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My group of friends has moved to circle one wall, but I’ve stayed back in the booth with everyone’s stuff. Outside of the wooden countertop and lonely-eyed man, not much else reminds me of Western bars the DJ now bobs to hard rap over the dance floor, where neon lights thread through plumes from a fog machine. I’ve tipped back plenty of wine tonight, enough to know that my teeth aren’t glinting in the blacklight. Pretending the warmth in my belly wasn’t easing a knot I’d looped too many times to count. I sipped wine from a bottle passed around a dorm room, pretending it wasn’t the first covert drink of my life, that it didn’t taste like fear and broken metal. I didn’t know Montana’s white crosses were unique to the state until I moved two hours away for college, which was two more hours of worldliness. My dad taught me which roads to avoid at dusk-Green Meadow Drive, 93 through the Flathead. No late nights, no parties, no sliver of recklessness. Tiptoed heels across spurs of ice dense as concrete and smooth as glass. We left early, shivering in our thin gowns and suits on the walk back to the car. My first dance, senior prom, I wore a strapless navy dress and my grandma’s pearls, and I lingered on the pillared edge of the ballroom until a guy asked me if I wanted to dance. I had a 4.0 to keep up, I told myself, even though half the kids in my AP classes were mooching off their older siblings’ IDs. Weekends, I stayed in doing schoolwork while classmates littered old mining quarries with PBR cans. “A cab,” I say, feigning poise, and the bartender doesn’t card me. We claim a booth, wander to the bar to order drinks. I lift my chin, a trick for confidence I’ve been trying out, and skirt close to my group of friends. I dart fingers to my throat, hoping to catch the rumble of blood there, but it’s back to a steady drum slugged with wine. My heart flits under my breastbone, a sensation that’s dogged me since adolescence. Given the DJ getting set up across the room, I’m figuring the latter. It’s early enough in the night that the club bouncer let us in at no charge, but late enough that I’m swaying somewhere between sleepy and tipsy, not sure where another drink will put me. The music drums something unfamiliar, though that image drags me back-a fizzed spark of gin and tonic at the Rhino on Ryman Street, men wearing flannel for flannel’s sake, and women too, and me in the smoky middle, unsure if this was something I wanted, feared, or maybe a little bit of both. This place feels like home, but only because there’s a guy in flannel eying women from the bar.