Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  The family lived for a year in Carolina Beach—the redneck Riviera of Wilmington—and then in a housing project called Nesbitt Courts. The 216-unit development was whites-only when it opened in 1940, and it held on to its reputation for being the only project in Wilmington that housed whites. Kim’s first baby, a girl named Marissa, was born when they lived at Nesbitt Courts. Amber and her friends would race home to play with her. Kim was almost twenty when Marissa was born. The father was a kid from the neighborhood named Mootnie. She’d have two more children with him, though another boyfriend would end up raising all three.

  Life was about as stable for the Overstreets at Nesbitt Courts as it ever would be. Al worked at Krispy Kreme. Margie worked part-time managing properties and looked after Kim’s baby. By then Amber’s mother had become an almost ghostly presence around the house. Slender, with shoulder-length hair that had turned prematurely gray, she kept cases of Olde English in the pantry and would sip from the warm forty-ounce bottles bright and early in the morning. Amber earned A’s and B’s, smart enough that if she had to get a teacher’s note signed by a parent because she cut class, she’d trick her mom into signing it by setting up her little desk and pretending she was playing school: “Ah, yes, yes, Mrs. Overstreet, could you sign this?” Margie, watching TV, would sign anything.

  Amber and Kim had just one fight that Al knew of—a knockdown, drag-out brawl that they wouldn’t let him break up. They told him that he had better get out of the way or he might get hurt. More often, they looked after each other. One time a member of the Crips gang came to the house looking for Amber; Kim, pregnant at the time, came out with a baseball bat. When the sisters clashed, it would be because Amber felt entitled to everything of Kim’s—her clothes, her perfume, anything sitting around her room. Kim would see her sister wearing something of hers and tell her she couldn’t, and Amber would act like Kim hadn’t said a thing. Their lives were symbiotic. What was Kim’s, Amber always thought, was rightfully hers.

  Teresa didn’t look like a madam to Kim. She had red hair and green eyes and freckles—not exactly a knockout but pretty, with a boob job that brought her up to size D. Unlike Kim, Teresa had her life figured out. She had a husband who was in the military, based in another town, and rarely home. He was, if anything, a junior partner in the business. Teresa was the boss, and a successful one.

  When they met, Kim was nineteen and a sophomore at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, studying sports medicine and paying tuition by waiting tables at two different restaurants—Bojangles’ and Freddie’s Italian-American Grill. Kim and Teresa were in a psychology class together; Teresa was a year ahead and a few years older. She didn’t keep her living a secret. Coed Confidential advertised in the local paper, promising “entertainment” for men: solo appointments, bachelor parties, massages. But Teresa didn’t talk about herself at first. Instead, she listened as Kim talked about how her own life was unraveling.

  At the start of the school year, Al and Margie had been rocked by back-to-back health setbacks. First, Al had gone to get a hearing aid, and the MRI had revealed tumors on his acoustic nerve. After surgery, he was at home in bandages when Margie collapsed with a perforated ulcer. She, too, was rushed into surgery. Amber was just thirteen, so Kim became the nurse for both parents. What little sports-medicine training she had came in handy as she repacked her mother’s bandages and bathed her, and then turned around and rebandaged her dad, too, minding the staples in his head. Kim was holding on, but the financial pressure was mounting. Waiting tables wasn’t going to cover it.

  Teresa kept listening as with each class, Kim became more despondent, losing heart. Then one day Kim said she’d seen an ad for amateur night at a strip club. She was thinking of trying to win the five-hundred-dollar prize.

  Teresa shook her head violently. “You’re not gonna make shit there. You won’t make half of what we make.”

  “I’m not gonna have sex,” Kim said.

  “That’s not what it is,” said Teresa. “It’s about the show.” And then she proposed a half-measure. “Why don’t you come answer phones for me?”

  The rate depended on location. Calls within reasonable driving distance of central Wilmington were $150 an hour, cash only. The dancer collected $100, and the rest went to the house. Calls from farther away charged more—Carolina Beach was maybe twenty minutes away, and that was $200 an hour per girl—but since they were the ones driving there, the girls kept the extra money. The girls were making $800 a night or more, just like that, while their friends were working eight or ten hours a day at places like Bojangles’ for ten dollars an hour.

  When a guy called Coed Confidential, he would give his address and directions. During a normal appointment, the girl would come in, take the money, and go in the bathroom or bedroom to get changed. The client was supposed to give the girl adequate time to fit into her outfit—no pounding on the door, no shouts to hurry up. About thirty minutes later, Teresa would call to let the girl know how long she’d been there. The rule was no longer than an hour, unless the customer was paying more. The phone call from Teresa was a sort of safety valve: If she couldn’t get ahold of the girl, she’d know to be concerned. There were other security provisions: Girls couldn’t go alone to a party; more than one guy necessitated the hiring of more than one girl.

  Kim had no trouble perfecting her delivery of the script: A girl comes out, she models lingerie, she dances for you topless, she ends up nude. Some girls offer massages, but if she’s rubbing your back, she has to be dressed. Tipping is optional. Sex, or “full service,” was never officially part of the deal. Inevitably, guys would ask, and the girl working the phones had a stock answer: No, that’s against the law. They will be topless, and they give you a massage as long as they have bottoms on. The girls were allowed to keep all tips, which was tacit encouragement to do more than dance, provided a client was willing to tip big. Teresa made a big show of not wanting to hear about any side deals. “Do what you want to do to earn the tips,” she said, “but just know that we don’t condone it.” She also covered herself. Each girl signed a form drawn up by Teresa’s lawyer, declaring that she worked as an independent contractor and that Teresa was not employing her to do anything illegal.

  Those early years, it was all about fun, and in some ways it was innocent. They weren’t prostitutes, at least on paper, and at times they didn’t even feel like escorts. They were best friends. Shortly after Kim started, Teresa moved to a breathtaking plantation-style house: eleven hundred dollars a month in rent for four bedrooms, hardwood floors, a grand staircase, huge living rooms on the ground floor, an antique rug, and a big Jacuzzi in one of the bathrooms. All the girls who worked for her kept extra clothes there. It was like they were college kids, crashing together in the same stunning dorm.

  Teresa made it easy to work for her. If you wanted to go on a call, you did. If you didn’t, you didn’t. When you made what you considered enough money, you had the rest of the day to do whatever you wanted. The big-money calls were at resorts like the Bald Head Island golf club off the coast of North Carolina. Those jobs were ideal: Guys on golf getaways, wives left at home. The girls would dance and spend the rest of the time doing a bunch of coke, playing poker, and negotiating side deals for sex. At the end of the weekend, they’d come home with a few thousand dollars each. For many of the girls, working for Teresa was about more than the parties—it vaulted them into a life of affluence, with all the trappings. Lending practices were so loose that the girls could pick up a car-loan application form at OfficeMax and have Teresa fill it out with whatever amount the girl wanted, and in no time, she would be approved.

  Even answering phones, Kim was making enough to forget all about waiting tables. Teresa was kicking twenty-five dollars of her own commission over to Kim for every call, which translated into hundreds of dollars a night. Kim poured herself into the job, working nights and days, skipping classes. Before long, she sat in on interviews for new girls. One night, when a few of the
girls were hired to perform during a bachelor party at the Beau Rivage, a golf club in Wilmington, Kim decided to go and observe. The guests were a bunch of doctors and lawyers from New York and New Jersey, about seventeen in all. Kim watched as the girls brought in suitcases with black lights and glow-in-the-dark body paint. One girl brought vibrators to play with while she stripped. Another brought Ping-Pong balls with which to perform the crudest, most notorious bachelor-party trick. They were all just stripping and dancing, no full service, and still Kim saw how the money—the tips—flew. One girl gave a hand job. Kim had never watched someone do that before, and she was a little stunned to be right there in the room while it happened. The takeaway for Kim was more than powerful. It was seismic. For just two hours of work, each girl made five hundred dollars plus tips. She figured they each came home with close to nine hundred dollars.

  On her first call, Kim used the name Mia. The john was a guy named Vinnie who owned a backhoe service in Raleigh. He was nearly twenty years older than Kim, and she was scared to death. But when he opened the door, he seemed nice, so she danced and stripped to the music she played on a boom box. He was a gentleman and tipped her and kept her an extra hour. She walked out with hundreds of dollars and a regular customer.

  Once she signed, Kim became part of a little sorority of full-timers. Kim already knew a couple of them from school. June’s working name was Cameron. Crystal’s was Mocha; she was one of the few black escorts working consistently in this part of Wilmington. Like any sorority, they threw a great party: a DJ for one part of the house, a band for the other. Once they took aluminum foil, poked holes in it, and covered the TV screen like a Lite-Brite. They turned the volume down on a cartoon, threw on the Doors and Pink Floyd, and sat there, high, staring at the light shining out of the holes, laughing. Another time they filled a bathtub with purple Jesus—vodka and grape juice and whatever else was around—and guys came by and dipped their cups. A guy who was seeing one of the girls brought ecstasy. Someone else’s boyfriend walked around administering acid directly into people’s eyes with a dropper.

  Kim became fixated on making more. Her family was a parade of tragedy, and Kim was the one who always had to fix it. Now that she was making real money, she felt empowered. She learned tricks to maximize revenue. Even though the fee was $175, the guy usually had $200, and if by chance you couldn’t make change, that was an automatic $25 tip. Sometimes she’d lift a john’s credit card. Other times a watch would disappear, or some checks. One look at her parents, frail and declining at home, and Kim could justify anything.

  Just as it was for all the other girls, Kim always made a show of not offering full service, at least to anyone who asked. When it was Amber’s turn, she wouldn’t bother drawing that line.

  Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse turn their back on sex altogether. Others turn the tap on full blast, trying in vain to trivialize it even as they reopen the wound over and over. By the time Amber was a teenager, sex had become meaningless to her, even as it came to define her. Even before she worked for Teresa, Amber tried to make money for herself as a free agent in and around Nesbitt Courts. When she was sixteen, Amber charged some neighborhood boys for sex. Her first trick, according to an old neighbor named Carl King, earned her seventy-five dollars. Carl eventually lost his virginity to her—for free, or so he says—and so did a friend of his. “She didn’t care what people thought about her,” Carl said. “She really didn’t. It was kind of her thing, and I always admired her for that.”

  Not everyone was quite as warmhearted as Carl. A promiscuous white girl in Nesbitt Courts was a hot topic, and Amber got a reputation. A rumor went around that Amber was spreading gonorrhea. Amber never cared what anyone said. Her sister was more famous around Nesbitt Courts than she would ever be.

  Everyone saw that Kim had a car, cash, and clothes. Practically everyone except their parents knew where Kim was working. She had made up a cover story for Al and Margie that held for a while. She said she worked for the Hilton in Wilmington, driving a limo to the airport to pick up VIPs. All her cash, she said, came from tips. She waited to tell them the truth until she was sure there was nothing they could do about it. They needed her. They were too frail to work, and Kim was paying their bills.

  When Amber finally joined Kim at Coed Confidential, both sisters were mindful enough not to throw it in their parents’ faces. Privately, Margie told Al that she hoped the girls were working their way through a phase. The girls were young, she said. Their stories weren’t over yet. Al tried his best to be philosophical. Kim was a hard worker, ambitious and powerful, stronger than he was. Amber, though, was a special case, more sensitive and vulnerable. Al saw how much Amber needed to be close to Kim, but he also saw her wrestling with her decisions. What gave him the most hope was the way Amber would allow herself to be overtaken by a deep and chaste religious fervor, at least sometimes. That, in Al’s estimation, had always been the biggest difference between the sisters: While Kim never believed in anything except herself, Amber never stopped searching for something bigger.

  They’d seemed so alike to the other girls at Coed Confidential—both skinny little chatterboxes, brash and sassy—that it took a while for everyone to notice how different Amber was from Kim. Kim ran cooler. She was less affectionate and more self-reliant and mercenary. Amber was the sweet one. She had an endearing daffiness, a genuine innocence. She couldn’t even drive.

  For Amber, the work didn’t seem to be as much about the money as the chance to connect with the people at Teresa’s house—to be a part of a family. She wanted the money, but more than that, she wanted to make an impression, to fit in. If you asked her to pick up a dime bag of weed, she would come back with a quarter bag or a twenty and try to shrug it off: “Here, I got you some extra, I didn’t know if you wanted it or not, but what the hell.” “She’d yes you to death,” June remembered, telling you anything you wanted to hear if you would only be her friend.

  Once, the boyfriend of a girl named Chastity got busted buying pills, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer. Amber wanted so badly to help that she made an offer: “I’ll just dance for the lawyer. How about that?” After Amber walked out of the office, whatever had happened inside, Chastity’s boyfriend had adequate legal representation.

  Teresa’s parties were getting bigger—so big that they upstaged the business. Where they’d once lasted all weekend, now they started earlier in the week until it seemed like every day offered a chance to cop. Teresa moved seamlessly from pot to acid to ecstasy, then coke, then crack, then heroin, then meth. She’d order enough for everyone, as if ordering pizza. The ecstasy parties always got a little mystical. Crystal thought ecstasy opened her third eye. Once Crystal was giving Teresa a massage and started seeing a flash of light in Teresa’s back, and then she started seeing visions of what seemed to be Teresa’s life. Teresa went ballistic, screaming, “What the fuck!” After that, everyone wanted a reading.

  Kim’s first pull on a crack pipe happened at one of Teresa’s parties. Teresa had been the first to try it, as usual. Then she kept taking June’s coke and cooking it into crack, and June—the stuck-up one who used to say, “Crack, that’s the poor people’s drug”—eventually went all in. Then came Crystal and, finally, Kim, who fell in love. “I could work all the fucking time,” she said. One gram would last Kim for two days. She could work an entire weekend without crashing. The only problem with crack was how miserable you got when you started to come down. All the girls experimented with Xanax and other pills, anything to help them sleep off the hollow feeling.

  Whom Teresa liked best often depended on who did the drug she liked at the time. When she was into coke, she and Kim were best friends. When she moved on to crack, she and June were best friends. And when Teresa started on heroin, it was Amber’s turn. Amber wanted only crack at first—like her sister—but heroin snuggled up to her and held her tight. It numbed her, zoned her out. She started when Teresa had made a new connection, a dealer who would go to New York an
d bring back pills. One day the dealer showed Teresa and Amber how to shoot up. Heroin brought the parties to another level. The dealer went into convulsions once, and they stuck a wallet between his teeth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue. When the dealer’s girlfriend started OD’ing once, they had to do the same thing for her; for a little while, as they watched her shake, they considered dumping her at the ER and driving away.

  By then the drugs had fully upset the familial atmosphere at Coed Confidential. Kim was scooping up whatever coke was floating around at the parties and selling it on the side. Crystal left Teresa altogether and started a rival agency called Sensual Pleasure, specializing in happy-ending massages. And Amber was forced out by Teresa after too many complaints about her ripping off the johns—taking the payment and any drugs and just walking out.

  With nowhere else to go, Amber worked a little for Crystal. One night she went by Crystal’s place at the Governours Square Apartments, near Carolina Beach, and they smoked crack. Crystal performed a reading on Amber, looking into her past and seeing that she had been through something terrible. They talked about the rape and cried together. Crystal thought the drugs must have been to help ease the pain. She could relate: She didn’t want to deal with the stuff flashing in her head all the time, either.

  By dawn, the crack was gone, and they didn’t have anything to help them come down. Amber started crying again. She wanted to go out and get more. Crystal said they should stay there. Amber kept crying, so Crystal held her like a baby. Then Crystal started praying for her, telling her it was going to be okay. “Have you ever prayed before?” she asked Amber.