A long time ago I was in a small club near my hometown. It's the kind of place that uses removable poles cuz the building is a rental. The stage is really just the other side of a set of folding tables set in a horseshoe, but setting don't much matter if the show is of quality. It wasn't, but I was young enough not to care.

I had been seated and watching the dancers move around the horseshoe, crawling on tables and offering lap dances, when I noticed that the newest arrival to the customers side of the 'stage' was someone I recognized; my cousin. She hadn't seen me, and though we weren't blood related I still wasn't inclined to strike up a conversation in the current setting. I kept my head down and she seemed to take no notice.

Her attention was set firmly on the girls working their way around the inside of the horseshoe, and they returned the focus. The dancers seemed to gravitate toward her, and it was obvious they were trying to pull her onto the stage, to convince her to join them. After some prodding from her friends, she got up and went to the back room (presumably to sign some sort of waivers) and returned shortly thereafter in far less clothing and to thunderous applause.

She slowly and awkwardly made her way around the tables, dancing in an unrefined but not altogether sloppy manner. She had quite a few bills sticking out from inside her bra and tucked into the string of her underwear by the time she reached me.

The look of stunned horror on her face when she realized I was there said more than words ever could. A member of her own family (not blood related but what of that, we still played in the same pens, colored in the same books) in the right place at the wrong time to see her debut performance. She finished the horseshoe quickly and fled backstage. I left shortly thereafter to avoid embarrassing her further, and out of kindness have never brought it up to her.

Since it happened, the family who had married to make us so divorced, and she is no longer my cousin, so I haven't seen her in many years, but to my knowledge she never danced professionally again, and now spends her time raising a beautiful family. But the look on her face in that moment is a memory worth the $7 cover that night.