Victoria reaches into the trashcan to retrieve the newspaper. She unfolds it and looks at the day's headline, which involves Congress arguing over the national debt. She allows a little smile to creep across her face, knowing that though the smeared-ink dates said otherwise, nothing ever changed in that dirty world that she lived in. She flips through the pages. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She sits down with the periodical, folding her legs, before setting it down again to absentmindedly fiddle with her stiletto stem. They seem to be getting shorter and shorter every day, she remarks, smirking at her joke, until she remembers what happened last night, and the brief youthfulness is erased from her face, to be replaced with a weariness that is too old for a girl of seventeen. She fumbles in her pleather purse, before finding a Lucky Strike and lighting it, the ember lighting up the blue morning haze. She exhales, blowing the smoke away as if it were all the problems in her life, unraveling in the air like a piece of thread. The sound of footsteps breaks her out of her reveries. A middle-aged man, balding, sits next to her at the bus stop. She regards him with a cool look, sizing him up, before turning back to look at the filthy road.
"Aren't you a little too young to be up this early, darling?" the man asks her. She casts a glance at him, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and puffing a breath of smoke in his direction. At that moment, her cell phone buzzes, but she ignores it. Not today. Today is her day off, when she can see her family, can act like nothing's wrong, can be Victoria for once. She will never give up this day. She throws the cigarette on the ground, squashing it under her heel. She digs again in her bag, and opens the compact. Her nose crinkles up when she sees the purple threading across her eyelids, but she doesn't cry. She stopped crying a long time ago.  She brushes the foundation powder over her cheek, hoping to disguise the bruise. At the sound of the bus, she snaps the case shut. Later, on the bus, Victoria looks out the window at the spreading dawn, wondering what life must be like for a Lady of the Night once the evening is long gone.