and settled down on a couple of stools to wait for the others. I had the strangest feeling that I was on the wrong side of the bar. The bartender, a ponytailed girl with a filthy apron, mixed up a drink and I kept mentally critiquing her. Less grenadine. Don’t shake so hard.
    “I still can’t believe you have brown hair,” I said, with a sideways glance at A pril.
    She touched it self-consciously. “Do you think it’s u gly?”
    “What? No! Actually, I like it better,” I said. “It’s more real. How’d you get into being Marilyn, any way?”
    “It was my ex-husband’s idea.” April wiped some foam off her Guinness and wrinkled her nose. “He was great at coming up with ways for me to make money while he sat around and did noth ing.”
    “He sounds like a real prize.” I looked at her curiously. “How’d you hook up with a guy like t hat?”
    “It’s a long st ory.”
    I shrugged. “We have t ime.”
    “Here’s the short version. Idiot girl falls in love with a loser and gets married at eighteen. He cheats on her and she finally leaves him. The end.”
    “You got married at eight een ?”
    “Shut your jaw,” she said irritably. “I said it was a mist ake.”
    “How old are you now?”
    “Almost twenty-two.” She slurped her Guin ness.
    “That was the really short version,” I said. “Give me a little longer version.” I was enjoying myself. April reminded me of my friend Missy back in Seattle: tough and ho nest.
    She rolled her eyes a little. “All right. The longer version. We grew up in Bakersfield.” She held up a hand. “Don’t say it. I know it’s a pit. We got married right out of high school, and we were doing property management for this shady apartment complex. Then our friend Tom went to Vegas and started parking cars at Harrah’s, and he was always bragging about how you can make cash in Vegas by opening your pockets and just letting it fall in. So we moved here. But Bobby couldn’t get work. I was so dumb, I actually believed he was trying.” She went quiet for a moment. “Anyway, we were out of cash, so I started dancing. It was easy money. But I hated it. So many perve rts.”
    “Dancing?” I echoed stup idly.
    “Don’t be a jerk,” she said with a sharp look.
    It slowly dawned on me what she meant. “I’m not! I mean, that’s cool. A lot of girls do it.” I sipped on my Guinness and tried to act as if I had these kinds of conversations all the time.
    “Anyway, Bobby wanted me to keep working, but I couldn’t. I kept calling in sick. Then I punched this one guy who was . . . doing something inappropriate, and they fired me. So Bobby said maybe I should try being a Marilyn impersonator, since everyone was always telling me I looked like her.” She laced her fingers around her glass. “I went to a talent agency, and they signed me up. I did gigs, like at hotel parties, where I’d walk around and take pictures with people. But then Nick came looking for somebody regular, and I took it.”
    “What was Bobby doing then? Had he found a job?” I a sked.
    She gave a funny smile. “No. He was cheating. I found out about a month after I started at Hush. She was totally disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s talk about you. What’s up with that girl? And