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Kirsten opened the bathroom door to find Holly waiting outside.

  “I’m all done,” she said. “Now get your buns in here.”

  Holly stepped into the lavatory to find that it wasn’t too bad with two people in here. The girls cracked open their purses and looked into the mirror to do a few last minute preps; shuffling hair, applying another coat of lipstick, clearing their faces of any eye crust, outdoor mildew or gunk of any kind.

  “What are you feeling right now, hon?” Kirsten said.

  “I feel…” Holly knew what she felt, just had to search for the right description. “…I feel leery but at the same time more pumped for this than I’ve ever been for anything that I can remember.”

  Kirsten pushed her hair behind her shoulders.

  “Get rid of that leery feeling. It’ll do you no good. I swear, man, the looser and more relaxed you are, the better this is gonna feel. Trust me on this.”

  Her friend’s knowledgeable words sent a wave of ease over her, washing away any minor tension, but there was still one part that refused to be eradicated.

  “It’s supposed to hurt, though, right?” she asked.

  Kirsten furrowed her eyebrows, chuckled and shook her head.

  “That’s all a myth. They call it pain but it’s really an extraordinary type of pleasure; if there’s any pain it’s gonna feel so unimaginably, inconceivably glorious. You’ll feel the bliss more than you will the sting.”

  They heard them both shout something down the hall, like a chant or a cry of victory. It sounded something like Reversal! or Eternal! Both looked at the door, and then to each other. Holly gave a look of some disorientation; Kirsten just smiled wryly and shook her head.

  “Anyway,” Holly said. “What were we saying?”

  “The pain. There simply is none. It's two different types of pleasures: one that's plain pleasure and one that exceeds that plain pleasure by a hundred...a hundred-million.” Kirsten winked and smiled.

  Holly looked at herself in the mirror. A simple, ordinary girl with a void yawning and yearning to be fulfilled, and no one in the world knew about it besides Kirsten and herself. Her whole life, she woke up every morning with the sickening feeling that she would have to carry this emptiness in the pit of her stomach through the everyday world. And now, finally tonight, after all those days of feeling extrinsic to the stranger that she walked past on the sidewalk or in a public place somewhere…it was going to be all over. Or at least this evening was to be the first step to fill the gap.

  Tonight, she was going to reach the end of that long line to humanity. This is what was keeping her from having some peace of mind; a happy life; this was her destiny. She squared her shoulders and raised her chin, observing a different, hardened, femme fatale Holly now. Nothing—and not one fucking thing—was going to get in the way of what she wanted.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said, hearing her tone deepen a notch. “As long as it makes me feel a hundred-percent, and there is no doubt in my mind that it will.”

  “Now that's what I'm talking about, bitch!”

  She made a few last-second adjustments to her hair, make-up and breasts, and then turned face to face with her mentor and said, “Bring it on.”

  Kirsten smiled proudly, raising an open palm up for her to high-five, which she gladly welcomed with a responsive slap with her own hand.

  “Oh yeah,” Kirsten remembered, “and I know this goes without saying but try not to get any of it in your hair.”