The people behind Stall 313 are three middle-aged white guys. You only have to take one look at them to see they’re assholes. I want them to pay for what they’ve done, but I know they probably won’t.
There’s a woman on the screen, talking about her daughter, Shendea, who was sold on Stall 313, beaten, and left for dead in a motel room. She’s crying. I can’t imagine my mother getting sober long enough to cry over me. I don’t want to listen to the list of things the johns did to her girl.
“They raped her, vaginally and anally. They beat her. They burned her. They whipped her with belts…”
If I could reach the TV, I’d put my foot through it to shut it the fuck up. Lonnie puts her hand on my left leg to stop it from twitching. She doesn’t look at me.
The film cuts to a girl about my age. She’s got scars on her face, on her arms and back and legs. Everyone in this room knows she’s got scars in other places too, places the documentary can’t show. She takes out her false teeth, showing how many the men who bought her knocked out. I run my tongue along my own teeth, thankful I still have them all.
On the other side of the room, the girls I belong with are agitated, saying shit. I could have been one of them, but instead, I’m watching them, and I see them. I see them like Lonnie sees them. They’re scared little girls who don’t want to deal. They don’t want to see themselves in the girl on the screen.
I can’t stop seeing myself.
“My pimp named us after flowers,” says a new girl on screen. She’s kind of hard looking, black eyeliner all the way around her eyes. Her hair is bleached blond. On the screen they call her “TS,” but I know her as Iris.
“He was friends with a guy my stepfather knew. Started coming around the house, telling me how pretty I was. He bought me gifts—things my parents couldn’t afford. Mom told him to step off, but it was too late. I loved him. He said he loved me too.”
They ask her about the first time she was forced to have sex with a stranger. “He told me he owed this guy money, that he was going to get hurt—maybe killed—if he didn’t pay the guy back somehow. He said he hated asking me to do it, but the guy thought I was pretty. Did I love him enough to save his life?” She smiles sadly. “I did.”
I’m cold. Something prickly is crawling up the back of my neck, digging its claws into the base of my skull. My vision narrows so all I can see is Iris’s face. Her words ring in my ears, bitterly familiar.
“Afterward,” she says, “he put me to work with the other girls, but he always told me I was his favorite. I believed him. I still believed him when he tried to kill me, when he let two other girls be killed. Peony and Tulip.”
I see their faces in my mind before their photos appear on the screen. They disappeared shortly after I arrived. This couldn’t have been filmed too long ago. Mitch told us they’d left. That Iris had left.
I’m going to puke. I start to stand, but Lonnie grabs my hand.
“I can’t,” I whisper. Some of the other girls are watching me, but I don’t care.
“You can,” she says, squeezing my fingers.
I pull hard against her grip. “Let me go.” I’m going to run. If I make it out that fucking door, I’m going to run as far as I can and I’m not coming back. Fuck this. Fuck her. Fuck it all.
“This is how you survive. You sit the fuck down and give them the respect they deserve, and you make a promise to yourself that they didn’t die for nothing. You get mad, and you keep going. That’s how girls like us get even, how we say fuck you to the people who did this to us. We live.” She nudges me with her injured leg as she says this.
I sit. Every nerve in my body is on fire, twitching and thrashing. I swallow and taste vomit in the back of my throat. My stomach lurches. If I puke, I’m going to do it all over Lonnie, I swear.
Slowly, it begins to fade. On the screen, Iris is talking about how some organization that fights trafficking helped save her, took her in, and gave her purpose. I focus on her, on her face and her voice. I see her looking strong and healthy, going to school, and getting her diploma.
She looks so normal.
“I’m going to have that,” Lonnie murmurs. She looks at me. “You’re going to have that. Promise me.”
I nod. Lonnie looks away, and so do I.
chapter three
I’ve never lived in a house, and I’ve never had what I would consider a home—not since I was a little kid and we lived with my grandparents. But I don’t remember that part of my life very well. I remember some of the apartments that came later. Some of them my mom and I lived in alone, others we shared with her friends, or people she’d managed to con into letting us crash with them. When she had a boyfriend, we usually had a place to stay. Sometimes I even had my own room, but usually I slept on a couch.
I can’t remember the last time I had any privacy.
“I hope you like your room,” Krys says when she picks me up Saturday for my first visit to her house. After two weeks in the program, they decided I could have a day out. “It’s pretty plain, but you can decorate it however you like.”
“Does it have a door I can lock?” I ask, climbing into the car.
“Well, yeah,” she replies. “Of course.”
“Then I’ll like it.”
She winces. I don’t mean to make things hard for her. I don’t know how to say things so they won’t affect her, and it’s not like I can pretend nothing bad has ever happened to me. She already knows I had crabs and gonorrhea. The hospital told her before they told me. Luckily HPV and HIV were both negative.
Would she still have wanted me if I had AIDS?
She turns to me after pressing the button to start the car. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but I want to understand you, okay? I want to help you get through this. If you want to talk, I’m here. If you don’t … well, I’m still here. Always.”
My aunt hasn’t asked me a lot of questions, but I know she met with Detective Willis and Jill. I assume they filled her in on my story. What they know of it, anyway.
“Okay,” I agree. I’m not about to start telling her everything though. She might still change her mind. Who the hell wants to take in a seventeen-year-old who’s been passed around and discarded like loose change? God, I could really use a little something right now.
Being clean is hard. I don’t miss the drugs, really. I like being able to focus, but I miss being numb. Feeling shit is overrated. Feeling shit means it has to go somewhere—get out—and everyone at Sparrow Brook has sharp fucking eyes that’ll notice new cuts, fresh marks, or missing hair. Even if you think you’re being smart, Dr. Lisa always seems to notice. Yesterday, she noticed me rubbing a spot on my leg.
“Lex,” she said. “Have you been self-harming?”
It’s no good to lie. Bitch has some kind of superpowers when it comes to that shit. She doesn’t like being called “bitch” or “bro” either. I have to remember that.
“It’s just a scratch,” I told her.
She looked at me a second, got up from her desk, went to a cupboard, and took out a small laptop. She handed it to me. “How about you try writing your feelings down on this rather than on your skin?” she suggested.