Anti-Work
 
This story is about you. It is about me. It is about us.
________________
“Holy fuckballs, Tiff. Have you seen what Ava just posted?”
I glanced up from my phone, where I’d been scrolling through the anti-work reddit for the past two hours. Looking up made my eyes hurt. My neck, too. I was tired as hell. “No. Where’d she post?”
“Tiktok.” My kid sister made it sound like I was some kind of idiot for not presuming as much. Twenty-goddamn-seven, and already I was beginning to appreciate how old people were always bitching about the constantly swirling miasma of social media. My dad still referred to every platform as MyFace like some twat from Atlanta calling every carbonated beverage Coke. He might have a point, though.
With strained patience, I indulged Emily and brought up Tiktok and invited the emperor of China into the kinds of dog rescue videos I was most likely to tap on. (And then tried not to think of my dad.) I’d put in twenty-two hours of the past forty-eight at Dr. Stanton’s office, so I hadn’t logged in since… Huh. I guess only like an hour ago when I got home and took a shit.
Yes, cute girls shit. I get paid to smile bright and endure whining and griping from Dr. Stanton’s patients. It’s a dentist office, so there’s loads of both, and some of it’s probably even justified.  Still, the absolute last thing in the universe I’ma do after I clock out for the day is put on a happy face to coddle people’s tender widdle feelings.
For a moment – sixteen moments, specifically – I allowed myself to be distracted by a tiktok of a gruff-looking dude who looked like he was about to rob a convenience store instead burst into a beautiful yet absurd rendition of “Sigue” that rivaled the original. Or maybe it was lip synced. I don’t know. Either way, sixteen seconds didn’t turn out to be enough time to find out how the girl in the convenience store sneering, then gaping, then giggling hysterically reacted to his stunt.
“What are you doing? That’s not it! It’s Ava, I told you!”
“Fuck a duck, Emily, I’m getting to it, god. What, are you gonna do a reaction post or something? Piss off.”
She did not piss off. Left with no choice, I guided the app to Ava’s stream. There wasn’t much there. Six posts, four of which were lame attempts at viral trends that had aged as well as Mr. Navarro’s gnarly, yellow teeth that I’d spent two hours cleaning this afternoon for my queenly rate of $19.45 an hour. The fifth post had been a thing she’d done with and for her six-year-old niece to earn some aunt points. The sixth was new.
“Ava quitz her job!!!!!!!!” read the title. Eight exclamation points. Ordinarily Ava used exclamation points to express rage, or once in a while, sarcastically. Even then, three max, and that only because two looked fucking dumb. Eight? I wouldn’t expect my gruff glam goth girl to use eight if she won the lottery, and they dropped her winnings in a mountain of pennies on her ex-boyfriend’s house, right after the slut he cheated on her with bit his dick off. Not that I didn’t empathize plenty with the title’s basic sentiment, but come on, Aves. Get a fucking grip before I have to officially sanction your ass with a third person alert.
I tapped. It played.
The camera opened on the face of a man in a white dress shirt with a red vest over it. Forty-ish, clean shaven, thick black rims on his glasses. He was already frowning, no doubt on account of the camera. The background noises of the restaurant, the Honey Badger Brewing Company, played in the background. It was a combination of crap conservative news stations, sportball matches, and of course the patrons, wedging shit in their teeth that I’d get to have stress dreams about picking out later tonight.
Ava’s voice cut in. It was hard to make their individual voices out over the din, but what I heard was, “Hi, Mr. Bergman!”
“Ava. Would you mind putting down your…” He gestured toward her phone.
“I would, actually. I’ve worked here for four years now, and I can’t do this for single ‘nother second. For four thirty-five an HOUR I’ve been coming in here to work for you. Getting screamed at by the Karenistas because you never staff enough servers. Wiping tables until my hands stink when I give customers their food because you won’t hire another busser. Fending off gropy assholes because you don’t give two shits if your regulars order ‘the Ava special’ for dessert. And I’m talking about you, Jack!” Her voice rose to a roar that silenced most of the background noise as she panned to show an overweight dude with a mullet, his face dripping with wing sauce as he looked around in a dopy panic.
“Now Ava, why don’t we go into my office and talk about–”
She gave Bergman no respite, whirling the camera back to him. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’ve let you treat me like shit for four years, and I’m done! I QUIT!” 
The word seemed to reverberate around the restaurant. It honestly gave me a tingle just watching it in the modest comfort of my childhood bedroom, a bedroom I longed to escape. And would have, if Dr. Stanton hadn’t given me a “$0 raise” this year, because “things are tight right now.” Not so tight he couldn’t take his wife and four kids to Hawaii last Christmas, and then to Cancun with just the Mrs. At least the second time he needed a full-time baby-sitter, so I only barely had to dip into my savings to pay for my student loans and credit cards on account of the office being closed for a week and change. “We love you like family, Tiffany,” he’d told me when I picked him and his stupid trophy wife up at the airport, right before paying me exactly the agreed upon amount, no tip.
I refocused on the video, though I seemed to have gotten the core message. Ava was in the midst of a lengthy diatribe about the Honey Badger’s many failings, to the horror of Bergman and his customers. A lot of it I’d heard before during gripe sessions, some of them in the alley behind Honey Badger’s when Ava hadn’t been able to wait to get off work to do some venting. I had not known that their signature house brew was, in fact, Miller High Life putting on airs with a touch of honey. 
“Ava, keep your voice!” her boss pleaded. Not that it would do any good. At that point, if Aves had started whispering, folks would have leaned in to hear it. “You quit, all right? Fine! Now just go!”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, or when and where to go, any more!” she snapped back. Someone hooted in admiration. “You can shove this job right up your ass, yeah? And while you’re at it, shove this up there!” Something flew at a flinching Bergman from behind the camera. Nametag? I paused, rewound, screenshotted, zoomed, my fingers as familiar with the button combo as my little brother was with his video games. Nametag, yep. 
“And this!” An apron followed suit, thwapping through the air like a boulder from a catapult. “And this!” A shoe! Holy shit, the bitch pelted his ass with a shoe! “And don’t forget this! Wouldn’t want you to be short-handed!” She missed with the second one, but that was fine. Hitting him with a shoe wasn’t what was great here. Throwing it was.
“Ava, we didn’t buy you those,” Bergman protested lamely.
I glanced up to where Emily was still studying my reaction in time to see a weird little sparkle in her eye. “What, Emily? Jesus dick-sucking Christ, you’re such a–”
“And THIS!” Ava roared. A white ball flew at the aghast Bergman. Fabric. He looked down, then up, then down, then up, then spun around to look anywhere but at Ava.
It was my turn to gape as the white wad drifted breezily to the restaurant floor off-camera. “Is… is that her shirt?!”
“I fucking told you, Tiffany!” my sister cackled in triumph. “Fucking nuts, right?”
Right over the top of her was a muffled Mr. Bergman. “And we definitely didn’t give you that! This is a public place, Ava! You can’t…!”
“Can’t what? Show off my tits? You were happy to let me when I was still your wage slave. Don’t like ‘em? Well good! Because as of now, they work for me!”
The camera pivoted to show Ava. It was mostly her face, but she was excited, not holding her phone very still, and sure enough viewers – currently over 11,000 viewers – were treated to glimpses of a sedate white bra. Nothing too sexy, aside from the pale, stacked chick inside it. “And that’s how you quit a job, boys and girls. I’m off to Jumping Jack’s to start making it mothafuckin’ rain, yo! Peace!”
With a blown kiss, the video ended.
“I told you,” Emily repeated.
“Cram it up your cram hole,” I barked as I shoved her out of my room. God, I needed my own place. Or maybe a rich boyfriend – with a serious illness and a desperation to tie the knot before it claims him.
I hit refresh and began my second watch. Over 12,000 views now.
________________
By the time I made myself stop rewatching the thing, it was well into six figures. Now I’m straight as an arrow, but I’d contributed to that sum as much as any horny dickhead we’d gone to high school with. Collectively, though, those guys helped. They were all over the comments, and where the clip had been shared and re-shared on facebook, insta, snapchat, and reddit. It was on twitter, too, but not Ava’s. She’d never gone for twitter. 
She should have, though. Sarcastically shockingly, those viral quitting videos gained even more steam when you found a way to sneak in a hot busty goth girl. The clipped version that was just Ava’s boobs bobbling around in her bra had triple the clicks the full video did. I’d never watched something – someone – go viral in real time before. It happened fast. It’s so easy to get blasé about a video getting a hundred million views – not that Ava was anywhere close to that, yet – but when you watched it snowball minute to minute, it was kind of insane. How many of those views were righteous anti-work crusaders, feeding off someone else living their dream? How many were guys, beating it to an amazing set of jugs? How many of them were guys we knew?
Now you’re probably thinking that I’m a shitheel for not calling one of my oldest friends to check up on her. But I did! Her phone went straight to voicemail, time after time, and pretty soon I felt dumb to keep trying. She probably had a ton of people calling her about it, for one, and was no doubt embarrassed as all hell for two. I mean, Ava Nedrick, a girl who spent all of high school wrapped in anything tight and black and bereft of mirth, taking her top off in a crowded restaurant, on camera. Worse still was that joke about Jumping Jack’s. It was a go-to comedic line among our friends, an eternal fallback plan for when life seemed too hard and we were ready to swap out our brains for our boobs. None of us would ever actually do it, of course, but most people watching that video, literally 99.9%, wouldn’t have any context for the joke. Shit, there was probably a line out the strip club door right now full of disappointed pricks. They didn’t know that Ava didn’t own a single shirt that even teased at showing cleavage. (She’d owned one yesterday, but the video suggested she’d left it on the floor of the Honey Badger Brewing Company.)
I fell asleep worrying about her. There was no shortage of entitled creeps in the world, and Ava was setting herself up for a blind date with every last one of them. I had dreams that night about it, even. Dreams where Ava was on stage, in that same stay-at-home bra, surrounded by a crowd of every jerk I’d ever met. They thrust wads of cash into her cups as she cried out, over and over, louder and louder, “I QUIT!” But that only made them reach for smaller and smaller bills until they were just whipping change at her, sometimes handfuls at a time. Suddenly, the music pulsing with that tuneless beat I’d come to recognize as my alarm sounding in the waking world, Ava’s face went blank, though her black eyeliner still clung to its rivers down her porcelain cheeks. Her eyes locked on mine, and suddenly she grinned her half-hearted grin and performed a tit-shaking shrug.
“Well, at least I’m not working.”
I woke up with a gasp.
That imagery stuck with me throughout my day. Not the boobs, though I’m sure that image was alive and well with plenty of others out there. No, I mean the casualness of it. The gross, sweaty wads of cash. Piles and piles of it. How eagerly they gave it up, even though she wasn’t doing a damn thing. No, she was actively trying to stop them. As I clocked out and shuffled back to my car, just in time to miss the sunset, I had to shake my head and marvel at the limitless power of huge boobs. 
Not that I’d know much about it firsthand. I’d gotten mostly A’s in school, A’s in my shirt. Ava had gotten by with her D’s. My parents had never liked that we were friends, but it took more than mild parental pressure to stop two same-aged girls living four houses apart on the same dead end street from becoming friends. She had her own place now, a shitty little apartment near downtown so she could walk to work because she could barely afford health insurance, much less a car. We hadn’t been hanging out much lately. I’d started working part time evening shifts, converting my own car into cash for people too tired from their own shitty jobs to drive to the restaurant themselves. It kept me on the brink of exhaustion pretty much all the time. Ten, maybe twelve more months (I couldn’t bring myself to call it a year) and I’d finally have enough to think about house-hunting.
I could have done the “normal” thing, found a guy, pooled income, squirt out his brats at nine month intervals until he got bored. It was too depressing, though. For one, I worked too much to date. On top of that, the thought that my happily ever after would really be an accomodation in order to not be homeless had kept me too bitter for it. No, I would get by on my own steam, and then, when I’d taken care of me, I could think about next steps. 
I just hadn’t thought it would take this long. Fucking capitalism.
On my way home, I ate dinner in my car by the quarry so I could at least see something pretty today even if I couldn’t interact with it. Then home to change out of my scrubs and four hours of slinging grub. I tried Ava again during slow times, but still no answer. Finally at ten o’clock, I decided fuck it and headed to her apartment. Her roommate could be kind of a cunt about having people over that late, but this was urgent.
“Tiffany? Hey!” She pulled me into the room and into a hug. I could smell weed and liquor on her breath. Moreover, I could feel that she’d definitely eschewed a bra today. When was the last time I’d seen Ava not wear a bra? 
Ugh – not like that. I meant… You know what I meant. Ava hated having her girls flop around. Then again, like I said, she also wasn’t ever one to show cleavage, yet here she was wearing her Black Souls Tatter t-shirt, except she’d taken a pair of scissors and given it a hell of a makeover. There were gashes all over, but most notably was a deep jagged triangle that went so far down that I was now two days in a row being exposed to the sight of my friend’s bra.
“Geez, you too? My eyes are up here, gurl.”
“I… Yeah, sorry. Did a shark attack you or something? What happened to your shirt?”
“Oh!” Ava giggled, then teetered back across the apartment to the sofa. She was un-fucking-steady all right. “Yeah, I figured, lean in right?”
“Lean? Hon, you can barely stand from the looks of things. What the heck is going on?”
“You saw the video?”
“Fuck yes I did!” I sat down opposite her. We high-fived. “That was so fucking bad-ass!”
“Yeah?” She grinned toothily. “It felt pretty good. Just had to get all that shit off my chest, you know?”
I waited for her to laugh at her pun, but nothing doing. I nudged. “Hey, speaking of… what was going on in that last part?”
“Huh? Oh hey, you want thumbsing to drink?”
“No thanks. Unlike some people, I got work in the morning. And you seem like you’ve had enough for two.” That didn’t stop her from pouring herself another whiskey shot from the bottle on her coffee table. The one that wasn’t already empty, that is. “But no, I meant… Fucking hell, Aves, you took your shirt off in the middle of a restaurant. And you recorded it. And uploaded it.”
That sent her into peals of giggles. I offered a hand to help her back upright when they finally subsided. “Oh man, that was fucking tits, wasn’t it? The look on Mr. Bergman’s face! Everybody’s faces. Same sons of bitches who’ve ogled them a million and a half times, but let me pull back the curtain and suddenly it’s unseemly. The fucking nerve, right?”
“Oh yeah, totally,” I muttered. “Is Jess home? I don’t want to piss her off.”
“She’s been in her room since the second she got home from work. I think she thinks I’m some unholy whore or something. Whatever. Fuck her.” She raised her voice to make sure anyone eavesdropping would overhear.
I let it drop. “So, yeah, what happens now? You got anything lined up? I hear internet fame doesn’t pay like most folks think.”
“Da’s right, homie, these titties are fucking famous!” She gave them a few hefts. “I haven’t checked my count in a while. I wonder what I’m up to? Making change, yo!”
Then Ava, my friend since second grade, reached into her sweatpants and pulled her cell phone out of her underwear. 
“Ew! Something wrong with your fucking pockets?”
“These shorts don’t have pockets.” She plucked at her hips. True. 
“So set it on the end table or something, god!”
Ava flicked her fingers at me, whatever that was supposed to communicate. “Plus, there’s a notification like every five seconds. It feels good.”
“TM fucking I, Aves! God, why don’t you tell me about your stinky fucking jock itch next?”
“Can’t have jock itch if you shave your pussy, Tiffany,” she pointed out.
This, too, was news. What the hell had–
Nope, this question ought to be an out loud one. “What the hell has gotten into you? Did you get bitten by a wereslut on your way to work yesterday or what?”
“Damn, babe, you’ve been here like two minutes and you’ve already asked me twice if I’ve gotten bit. Somebody want a little nibble? Yeah?” She began crawling toward me.
I gave her a laugh as I shoved her pack with a foot to the chest. “No thanks. I actually need my job, thanks.”
“Bah, no you don’t. Jobs suck. Work sucks. You’re too pretty to have to work so much.”
“Pff. Yeah, because pretty pays the bills. I’ll text the bank a bikini selfie. And make sure it’s one you’re in, so there’s actually something to see.”
“Famous titties, baby!”
I rolled my eyes and gave in to the call of the whiskey. Ava sidled up beside me and let me live the life of internet celebrity vicariously for a while. We scrolled through comments, even replied to a few fresh ones and fucked with them a little (one guy even scored a couple pictures of us, one where we posed like we were about to tongue kiss, and another flipping him off). Even the meta was kinda cool. There were all these threads of people debating whether or not her video violated X community standard on their forum. Shit got heated, all these folks caught between their hero worship of a first rate quitting video and their need to shame attractive young women for owning their sexuality. 
Then there were the DMs. Holy fuck, the DMs. “A hundred and forty dick pics and counting,” she reported. At first I thought she was being funny, but then… fuck. Evidently her number was way too easy to find on the internet. She made it a point to show me a few she liked. One because it was babydick tiny, one because the guy obviously had herpes, and one because it was fucking huge and she just liked looking at it. 
“Whoa, go back.”
“Tiffany likey the dicky?”
“No, Tiffany–” I stopped myself and simply snatched the phone from her. “What… Jesus, you replied?! Do you wanna get stuffed in someone’s trunk and get raped to death? Because this is how you get stuffed in someone’s trunk and get raped to death.”
Then I actually read the conversation, brief though it was.


Not too bad dood
Yeah? Plenty more where that came from
How many inches is Plenty lol
More than a quitter like you can handle. ;)
What I hear you saying is that’s as big as it gets
You want to see more, you gotta at least say please
Tell ya wut. I just lost my job, so you venmo me $50 and I’ll say it on my knees
Srsly?
You obvs saw the vid
Do I seem like someone who isn’t serious?
Kevin has sent you $50.69 for Don’t forget to say please.
Still with me?
Hello?
Fucking slut get fucked and go to hell
“Did you rip this jerk off, Aves?”
“Sure did. Can’t believe he didn’t still send the dick pic anyway. Most of them do.”
“Most…?! Ava, how many guys have you done this, too?”
She gave another one of those maddening apathetic shrugs. “I’unno. Two thirds of this month’s rent payment, so far. Ish.”
“Ava, you can’t do that. You could get in huge trouble!”
“Really?”
I actually didn’t know. It sure seemed like she could, though, and I didn’t feel like endorsing her behavior by backing down. “Of course you can!”
“Oh. Shit. Ah, well. I’ll think of something.”
It had been on the tip of my tongue, and I finally took the opportunity to probe. “Jumping Jack’s not hiring, huh?”
“That was a joke, Tiffany. God.” I heaved a sigh of relief as she elaborated. “You wouldn’t believe how many people took me seriously, though. Do you remember Carlos Navarro?”
I nodded. “Yeah, the only kid in middle school with a mustache.”
Ava giggled. “I guess he works there now? As a bartender, not a dancer, obviously. He messaged me tonight out of the blue, said that they’ve had people asking after me all last night and tonight. Said the crowd was almost double the usual. Nuts, yeah?”
“For all that boobage? I can’t believe it wasn’t triple.”
She bent down and smooched her exposed cleavage. “Right?”
“So what are you going to do? Another server gig? I mean, if you’re looking to cash in on those things, they’d probably beg you on their knees to work at LB2.” LB2 had once been a Hooters, but after some kind of falling out, the owner renamed the place but kept almost everything the same. What the acronym stood for was open to guesswork, though since it was a chicken wing joint with scantily clad servers, Legs and Breasts Too was the popular interpretation.
“Blech, that sounds like work. Can’t you let me have my ten minutes of coasting through life as an internet celebrity?”
I pursed my lips, though I made sure to hint at a smile. “I suppose, but keep those puppies under wraps, yeah? I try to think I’m cute, and then you come along and remind everybody I have the body of a twelve-year-old boy.”
“Could always take those savings and invest them in a top notch pair of your own, you know.”
“Right. My mom and dad would be totally cool letting me live there rent-free for another few years to pay off a boob job.” I’d given breast enhancement serious thought once upon a time, actually. Ava had helped talk me down. I’d always suspected she didn’t want to be outdone – not that I’d ever have gone as big as hers – but there was no proving it.
________________
Ava poured herself another shot, but halfway to her lips, it tumbled out of her hand and splashed onto carpet that had clearly seen this kind of treatment before. “Shit. You’re probably right, Tiffany. As usual. And I didn’t really ‘steal’ all that much from those creeps.”
“And they deserved it,” I assured her. “Maybe it won’t be so bad. You could probably make the same money in half the hours there.”
“You really think I should? I know we’ve joked about it forever, but… God. Actually doing it.”
“They let you wear more than just a bra, at least,” I kidded.
As she bent down to mop up the spill, she shook her head, maroon-dyed hair dragging through the whiskey. “I don’t know why I ever let you turn me on to all that anti-work crap,” she grumbled. “It was a lot more bearable when I never thought about how sucky it all is.”
“So don’t think about it.”
________________
Ava took the job at LB2. They weren’t even hiring, they said, and from his shitty attitude, she was sure he’d seen her viral stunt. (There was, I confess, a tiny part of me that felt a tiny bit good that she’d at least paid some price for that.) Right in the middle of her rejection, desperation kicked in. Creative but a little dumb as usual, Ava brought it up herself. 
You’re right, this was probably a dumb idea, she’d told me she’d told him. I was only thinking, I bet I could make killer tips in your uniform after everybody saw me, you know, in that tiktok. Two million clicks on some stupid video can give a girl a big head, you know? Like all those people would flock in here just to see me. Oh well. Thanks for talking with me.
They went nuts with it, doing all the word of mouth they could and then going to facebook to make sure every 18+ male with no significant other within twenty miles of the restaurant saw their ad. Ava put the bait in click bait. Ava and another of their hottest servers, smiling ear to ear in front of their signage. Pale as she was, it looked like the first time her skin had seen the light of day in years. As for the outfit, it was a pretty typical breastaurant uniform, and a little surprising the Hooters people never swooped in to sue the crap out of their erstwhile franchise. Booty shorts with a little butt cleavage, tight white halter top, leggings optional. The shorts were pink, not orange, and the shirts weren’t long enough to tuck into them, but otherwise, she looked like…
Well, as I told her, “You look like such a skank, Aves.”
It had been a while since we’d hung out. Mostly because I was busy, or at least, that’s why I didn’t reach out to her. Why she didn’t reach out to me, I didn’t know. That day, it was raining cats and dogs and she’d texted me pleading for a ride to work. I had to use my lunch break to do it. We don’t all wear capes, you know.
Ava’s cheeks turned crimson. “Shut up! God, everyone keeps telling me that. Like, literally everyone. Ever since the quitting video heard round the world, I have…”
“Fans?” I suggested.
“Ugh, I guess. An endless horde of creeps is what I was gonna say. How did I ever think that was cool? For like a day, I was this kick-ass job-quitting boss bitch, but now I’m just the chick with big tits who’ll pose on customer’s laps for an extra 10% on the tip.”
“You… do that?”
“They’re only giving me twenty hours. The money’s way better than Honey Badger’s by the hour, but it’s also less than half the hours. I’m actually making less now than I was before.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they have you in as much as they could? It’s like Red Lobster only serving those biscuits two days a week. That’s the thing people go in there for.”
“I’m not sure I feel great that you basically just said my tits are a cheesy biscuit. But it’s not that. At first, they had me working gangbusters. Only then, the other servers started getting pissed off. Too many customers requesting me specifically, and I guess they took out their anger at my lack of clones to fetch them wings on my coworkers’ tips.”
“So? Your coworkers don’t set the schedule.”
Ava looked out the window as we drove past our old high school, sighing despondently. “Yeah, but – brace yourself for irony overload – three of them quit because of it.”
“So… aren’t they short-handed now?”
“Yep. But the boss man said he’d lose even more if he didn’t scale back my hours. I dunno. He said once things calmed down, maybe they could do more. I told him I had rent to pay, but he said that’s not his problem.”
“So… what are you going to do? Get a second job?”
“I can’t handle a second job,” Ava muttered as she reclined her seat back. “Fuck my boss, fuck this uniform, fuck end-stage capitalism, and fuck me for spending six hours a day inundating myself with anti-work stories and propaganda. The only reason you don’t get a fuck you for all the anti-work crap you’re always sending my way is because you’re giving me a ride.”
Indulging self-pity was not my way. “Well you have to do something, Aves. You can’t be homeless, and you know Jess will lose her shit if you don’t pull your weight.”
“Yeah. Gotta do something.” That was all she said.
I glanced over as we hit a stoplight a few blocks later, and saw she was squeezing at her boobs, of all things. “Fuck, Aves, save it for work.”
She looked up, surprised, and forced her hands back into her lap. “Sorry. Ever since the video, it’s like, weirdly, I like them way better? I know it’s stupid. But it felt good, being internet famous for a day.”
I laughed as I remembered, “Oh shit, I forgot to tell you! Dr. Stanton asked if we were friends the other day. Like, out of the blue.”
“Why, is he hiring? Those scrubs looked comfy right about now.” She fidgeted unhappily in her micro booty shorts.
“No, I don’t know. I told him yeah, sort of, because I didn’t know what he was after, and he kinda made this wrinkly face. I dunno.”
“Will you ask if he’s hiring, then?”
I grimaced empathetically. “I know it sucks, babe. Something better will come along.”
“Smile, right?” she grumbled. “Easy to say when you have dental insurance.”
Oh fuck. Easy to forget the perks sometimes. Since in this shit country, not having your teeth rot out of your head is a “perk.” I almost patted her leg, then realized it was bare, much too bare, for touching. “Swing by the office tomorrow morning, before you have to sling wings. I can get you in. I know the cracks in the system. He’ll never even know.”
It got me a soft but hopeful smile. “Yeah? You won’t get in trouble?”
“It’ll be fine.”
________________
It was not fine. 
Apparently Dr. Stanton recognized Ava even with her shirt on. He gave her a cleaning, reminded her to brush more, and that was that. I made the paperwork disappear. Jane wouldn’t remember he’d ever treated her, and Dr. Stanton had always been hands off about the business end of things, so he’d just assume Ava paid. Except because of her moment in the spotlight, and my confession that yeah I know that internet chick you probably beat off to because your shitty trophy wife wouldn’t throw you a bone, he did ask Jane about it. It took the two of them about ten minutes to put two and two together. 
Dr. Stanton stood their glowering at me through his office window as I shuffled, sobbing, to my car.
My attempt at a cathartic moment, like Ava had gotten at Honey Badger’s, only made things worse. 
“Now I’ll grant, this might be the pot calling the kettle black,” Ava said, “but how is it you managed to take your pants off in the middle of getting fired again?”
“What! That was an outstanding diatribe against the evil of for-profit healthcare, a subject I would think you of all people given recent events would share my passion for, and in the moment, capping it off by telling him to kiss my ass felt right. OK?”
“But you still posted it. On like every social media. Including LinkedIn, apparently? Why do you even have a LinkedIn?”
“Oh god, mine barely shows my hip, and only for like a second. Dr. Stanton’s the only one who saw anything. Kinda wish I hadn’t worn a thong, though.”
The corners of Ava’s lips jerked back almost to her ears, and stayed there. “What?” I pressed.
“Oh shit. You don’t know. Uh…”
I watched as she tapped at her phone for a moment, and then handed it over to me. Someone had screenshotted it, me bending over, scrub pants down, ass up, my phone pointed over my shoulder to display the horrified face of Dr. Stanton. You could see my left hip and a teensy bit of the top of my butt at a weird angle, but it was pretty tame. Nowhere near as bad as Ava showing her bra to the world. 
“So?”
“Now swipe right.”
I swiped right. Someone had zoomed in on Dr. Stanton’s face, right around his eyes, and there, in shocking clarity, was the reflection of my almost naked ass and pussy in his glasses. “Holy… Goddamn perfect fucking iphone cameras!” I shook my head. “I’m sure most people didn’t catch that, though.”
“Keep swiping, sweetie.”
The next shot showed an even clearer image, this one in the glass over his diploma. The one after that on his practitioner’s license. Then on his undergrad diploma. Then on the window, though that one was far worse quality. Of course it also reminded me that the window had been wide open, and also showed a patient I recognized staring agape at my crotch shot.
Things happened pretty quickly for me after that. Ava helped me get so blind drunk I had to crash at her place that night. Apparently in the middle of the night I tried and failed to find the bathroom and stumbled into Jess’s room, sat down on the corner of her bed, and… Well, let’s just say I made an enemy. 
I got to learn a little about going viral myself. Not even half the clicks Ava had gotten, but enough that all of my social media accounts were flooded with the sort of pervs who zoom and enhance any picture that even has a chance of showing them an ass that doesn’t want to be seen. Aves and I stayed pretty close in dick pics, though. She had the edge, but she’d also gotten a head start on ruining her reputation.
The whole thing got enough attention that somehow I got fired from my side hustle, too. Didn’t take forty-eight hours, even. Just as well. My first shift after recovering from three days mired in abject depression, I got a delivery call for a box of Moon Pies. I used a little google fu on the delivery address. The little brother of some dickhead I’d gone on like three dates with in high school. I should have simply quit then and there, but I was afraid, so deliver them I did. He laughed as he took them from me, explaining that he’d had to put in the order seven times at seven different convenience stores before the delivery was assigned to me. It’s funny, he explained to my unblinking, unsmiling face, because I mooned someone. Get it?
I flipped him off. They fired me with a generic text two hours later. So hey, maybe it wasn’t my sudden rise in prominence in the community wank bank that got me canned, come to think of it.
My parents gave me the weekend for self-pity, and then I was told if I didn’t have a new job by the end of the week, I’d be out on my newly famous ass. Unlike Bergman, Dr. Stanton had apparently made the rounds airing his displeasure. There wasn’t a clinic in town who would return my calls. I finally found one two towns over that would, though they warned me up front that they were only looking for someone part time. They called the day before my interview to say the position had been filled; the woman on the other end of the call smugly added that someone of my “impressive assets” would surely find something. I called her a cunt. She hung up before I could.
So, there went all utility out of a degree that I’d spent four years and twenty-eight thousand dollars on. More, with interest. I had no idea what to do. No. I knew what I wanted to do, and it was nothing. The worst portion of my life, propped up by a system that made living impossible if you didn’t embrace it. For days, I did nothing but lie in bed scrolling through anti-work posts in grungy underwear and trying in vain to convince myself that I had more urgent affairs than idly masturbating. Not about anyone, really. Just imagining myself on a beach somewhere, with the sun and the sand and the sound of the ocean washing away years of built-up stress. And if anyone cared to watch, who the fuck cared. I had on sunglasses, my eyes were closed, and you can’t dick pic a girl who can’t hide a cell phone in her bikini.
Following Ava’s poor example yet again, I was a little drunk or a little high almost all the time. I’m not proud of it. In fact, it caused me more than a little shame. The capstone, I suppose, was when I was on my hands and knees trying to extract my vibrator from where it had fallen under my bed after one of the previous night’s random several wake-up-and-come moments. I don’t know how long my dad was behind me, but I do know I was buck-ass naked, and that his misinterpretation was that I was actually down there using the thing, not merely retrieving it. As unobstructed a view of my pussy as he had, I have no idea how he made the mistake, but he insisted the door had been ajar and he’d said my name twice before stepping in. I’d had my earbuds in, listening to another kick-ass quit vid. 
And some porn. The two weirdly went together. Don’t judge.
Speaking of judging, I was told I needed to find a new place, ASAP. Nothing to do with my dad walking in on me going to town on Miss Kitty, he insisted. No, I was old enough, and it was time “to get my act together.” Like getting my associate’s, holding the same job for six years, and working a second to supplement were the behavior of some free-loading hedonist. One stupid mistake, and every bridge was burned behind me.
Luckily…
“We could be roommates,” Ava suggested. “Jess kicked me out when I was short this month. Again.”
“That’s not much of a ringing endorsement for your roomie application, you know.”
“Yeah, well, who else you gonna turn to.”
Harsh but fair. Ava had never been my best friend. We’d stayed close, mostly because we lived close, but I don’t think either of us would have ever considered living together. Still, after baring my ass to the world, my other friends had ghosted me hard. My chick friends, anyway. My guy friends were behind at least a couple of the samples in my dick pic favs folder, I suspected. 
“I don’t have a job.” So long as we were giving one another reasons not to do this.
“I could talk to my manager, Mr. Nicolidis.”
I scoffed. “You have got to be kidding.”
“What, so you’re too good to do what I do? I’m not saying make a career of it, Tiffany, fuck. But it’s quick, easy money, and you’ve got the bod for it.”
“LB2 makes those shirts in a boy’s medium?”
“Come on. You don’t have to have big boobs. Plenty of wakes to make horny randos tip well. I’ll show you the ropes.”
“Your rope is having big boobs.”
Ava folded her arms, waited for me to stop sulking. 
Three days later, we’d moved into our new pad, a month-to-month studio. Neither of us owned enough furniture for more than that. Aves took the bed, I got the couch, and we promised ourselves this would be temporary. Unless we’d have to do more work to get out of it. We’d both of us rather stay there forever than bust our asses for LB2.
Not that I was busting my ass so much as constantly stepping fast to keep it out of enemy hands. Mr. Nicolidis, a man with a thick Greek accent and ear hair that looked older than either of us, had not wanted to hire me. His disdainful appraisal of my modest chesticles told me exactly why. A total lack of experience in food service didn’t help, nor did my connection to his least popular staff member, nor my appearance in a viral quitting video.
“I really think I could do well for you here, sir,” I’d pleaded during that interview, literally batting my eyelashes.
“Yeah, maybe she’s not stacked out to there, but look at her. Tiffany is like dangerously pretty. Guys won’t even look at her chest,” insisted Ava, who’d somehow been allowed to tag along.
His eyes on my chest seemed a poignant counterargument, but it at least told me how to impress him. I stood up, lifted my shirt and jacket so his view of the back of my leggings was unobstructed. “See? I may not fill out the top as well as Ava, but I could work wonders with those shorts. If you have a pair tight enough for me. Sir.”
Mr. Nicolidis’s look had been pure skepticism, but then he’d told me to turn around again, and we knew we had him. I’d been started as a hostess, which meant no tips and lots of sweeping and mopping and wiping down tables. I heard all too plainly when some douche in a suit asked Mr. Nicolidis in a thick Southern accent, “How’s come you got your purtiest one washing tables? Piece like that ought to be serving me, not candy dancing around with a rag and bucket, Nicolidis.”
I’d never been so elated to be called purty. Or a candy dancer. Or a piece. I didn’t know if the guy was a friend of the boss’s, someone rich and/or prominent, or simply had convinced Nicolidis my ass was worth the extra training. Whatever it was, he started me waitressing on my next shift.
Ava indeed showed me the ropes, though my official trainer was this cunt named Becca. Her muffin top was an embarrassment to an already humiliating uniform, though I mostly hated her because she repeatedly called me Tiny Tiff, even after I asked her not to. Worse, everyone immediately picked up that it wasn’t a reference to my height or my waistline, but the usual line of attack I’d been putting up with since middle school. Becca was one of the big stars of mine and Ava’s anti-work video diary. 
If Becca showed me what to do, it was Ava who told me how to do it. How to smile, how to flirt without being too fake about it, how to find excuses to show off my ass. There was this high shelf over the window to the kitchen that probably made me a hundred bucks a week from guys who busted a nut under the table watching me stretch up on my tippy-toes to reach for this or that. Showcasing my shortness didn’t help with the Tiny Tiff nickname, which had spread to the rest of the staff, though.
Funnily, Ava was horrible about taking her own advice. When Mr. Nicolidis scheduled us together, I don’t think I ever saw her smile or flirt or show off her assets. They were just huge, buoyant, impossible to miss, and if I’m being honest, I think customers sort of thought she was faking her bad attitude. She kept to her goth vibe, to the extent she could in neon pink shorts. But with black lipstick, her hair in its dark red dye (an obvious fake shade), gobs of eyeliner in the same dark red shade, and a terminal case of resting bitch face… It was like a dunk tank at a carnival, egged on to throw a few more balls. Guys acted like it was a game, and they always won.
“I think I want to get a tattoo,” Ava said one day in the break room. I was eating a sandwich from home. Even with the employee discount, I couldn’t afford to eat LB2’s food. Thanks to the bloviated, out-of-control real estate market, even my share of the rent on our double occupancy studio was eating into my savings, slowly but inexorably. Ava, on the other hand, was doubling my tips most shifts, and after several months, was entertaining herself imagining she could spend it on something to enjoy life. Fucking capitalism, stretching you out on the rack to earn a buck, then inviting you to pay it right back for admission to see somebody else’s turn.
“No tattoos,” Mr. Nicolidis said behind us. I jumped. We hadn’t even known he was there.
“I didn’t say where,” Ava snapped irritably.
“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure you can’t tell your employees what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.” I blushed before the words were even out of my mouth. When I’d asked him last week if I could please pick up more hours, Mr. Nicolidis had told me my body needed to go down one size in shorts if it wanted another shift. These fucking things somehow lived and thrived even inside the inhospitably dark, damp environment of my slit.
“Oh? I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you, so yeah, let’s do it now. Because I thought employees can’t talk back to their bosses after the boss find out they’ve been running a little youtubetok video website where they bitch about their jobs in their underwear.” He smirked. “You didn’t think I knew about that, did you. Yes, I may not be raised by the facebook, but I know how the interwebs work, girls.”
We both froze. He’d seen that? Holy shit. For months now, we’d been doing daily posts about our bullshit job. The underwear comment was uncharitable. We usually dressed merely cute, not full-on lingerie mode. If we wanted to hang onto our followers, it was an irksome necessity. Besides, degrading ourselves at LB2 twenty-some hours a week made degrading ourselves on instagram a lot less unsavory.
“We’re just blowing off steam, sir,” I said quickly. He liked to be called sir, all right. I did it almost by reflex now. This man’s opinion of me had become too core to my financial well-being. “We don’t mean anything by it, and we never mention the restaurant by name. Not even the town.”
“You two are internet famous! Look me in the eyes, tell me you don’t have your little friends and families watching you do this. Well, maybe not family.” The contempt in his eyes as he looked us over was pretty profound for the sonofabitch who’d forced us to wear these tiny, slutty outfits.
“They don’t,” Ava said forcefully. This was true. We didn’t really have friends any more. My hopes to make some at work had been squelched by my affiliation with the surly goth, even if Becca hadn’t made sure that the one time I’d muttered Rather be tiny than fat and veiny not quite under my breath enough. And yes, obviously our families didn’t know about the site. My parents were actively hostile to my anti-work sentiments, for one, and besides, I didn’t want them watching me strutting around demonstrating just how uncomfortable and humiliating my work uniform was. The people who got it, were getting it.
“Oh? You have so many followers, I saw. How would you know?” Mr. Nicolidis shook his head, ear hair bouncing side to side. “This is what I get for taking risk on you girls? To be made fun of on online? I think it is time I fix my mistake for ever hiring you two.”
Before Ava could say something to make it worse, I bounced out of my seat and hurried over to him, hands clasped behind my back. My boobs might be practically nonexistent, but I’d use them how and when I could. If I had to, that is. “We’re really sorry, sir. Both of us. Right, Ava? We didn’t think anybody would watch, and then they did, and we got carried away. I don’t know, maybe we get so used to all the attention here at work that we needed some at home. Right, Ava?”
The second time, she muttered something that sounded at least halfway penitent. I smiled, eyes wide and hopeful and vulnerable. Sometimes the face made them forget the chest. “We won’t let it happen again. We promise. When we get home tonight, our insta goes dark.” I saw that was already past his jargon threshold and clarified, “That means we’ll shut down the website. OK? Please don’t fire us.”
He looked back and forth between us long enough that Ava finally uttered an audible “I’m sorry” of her own. Finally, right as I was growing mad my uniform was too tight to let me carry my phone for another quitting video, Mr. Nicolidis gave us an ultimatum.
“What?! No way am I doing that! No. Fucking. Way! I’ll quit before I do that.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her back, trying not to imagine Mr. Nicolidis’ victorious smirk at his “compromise.” “Ava. Look. You don’t have another job. You might not be able to get one. Not easily. Definitely not one you can live off of part-time, especially now that we’re losing our ad revenue from the anti-work vids.”
From the smolder in her eyes, it was obvious Mr. Nicolidis was making his enjoyment of my assessment of our vulnerability known behind me. I told myself my efforts to resolve this would best be handled ass-first, and kept my eyes on Ava. “Please. If I lose this job, I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do. Come on. Please.”
“Did you hear what that fucker said?!”
“For me, Aves? Please?”
“Can she do it?” Ava asked around me.
“You both want to work here, yes? So then it sounds fair to me, you both do it.”
“Deal,” Ava agreed immediately, smirking at my look of horror.
________________
“I still don’t know why you had to drag me into it,” I managed between gritted teeth as the tattoo artist inked my lower back.
“Why should I be the only one? I was the one who stuck my neck out to get you that job in the first place,” retorted Ava from her table nearby. The tattoo guy, “Spice,” he asked to be called, had already finished hers. I was secretly dying to see it again. Our anti-work followers were going to lose their minds when we found a way to tell them about this latest line of capitalist barbarism. Right there across her chest, where every last cleavage-enhancing top she owned would showcase it, the cartoony block letters of the LB2 logo. (So, basically all of her tops now.) 
That same logo was as we speak being put on me for the third time, right above the crack of my ass. I’d done it right above my low-riding uniform line on my left hip, but Ava had insisted it was too small, so I’d done the right hip, too. The buxom goth had followed my example. Mr. Nicolidis had said they were way too small, or how did he put it?
“A customer would have to be halfway to tasting you before they would be able to read it!” Fucking gross. We had to find a new way to air our valid grievances again.
Anyway, he’d given us one last chance. Ava had burned through her meager savings on the first two (which weren’t even that small, by the way, easily bigger than my thumb). Tonight we were depleting our anti-work account to rectify our shortsightedness. Ava had asked if we ought to consider using my personal savings to have the hip tats worked into something else, as if she were my wife and not my roommate. I’d thought of the same (for myself, anyway), but there would be such hell to pay if I did mine and not hers that it simply wasn’t worth it to me. Besides, in some way my disgraceful triplicate LB2 tattoos were badges of honor. Battle scars in the war on the degradation of twenty-first century labor.
I hissed in pain as Spice’s needle started a new spot. This guy exuded dangerous in at least five languages. The “parlor” wasn’t even a parlor, just some guy’s basement. And not Spice’s. But Ava had investigated, and this was the cheapest option she could find. Hopefully we’d get to pay with cash at the end, and not with our rapes and murders.
“How’re we doing back there?”
“Like I told you last time, almost fuckin’ done. Axe me again, and I’ll stop. Your ass nice, but it still a white ass, white-ass bitch.” My white-ass bitch-ass ass received a hard slap as a rebuke. Another one. I was wearing my work uniform, and it was getting awfully red under that pink.
We made it out without getting either raped or murdered. It was a cash business, though, so when we came up short, Ava and I best of three bear-ninja-cowboyed for who had to blow Spice in his friend’s grungy bathroom. Ava lost, so I got to hang out in the living room at what was surely a meth manufactory while she paid up.
The tattoos were a big hit, both with Mr. Nikolidis and the customers. Mine had accidentally been inked too low. Apparently my shorts had crept down while I’d adjusted my spot on the table. Anyway, my boss said he was fine with me adjusting my shorts to show it off. No doubt, since the only way to show it was to lower them until the top of my crack was showing. They kept creeping back up, though, so as yet another concession to necessity, the next time I tried to butter up Mr. Nikolidis for more shifts, I asked for the next size smaller. Then I learned that they didn’t make a next size smaller.
“What does Avery have, then? She’s even littler than I am!”
“Dignity, and a little extra room in her shorts,” he replied.
He made a special order, just for my ass. They were a special expense though, so he insisted if I was going to require a special uniform, he wanted me to sign a contract. I agreed, of course. What choice did I have? Not like quitting here and working triple the hours at another restaurant would be any less degrading. Just to my energy rather than my apparently depleted dignity. I doubted if the thing would stand up in court, frankly. It required next to nothing of him, and a hundred little things of me. Being on-call during all business hours. Goodbye social life. Locking in my hourly wage at the state minimum. It was by far the smaller portion of my wages next to tips, but it would hurt. Ceasing and desisting the already dissolved website. Still, now it was agreed to in writing. Absolving LB2 of any responsibility for my tattoos or any other “physical enhancements,” the latest veiled suggestion that I get my tits done. Mr. Nikolidis knew nothing about my financials, so I have no idea how he thought I’d afford one on my newly reduced salary.
And last but not least, I had to agree to perform “additional duties as assigned, including personal assistance outside the business premises.” I’d had to ask what it meant, and once he had explained, it was my only successful push-back on the whole wretched contract. Since I wouldn’t be getting tipped to clean his house, do his landscaping, or babysit his asshole son, my hourly rate for such tasks was to be $14/hour, more than twice my pay at the restaurant.
It was enough to get Ava to drop her complaints about the hip tattoos. Thank god, because if the girls at work had disliked us before, they fucking loathed us now. They all thought we were total suck-ups to Mr. Nicolidis, despite the fact that we were dyed in the wool anti-workers. Shit, Ava has so hard core that the first thing she did when she woke up was sneak off to the bathroom and rub one out (or two, or ten) while she caught up on the latest forum posts. We hadn’t yet been able to convince our landlord to replace the bathroom door that had been missing when we’d signed the lease, so it was less private than either of us would have liked. Further proof that landlords were one and all useless parasites whose only purpose on earth was to siphon wages away from the working class. The sheet we’d tacked up kept me from seeing her diddle herself too clearly, but there was no stopping the sounds. Not from her mouth, not from her lips.
(I’ll concede she was probably quieter about it in there than I was in the living room, though.)
When I’d signed the contract, I’d been relieved. The money working at Mr. Nikolidis’s house in the suburbs, plus my previous income waitressing, would mean I’d still have to give up my car, but I could trade it in for something used. Ava and I shopped around until we found a Subaru with barely over a hundred thousand miles on it. Unfortunately, what I hadn’t realized was that Mr. Nikolidis wasn’t upping my hours, just splitting them up between what were basically two totally different jobs.
It was gradual, but after three months, my hours were split 3:1 between my boss’s housework and doing the job I’d actually been hired to do. The work wasn’t hard, really. I cleaned, I did his laundry, I ran some errands (40 cents a mile wasn’t nothing), mowed his lawn, pulled weeds. That kind of shit. 
Did I love that he made me do it in my LB2 uniform? No. I did not. He insisted it was a labor regulation and he didn’t want our unconventional arrangement to land “either one of us” (i.e. him) in trouble. 
Did I love that he sometimes followed me around, or watched through the window, while I worked? No, I did not. Crawling around in his garden with most of my butt exposed was bad enough without his eyes on my skin.
Did I love the constant barrage of scorn his wife heaped on me? No. She usually wasn’t around when I was over, which couldn’t be coincidence. When she was, though, she made her displeasure with my work clear. Knit-picked every fault, always another chore needing doing when I was about to head home, and the dirtier the better. Mr. Nikolidis told her not to ride me so hard. That started a whole big argument in Greek that I somehow still followed well enough that when she thereafter spoke to me only through him, and only by telling him what “the slut” needed to do around the house that day, it didn’t catch me off guard.
Did I love that his sixteen-year-old son developed a crush on me in the first thirty seconds after we’d met? No. Antonio was way too old to need a babysitter in the first place, but his dad said he’d twice been caught “doing the alcohol” and needed supervision. The kid followed me everywhere, tried a hundred and one times to chat me up. One Saturday, while Ava was glowering at leering customers for triple the rate I was getting for being leered at by Antonio, he came up behind me while I was making him his lunch – egg salad sandwich, because fuck that little shit – he took a full hand grasp of my ass. I slapped him, also full handed, and told him if I saw him again for the rest of the day I’d do it twice more. He shuffled off, sullen, leaving me to the sandwich. Fuck.
When Mr. Nikolidis arrived home from work, I was ready to tell him what his son had done and explain why I couldn’t babysit any more, and demand he return me to waitressing or else. Little Antonio had been a busy little texter, however, and so my boss had already heard the tale of how he had “accidentally” “bumped into” me, and despite “apologizing” “profusely,” I’d “hit him and kicked him and threatened him.”
“That’s not how it happened at all!” I insisted. 
That was all I got out, though. My boss held up a hand, looking tired. As if he’d been enduring my excuses for far too long. “Save it. My wife, she thinks you do a bad job around here. Now my son, he says you abuse him. Personally, I think you do good work around here. I like having you. You don’t come cheap, no, but worth it to get things done the way I like.”
“Thank you, sir,” I gushed, already abandoning the high ground, exchanging righteous rage for effusive agreeability.
“Huh? No, Tiny Tiffany, I am trying to tell you that you do not have a job any more. I try to do right by you, but you leave me no choice.”
“I… What? What are you…?”
“You’re fired,” he said, not bothering to keep a small, smug smile from his lips.
My brain was racing. Not only was my phone charging on his kitchen counter where it was useless to record an attempt to spin this into quitting, but I also needed this job. Yes, I still had a decent chunk saved, but I was twenty-seven! They said you were supposed to have forty grand saved by the time you were my age, and I was down to less than a quarter of that and falling by the day! 
“Fired?! You can’t fire me! I need this job! I mean, I need my old job, my other job, the one you hired me for! But I can do this, too! Please, I’ll apologize, I won’t let it happen again, but you can’t…! I can’t…! Please, Mr. Nikolidis! I’ll do anything!” The expression was still there, and it did its insidious work making me more and more afraid as he maintained it. “Y-you can tattoo my ch-chest, like Ava! Would that help?”
He snorted “What chest? Tiny Tiffany, I do not think you know very much about advertising.”
“I’ll get them done! Then can I keep my job, sir?!”
Wait… what?! But the words were spoken, and to my horror, they worked.
________________
I had a lot of opportunity for reflection in the next few days, waiting for my appointment. Mostly thinking about how it took me offering to remake my body for my boss’s pleasure before he took an interest in my healthcare needs. Not much interest; I was still paying for everything. Still, he admitted it was a shame that this country didn’t have universal healthcare. 
I told myself that being flat-chested had actually bothered me for a long time. It had. I hadn’t been bullied very much, although some, but there were those humiliating moments where it no longer mattered how pretty I was above the neck when I had so little to admire below it. Pool and beach parties, locker rooms, dates… It happened, and it felt crappy.
I told myself that having bigger breasts wouldn’t be degrading. Was a nose job degrading? A little collagen in the lips, was that degrading? Getting your teeth cleaned? Hell no. Nothing wrong with having a doctor help you look the way you wanted to look. Never mind that it wasn’t the way I wanted to look. Mr. Nikolidis had gone with me to the doctor, and I’d let him decide on the final product. Taken his suggestion, technically, but whatever. I didn’t want to do it in the first place, so who cared if I got them shaped like this or that.
I told myself that at least I’d be back in the restaurant. Mr. Nikolidis had promised. Not in writing, like I’d hoped, but he looked me in the eye and promised. Sure, I hated the job in the first place, but at least his cheesy, sexist breastaurant meant money. This operation was going to transform me not only into some kind of busty wet dream, but also into a paycheck-to-paycheck laborer. In fact, once they healed and it was time to get the tattoo across my new jugs, I’d have to figure out if I wanted to put it on a credit card and go into debt, or see if Spice was still in business, and how he felt about dem white tittays.
Ultimately it didn’t matter what I told myself. This was end stage capitalism, and in it, workers were grist for the mill. All over this shit country, people were putting up with bullshit at their work. If there was one thing that got me through it, it was my comrades in anti-work commiseration.
The surgery came, the surgery went. It was a fucking hell of a thing, opening your eyes to find you can’t see your tummy for the first time. Or most of it. A hell of a thing, too, to have your male doctor watch you inspect them, ask you question after question about them. I could hardly believe it. They weren’t huge, like Ava’s, but they were big. Plus they were so goddamn perky. They hadn’t been this perky when there’d been nothing there for gravity to hold onto. They looked “good,” if you defined “good” as “the way guys want porn stars’ tits to look.” They just looked wrong. I told them that, to show them how unwelcome they were. They stayed anyway.
“Say, are you that same young woman who used to work for Dr. Stanton?” asked Dr. Crepin, the surgeon, during my checkup.
“I quit that job,” I replied tersely.
“Yeah, I thought you were! ‘Kiss my ass!’” He guffawed. “We’re old pals. He will get a kick out of hearing about this, I tell ya.”
“Yeah, you know that’s against the law, right? Talking about your patients to people? Like, I could sue you?”
“Relax, I was joking,” Dr. Crepin lied. Not that he needed to. The money it would take to hire a lawyer had been injected into my tits already.
Ava and I compared, I think mostly so I wouldn’t feel so weird about it. Even after the soreness faded (which wasn’t quickly enough when I burned through those pain meds in the first few days), I was never not aware of them. They threw off my whole sense of balance, and since I couldn’t afford new bras, the things jiggled non-stop. In the thin white cotton of my LB2 uniform, they were even more indecent.
Mr. Nikolidis wouldn’t even issue me a bigger shirt. Now the whole thing was this pathetic, inadequate joke. I was the only one who didn’t seem to find it funny.
It sure didn’t do anything to bridge the gaps at work. Especially not when I showed up with that second tattoo. (I didn’t wind up having to blow Spice, by the way.) (I was just showing my appreciation for his labor.) My first day back, Mr. Nikolidis joked in front of the whole breakroom that it may be time to retire the nickname “Tiny Tiff.”
“Tiff, more like Tits,” laughed Becca, far too casually. 
From then on, that was the nickname. Tiny Tits. Tits, just Tits, sometimes, when the speaker didn’t want to waste syllables on irony. Before long, some of the regulars took notice, and after that, it was a matter of time before one of them had the balls to try it. Just my luck, it was Chuck, well-known for his penchant for hundred percent tipping if you flirted even a little. Ava had “accidentally” brushed her boobs against his saggy, wrinkly jowls once while setting down his plate and he’d dropped fifty bucks on the table, and a wink on his way out to the car.
“Oh, you heard the girls calling me that, did you?” I warped my snarl into a smile for him.
“Because of the…?” He pointed to my boobs, like that was more subtle than saying the word “surgery.” 
“Yeah, I think some of them thought it was funny. I’m sure it’ll fade before long. I hope so anyway!” I laughed. Somehow, I laughed. Still, I’d at least suggested I viewed it as a negative, so he’d no longer have any excuse to–
“I don’t know, I think it suits you!” Chuck chuckled back at me. “You know, when I was your age, a woman would never do something like that. They’d call her a whore, you know. It was a very different time. But between you, me and the lamp, I think they look great. Almost as good as these wings!” He laughed again, like that had been a heart-warming anecdote that built to a moment of levity for a woman having a hard day, rather than an insinuation that I was a hooker, and then comparing the thousands of dollars of surgery I’d gotten to gratify male gazes everywhere to a plate of cheap frozen wings, fresh out of the microwave. With my tits as the losers.
God, working sucked.
“Well I’m glad you like them, Chuck. You let me know if you need anything else, all right?”
As I turned to leave, he swiveled his bloated old in his chair to face me. “Hold on, Miss Tits. Ha! I hope you don’t mind if I call you that, like your friends, there.”
Someday I will paint my epitaph in Becca’s pro-work ass-kissing blood! I thought. “What can I do for you, sweetie?” I said.
“Turn around for me, would you?”
I turned to face him, burning the time my dad had shown me how to fly a kite on the beach when I was a kid to summon a smile. It barely got me there. RIP, blissful childhood memory. “Yeah?”
“No, no, now turn around again,” he instructed.
I complied, peering around, trying to figure out what he wanted me to see. Everything looked normal enough. “Ooookay…”
“One more time.”
I pivoted, hands on hips. I caught myself just in time though, making my exasperated face match his playful smile. “Chuck, are you just trying to get me to pose for you?”
“Guilty! All righty, ‘Tits.’ Haha! I’ll let you get back to it before I get you in trouble.”
I got a $20 tip out of the old bastard. It was a generous trip by ordinary standards, just over a hundred percent, but all I could think of was Ava’s $50 for her glancing boob blow. When I complained to her about it back home that night while we stripped out of our uniforms to prep for the evening’s anti-work browsing, I could tell she remembered, too. My friend could be a smug fucking cunt sometimes.
There was an attempt to rechristen Ava as Ass, or Assa, or even Labia/Labya/Lavia. It didn’t take. Not that she didn’t have an ass on her, if you liked ‘em a little thicc, but it was still pretty lame as insult games went. Tiny Tiff had worked to show me I wasn’t liked and that they could go after my provably weak points with impunity. Tiny Tits worked to show me that I could never win. For Ava, there was no equivalent.
Not that I let her forget it. “It’s not fair. You were named after Hitler’s girlfriend and nobody says shit. I pour every cent I’ve saved up for a house I’ll now never own into my tits, and they still make fun of me. Or use it to objectify me. God I hate working!”
Ava kneaded my shoulders harder. Her pussy was leaking onto my butt again, but I kept quiet. Mine did the same when it was my turn for her back rub. Sort of gross, but at least it was our gross, in our home, our choice. Not some degrading drudgery for the benefit of a boss whose living room set cost more than my car. 
(My old car, that is. Obviously it cost way more than my new car. Otherwise it’d be like saying Mrs. Nikolidis’ designer wardrobe cost more than the bandanas I’d been using as shirts up until the surgery. The neighbors had given me these judgy looks when I’d gone outside with just a triangle hanging over my microboobage. No bandana in the world would fit over these newly weaponized tits, though. Joke was on the neighbors, though. Somebody put a bunch of those wide stretchy rubber bands for working out in the trash; I swiped them, and voila, could put off buying new shirts for my new chest until the fall! Take that, capitalism.)
“We’re still not making it,” I whimpered as she worked her elbow against a knot in my shoulder.
“Because that Eurotrash prick won’t give us shifts. We work harder than any girl there! But–”
“Well, we flirt harder. I can barely walk with these things.”
“Still. We make that sonofabitch more money than any other three girls on staff, and he’s still treating us like pariahs. He’s worse than your family.”
“Don’t remind me.” This was in reference to a recent incident in which my parents had finally reached out and asked if they could take me out to eat for my birthday. I’d barely talked to them since moving out, not even when Uncle Brian died unexpectedly right before Thanksgiving. I’d still be just a hostess then, and when I’d asked for the day off to go to the funeral, Mr. Nikolidis had laughed in my face. First you want more shifts, now you want less shifts. You want off? Fine. Maybe I find someone else to fill those other nights, too. 
I’d sent Aunt Joanie a card.
Anyway, as the day grew closer, one day there was a random knock on my door. It was Emily. She said she’d missed me, wanted to stop by and surprise me. My sister took one look at me in my pink thong (all my thongs were pink, to match my uniform) and my rubber band, LB2 branded on my hips, my ass, my swollen chest, and I could tell in an instant I’d lost her. She looked at me, saw a corporate sellout whose entire life had been taken over by some scuzzy McJob, and the light behind her eyes at seeing me died.
Maybe I should have worn pants to open the door.
Our birthdays were only eight days apart, and the plan had been to celebrate them together as usual. Whatever she reported back to Mom and Dad, it netted me a text from the latter saying that until I got my act together and figured my life out, they didn’t think it was a good idea for me to see Emily. A bad influence, her honor roll dental hygienist big sister.
So I drove over to their house with all my old laundry, the stuff that didn’t fit my new chest or accentuate my ass enough to satisfy the almighty branding demand of my following, and threw a big ugly tantrum. There was nothing else to call it. I hurled article after article of clothing at the house, all the while railing against the bougie wage slaves who lived there, who’d abandoned their eldest daughter to be cared for by the tender mercies of the LB2 chicken joint. 
Ava came with, filmed it for me. We agreed that I’d gotten carried away, especially ending by stripping off the clothes I’d worn on the ride over and throwing them at my dad when he came out to tell me to leave. “You bought ‘em, they’re yours!” I’d shrieked, holding my hands over my naked boobs. I gave them a lift. “Not these, though! These are all mine!” Ava and I agreed the rhetoric was solid, and posted it to my feed. 
I hadn’t been in uniform, so Mr. Nikolidis couldn’t complain. The police had, when they’d come to our apartment that night. They’d smelled the pot smoke, so Ava and I had been treated to a night in lock-up. We’d both missed a shift over it and gotten our asses chewed out. With court costs and fines, we were both of us underwater.
“We need to do something,” I insisted to Ava as I rolled onto my front. Yes, yes, I could massage that myself, but somehow we never really addressed it. Ava was sensitive to my aches and pains incurred on the job, and wanted to help relieve them. I did the same. She was a true comrade, that one.
“Like what? Where are we gonna work now? You don’t own any clothes, can’t afford any, and have your job inked all over you like a walking slutty billboard. I have the billboard problem, and also I literally can’t handle working more hours, or for less money. Yeah, LB2 blows, but every job we’re qualified for blows. Working blows.”
“So maybe we need to make our job blow less,” I said as she took my big new tits and oiled them up. Ugh, don’t get me started on the waste that is our massage oil budget. Ava and her brand name shit.
“OK, so how do we do that? Our boss hates me, he thinks you’re a joke, and everybody there is treated like somewhere between garbage and shit.”
I reached up and seized Ava’s giant rack to make the moment dramatic. “Yeah, so… what if we unionize?”
________________
So that’s how we got fired for good from LB2. I don’t know who ratted us out. We weren’t stupid enough to pitch to that fat cunt Becca, but we’d approached some of the less hostile girls surreptitiously. The next day, we both got fired via text. No cause given, just the words, “You are fired!” 
(It was the same text message for both of us. Ava and I didn’t even merit individual firings.)
Obviously we were in no position to take our firing lying down. (We were lying down, though, when we received the text. I interrupted my anti-work media consumption to read the text looking up at the ceiling between Ava’s thighs, and she set her phone down on the bed between mine and paused her generous labor to read hers. Was that ironic? I don’t know. Ava said she didn’t remember high school English enough to remember what irony was, when I asked her.) 
Anyway, we went down to LB2. It felt weird, being there fully dressed. “Fully dressed,” at least, by the new normal we’d been reduced to as cogs in the capitalist machinery of the breastaurant industry. I was in a bright yellow rubber band, stretched near to bursting by my augment assets, and pink shorts. (I know, I know, they’re the uniform, but I’d thrown all my clothes at my parents, and hadn’t seen the need to buy more since all I did was work and lounge around the apartment, where I obviously didn’t need clothes.) Ava was in her warrior’s regalia, black leggings and a black t-shirt that had once read Keep Out of Direct Sunlight. Both looked like they’d been caught by a lawn mower. Ava had been savage when she’d shredded all her clothes, not caring if it showed ass cheeks, nipples, pubes, whatever. “To control the shredding would be to try to bottle chaos,” she’d said, slicing a slit in the crotch of yet another pair of pants.
Anyway, she looked fearless. We’d stormed Mr. Nicolidis’s office, closing the door behind us, and calmly explained that we were good workers, had made him a lot of money bringing in regulars and putting up with their gropes and pinches, and squeezes, and pats, and slaps, the occasional lick. It was illegal to fire someone for trying to unionize, I added stoically, at which point Ava pointed out that nobody liked us enough to listen anyway.
“Shut up,” he intruded casually. I hated that it worked, but neither my prideful demeanor nor my desperate situation would pay to keep the internet working. If I couldn’t get my daily eight hours of anti-work media, I’d burn down the apartment building. And the restaurant. And my car. With the pieces of my body scattered equally between each.
Oh, right, he was talking. “I do not like the two of you. I think you know this. You are lazy, angry girls. You don’t smile when you smile. You are young, pretty, have good body. Why should you not smile? But on your, what, video site, you look happy. I see you in the parking lot after shift, happy. So I think it is this place that makes you unhappy. I take offense.”
“That’s not true!” I protested, trying not to laugh. This fuckwit thought working in his demeaning, exploitative, sexist relic of a business should make a woman happy? No wonder his wife was such a bitch. “And that website doesn’t ever mention this place specifically, and we hardly complain. It’s mostly just memes and pictures of us.” They were all anti-work memes, of course, and in our pictures we were usually doing a rendition of those memes in a quarter of the clothing. But still. It was a concession. We were contributing to the anti-work movement. Nothing could be allowed to stop that.
Ava, however, wasn’t letting the lie slide. “Of course we’re not happy when we’re working. That’s why it’s called work and not play. You want us to be happy, maybe double our pay. Give us health insurance. Regular schedules. No weird house-slave contracts. Then I’ll smile whenever, however you want.”
“This is how you ask for jobs back?” Mr. Nikolidis asked with a scoff. “Now, I think you may not even get a reference for next job.”
I fell to my knees, imagining that final utility of this job evaporating. “Please, sir. We have nothing. Nowhere to go. Our lives are  in your hands. Do you understand me? Ava and I are in your hands. Please.”
A creepy smile split his face, but he directed it to Ava, glowering at my side. “See, this one at least knows how to shut up, recognize when she is losing. I have many friends in this town, you know. Getting a job could be not so easy for you if I let other owners know about you. Show respect, though, like your friend, and maybe I could make good things happen for you.”
“That’s the vaguest, bullshittiest offer of help I’ve ever heard. Fuck you.”
“Ava!” I hissed, whispering, pointless though it was. “Rent is due in eight days, and unless you’ve been turning tricks in the living room when I’m in the bathroom, you can’t pay it. We can be culture warriors tomorrow. Swallow your fucking pride for two minutes!”
Mr. Nikolidis watched her with amusement, plainly delighted to have split my loyalty so easily. “Well? Are you going to listen to Tiny Tits, there, or do you want to make angry faces until I have you escorted out?”
Part of me wondered who would be doing the escorting for him. Not like we had private security or something. I guess one of the cooks? I didn’t want to think they’d obey such an order. Those guys were the only people here who’d ever been cool to us, even a little. It was only because they wanted to fuck us. More than one of them had told us as much, so we made sure to never fuck those assholes.
After a tense moment, Ava took a step forward, and right when I thought she might slap the bastard… she dropped to her knees beside me.
“This isn’t right,” she mumbled.
“Sta arxidia mou,” he laughed. We shared a look of puzzlement. “It means, ‘I’m writing it on my balls.’ It means I don’t care. Now listen here. You two, you know how to use pretty face.” He nodded to me, “Pretty body.” He nodded to Ava. “You are very pretty. I think you are mean little girls, but customers, they like you, so you at least know how to act like nice little girls.”
“Genuine niceness costs extra,” Ava grumbled.
He didn’t stop to listen to her. “But lazy. Both of you, so lazy. I have heard you in the breakroom, on your video sites, with the other girls. ‘Oh, working is so bad, I hate working, boohoo, wish I didn’t have to work so much.’ Well I might have a job for you with my friend.”
“Thank you, sir, oh thank you. We’ll do such a–”
He held up a hand, and I choked down the words I’d barely been able to make myself vomit up. “Hold on. I offer to do for you. What will you do for me?”
“Um, please…?” I ventured. Fucking capitalism! Of course he wouldn’t simply do something nice for his employees, or ex-employees in our cases, for free.
“Heh. We have a saying back home.” He uttered something incomprehensible in Greek. “It means, ‘put please’s in one hand, shit in the other. Then see which hand fills first.’”
“Nasty,” I said.
“Look how much culture we’re picking up today, Tiff. What an ancient and fascinating people the Greek must be,” said Ava.
“I want to see titties,” Mr. Nikolidis said simply.
“No,” the two of us answered in unison. We turned and shared a confident smile.
“Yes? A shame, because with all these bills, these rents, it sounds like you will be needing to do more than show titties pretty soon. But so be it. Go now.”
He didn’t know we’d done a lot more for a lot less, but both of us knew that whoring ourselves out was a last resort. Our sexuality was one pleasure capitalism had not quite yet fully ruined. Our bodies were temples of anti-work. We didn’t enjoy the thought of using them for corrupt ends like this.
But I didn’t like the thought of tit-fucking my landlord, either. 
I rolled down the rubber band.
“Tiff!” Ava gave me a pleading look.
“End stage capitalism requires sacrifices in exchange for subsistence. I don’t like it,” I said as my former boss licked his lips in the most predatory way I’d ever seen someone do that, “but I don’t have a choice. We need his help. If you wanna blow Harris for your share of the rent, fine, but good luck selling that deal to the gas company, or when it’s time to restock on that flavored lube you can’t stop slurping up.”
It was the thought of going without the lube that broke her. Ava’s shirt came off, was tossed haphazardly in the wastebasket. He crooked his finger; when we tried to stand up, he shook his head, so we crawled. Crawled to kneel at his feet. I think he saw we weren’t such cheap sluts that we would go down on him for what could be, for all we knew, a bullshit offer. So we knelt there, side by side, glaring, as he whipped it out and jacked off to completion. He didn’t get any come on us, but not for lack of trying, the limp-dicked old fucker. A wonder Antonio had ever been born, so little dribbled out of that thing.
Then he told me to lick it off the floor.
“Not without something concrete,” I said back feistily. “I want to know your offer to help us is real, or that can dry right in.”
He grinned, nodded. “All right. It is already soaking in. Get to it; I will get on the phone while you work. And you, lick it clean so I can put it away.”
Ava was always loud and showy about sucking cock. You couldn’t live with her as long as I had without hearing that saga play out a thousand times. To think, I’d once been shocked to have her invite over one of her dick pic guys. Today, she was silent. No showmanship, no theatrics, no passion. I could have applauded her. This man wasn’t worth the effort. I put the same lack of enthusiasm into sucking his cum out of the faded blue carpet, just to show him there were limits on how far he could push us now that we weren’t his employees any more.
“Hello. Yes, yes, put me through to Jack. Tell him it’s Niko. Tell him I found something he might want.”
________________
Jack offered us the jobs sight unseen. As it turned out, we’d already met. He was that Southern fellow. Remember him? No wonder he was so preoccupied with candy dancing, running a joint like this. But he was hiring, and we were told the earning potential was limited only by our enthusiasm. Corporate bullshit, but it felt truer than it did at most places. I’d learned how to give a mean lap dance since moving in with Ava, that was for damn sure. She didn’t have my grace, but I doubted customers would care if she just buried their heads in her tits and shook.
When we went in to fill out paperwork, get the tour, he told us we’d need to do something to get “those weird tattoos” concealed, like half the girls we’d seen in the few minutes we’d been there didn’t have weird patterns and Asian characters and one girl a skull with a snake climbing out of it. But no, LB2 was “weird.” 
Ava told him she’d have them redone to look like a girl on a playground doing jumping jacks, if he could give her an advance on her first paycheck. Jack laughed. 
“So, should we get on with the W-2’s and all that?” I suggested. I knew it was dumb to feel awkward about seeing women pole dancing in nothing but tassles and g-strings considering that would be me pretty soon. A few hours, hopefully, once we’d dealt with the bureaucracy. Ava and I had diverted our grocery budget to getting a pole from the sex shop for our apartment, which we’d been training ourselves on for days now, ever since Mr. Nikolidis had set us up. (I know, depleting the grocery budget sounds bad, and it is, but it was either that or something sacred, like the skin care budget or the tit glitter budget. Those were investments in our future.)
“Look, I’m agonna be straight with y’all here and do something I normally take some time to build to. But Niko says you’re open-minded sorts, and that y’all’re in a bit of a desperate position, so… here goes.” He sat down on the side of his desk. Somehow he made that simple act seem slimy. And then he ratcheted it up by a few orders of magnitude. “How do y’all feel about making men cum, for cash?”
“Nothing makes me hotter,” Ava answered with heavy sarcasm.
“Um, yeah, it’s fine. That’s what we’re here for, I guess, right?” I tried not to scream. This time last year, I’d thought being on my feet all day was hard work. “I was a cheerleader in middle school and three years of high school, so I have some dance experience. No more uniform though,” I added in a jokey voice. No sense making another bad impression on another boss, right? I could be chill for a day.
“Sorry, girls, I don’t think you take my meaning. I’m asking you how you’d feel about letting a man pay you to put his worm in ya. I mean mouths and pussies, little darlins. Most times we don’t sell anal, but if that’s something you’re open to, I can keep my ears open.”
“Are… are you asking us to be… prostitutes?!” I sputtered.
He looked me over as if trying to see if I were wearing a wire. Where the hell the man thought I’d hide one when my shirt was four inches of stretchy rubber garbage, I didn’t know. “Officially, no,” he drawled, with a little wink. “Off the record, I hear you girls made yourselves a little sploosh on the internet a ways back. I think we could both stand to benefit a little from that.”
“It’s splash, asshole. Sploosh is when you get a woman wet. Something you obviously wouldn’t know much about.” Ava took to her feet. Seated on his desk as he was, she could almost look evenly at his eyes. “And we’re not hookers. Fuck you for asking, fuck you for letting us think this was a legit offer, and while I’m at it, fuck your friend Niko for being a rapey scumbag.”
That was it. Unlike me, Ava had pockets that could fit a cell phone. Whoops, never mind, she had it stuffed down the front of her thong again. Either way, my girl busted that thing out and was off to the races.
“It’s men like you who make it so normal, decent young women like us can’t get by. We came here, ready to exchange our labor, our assets, our tits, for a little sliver of your money. You, the one guy here this place absolutely doesn’t need.”
“Don’t need…?!” the man sputtered. “I built this place from the ground up!”
“Oh, that’s right. I’ll bet your clients line up to come see you, right? Because what you do here is so useful. I guess that makes sense, all those guys I saw on my way in making their way back to the parking lot, thanking you, Jack, for getting them off.”
“Now you listen here, Miss! I will not be spoken to like–”
“Yeah, you will. Because you can’t buy me. And you don’t own me. And you never can. That’s something neo-fascist capitalist pigs like yourself can never understand. Yes, my labor is for sale, but I set the price! What’s your cut of my blowjob, huh? Twenty percent? Thirty? Half? When you add nothing to the experience! If I’m going to jerk a guy off with my tits, that’s my sweat, my tears!”
I stared in rapture at the majesty of it. Move over, Rosie the Riveter. There was a new bad bitch in business. And as I watched, she was taking off her sliced up, raggedy clothes. Not because she was being paid to. Not because she’d lose her home or starve if she didn’t. (Though those things might happen.) Because she had something to say.
“Now you’re probably wondering, if this woman was so offended by my invitation to blow and fuck strangers for a cut of the proceeds, why is she stripping?” Ava threw her shirt in his face. It slid down his belly and onto the tile floor. (It would be a lot easier to suck up cum in this office, I considered momentarily, but returned my attention to her diatribe as she fought off her leggings. I helped, peeling down her thong while she tried to get it off her ankles. Then I took the phone, scooting back to take in the whole scene.
“Uh, yeah. Why are you…?”
“Because this is a strip club, Jack. If you don’t strip here, you can’t quit here. And I! QUIT!” Ava grabbed two handfuls of his hair, right on the back of his head, and pulled his face into her tits and motorboated him like she was trying to give him a concussion. I caught the whole thing. When she let him go, gasping, suit pants thoroughly tented, I took a moment to record his impotence, then turned to Ava. She was a portrait of righteous femininity. She was my fucking hero. I stopped the recording and threw my arms around her, kissing her, helping her strip me as naked as she was. We fucked right there in Jack’s office, licking each other’s pussies until we came harder and louder than any of his dickhead clients ever had. 
It was a triumph for laborers everywhere.
________________
Needless to say, I still took the job. Our display had shown Jack my value, and I started full-time, with benefits. I was back, and better than ever. The money was better than anything Dr. Stanton had ever offered. In fact, one night he and Dr. Crepin and a handful of other men who were doubtless also doctors came in. I made more money taking my old boss’s load on my face than I ever had in the same amount of time spent cleaning his patients’ teeth. Dr. Crepin even got to enjoy the tits he’d stuffed in me finally. I’d cleared Jack’s take of my work before they’d even shown up, so that was 100% pure profit for yours truly. I couldn’t have felt prouder.
As for Ava, we still roomed together for a while. Just because I was making bank didn’t mean I’d leave my boss bitch in the lurch. Her new quitting video went to whole new levels of viral. It was banned from social media app after social media app on account of the nudity, especially after Jack picked up the phone and kept the video going with the two of us sixty-nining on his office floor. Even Ava’s LinkedIn got involved, giving her a lifetime ban, and the moderators at LinkedIn let any filthy thing fly. The whole site was a bunch of assholes offering to give up their souls to capitalism, but no, let a couple socialists air their views and come all over each other’s faces, and suddenly we’re the vulgar ones.
Anyway, she finally found one that was open to her views, and at long last, our followers had a home. Her followers, truly, since anyone who’d clicked the heart button on one of my slutty little ass pics had Ava to thank for inspiring me. She didn’t have a business model. Didn’t have any capital, or investors, or even an office. But she had plenty of elbow grease, and a dream.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come work at Jack’s with me? I know you had your outburst, but I’m ninety percent sure he thought you were kidding, or doing some kind of performance art or something.”
“I’m sure,” she said.
I shook my head. “Giving up your only friend for an OnlyFans, huh?”
“I would never give you up! You’re my favorite corporate sellout in the whole world, Tiff.” She leaned in, touched her forehead to mine. Kissed me. Made out. Fingered me until I was going to have to change my thong before work. “Seriously.”
“You’re amazing, Ava. I’m so glad you’re doing this. Mr. Bergman, Mr. Nicolidis, Jack, none of them deserved you. This couldn’t be happening to anyone I respect more.”
I meant every word. In fact, I respected her so much, and wanted her to succeed so badly, that for those first months, I worked for her for free. Holding the camera, helping with hair and makeup, wearing the strapon. Whatever she needed. 
It was humbling, her level of conviction. Sometimes, I really did feel like a sellout. I worked for someone else. He got a piece of everything I did. But I was well-paid, finally. Six more years of sucking and fucking, and my savings would be right back where they were. Fifteen, and I’d age out of it and could think about trying to have a relationship with my family again. Maybe twenty. But Ava? She was pretty much running the only charity site on OnlyFans. Guided by anti-work ideology, she was catering explicitly to the poor, to fellow working class people like us. There was no bullshit, no ridiculously priced exclusives, no $30 jars of bath water. 
No sir. Ava’s bath water was $2, plus S&H. 
It didn’t even feel like work, she said, when you love what you do. She had to pay her bills, think about the future, but she never charged more than what she thought someone could pay, taking into account that most people’s porn budget was at or near zero. So it was always $0.50 to see her get a facial, $1 for the recording of the preceding blowjob, $3 for the brutal pounding her pussy took soon after. (The landlord didn’t even know his torso and cock were being recorded. Because fuck landlords, right? Not that I fucked my… Oh, you know what I meant.) If Ava was going to throw out a pair of panties after coming in them one too many times, she didn’t even charge for them. One guy offered her $50 to do a personalized video, masturbating and being all vocal, using his name, a few kink phrases. Then, the day before I was going to record it with her, he messaged her and begged for his money back, saying he’d just lost his job and he needed the money, and was so so sorry, and understood if it was too late. 
Ava sent his money back and jilled herself for him like a pro. I was so moved, I joined her myself, joking about sharing the $0 proceeds evenly.
If I’m being honest, I didn’t share her passion for sex work, myself. No, if I was going to have a stranger choke me out while he fucked me in some windowless booth, I expected fair compensation and adequate security so I didn’t get murdered. Jack provided. He wasn’t a great boss, but he was better than my last couple. When he fucked me, he paid the market rate and didn’t ask for a discount. When I asked if he’d help pay to get my tattoos redone, he paid for the whole thing. The ass tattoo got turned into part of a license plate on a car, its trunk overflowing with junk. (I sneaked some of my childhood toys and memorabilia in as the junk. Cute, right?) The hips just became little designy things of no real note. On my chest, with the help of some chemicals strategically lightning portions of it, I turned LB2 into a brightly colored “LET’S FUCK!” The “capitalism” in tiny print beneath it was never commented on by a client, but that’s fine. It was there for me, not them.
Even though I could afford a professional, I still let Spice do the work. I paid cash; Ava plastered over hers with ravens and skulls and other generic goth shit, and paid him with a work opportunity. Specifically, fucking her ass on camera for her site. All above board, everyone’s labor respectfully compensated.
So if you’re out there, and you’re working. If you’re struggling. If you’re miserable and you feel lost and desperate and overworked and underpaid. You are not your job. You are a person. You are valuable. You are a member of the only species in billions of years of life on earth that has ever written a poem. 
You are not alive to work.
I promise you, friend. There is another way.






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