From “I’m Not Sorry and I’d Do it Again”
By Irina Sterling
Published 2020 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House
Chapter 12: The Education of a Working Girl
Every woman remembers the moment she stops being invisible. For some, it’s the very first day she grows boobs. For me, it was waking up in a Beverly Hills recovery suite with a face that cost forty thousand dollars and tits that could stop traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Transformations are only fun if you get to gawk at the before picture, aren’t they? So let me paint you one.
A twenty-one-year-old butter face, fresh out of the Corps with an honorable discharge and exactly $3,247 to her name, standing in her mama’s kitchen in Memphis while she screamed about how I thought I was “too good for family now.” Same linoleum peeling up at the corners. Same smell of cigarettes and Dollar Store air freshener. Same woman who’d spent my whole childhood telling me I’d never be nothing, not even a whore.
“You th…