by Debra Dunbar
“Today is a spa day ladies,” she announced with false cheerfulness. Setting two bags on the floor, she pulled out a box and tossed it at Pistol. “You shall go first. We’ll need to pre-bleach that hair to strip the blue. Go get started while I work on the others.”
Pistol rose and adjusted her towel with a nervous glance at the guards. Then she headed to the bath area, reading the back of the box.
The woman pulled another two boxes out and tossed one to Pillow and one to me. “You two as well. Go dye some hair.”
Pillow and I both stood, Pillow’s towel slipping a bit to reveal more than she probably wanted. I guess Sugar had been right. The woman wasn’t a plastic surgeon, or a real demon, whatever that meant. Hair dye, nail polish, and some padded bras would thankfully be the extent of our “improvements.” It was a relief. Trying to figure out how to get the nine of us past the three guards and out of the warehouse to safety was enough of a problem without worrying about some mythical creature trying to take our souls.
“Those two need bigger boobs,” Pockmarks said, pointing to Tasha and Lacy. “And bigger boobs for the blue -haired one as well.”
I lingered, adjusting my towel. Push-up bra. With padding. That’s what he meant. That had to be what he meant, because the alternative was ridiculous. They couldn’t do plastic surgery right here in the middle of nowhere in a warehouse. How the heck would we be expected to heal from that within five days? No, there were probably a whole bunch of padded bras in those plastic bags.
“And when you’re done, clear up that one’s complexion, and do something about that one’s ass. I don’t know, make it more perky or something,” Pockmarks continued, pointing to Sugar and Baa.
Bras, some acne cream, and one of those lift-and-enhance pairs of undies. Still, I lingered and saw something flicker in the woman’s ebony eyes at Pockmark’s words. Anger. Then resignation. “Anything else?”
“The usual. Cheekbones. Eyes. They need to be top-rate. This auction needs to draw the big spenders.”
Make-up. Bras and acne cream. Fancy foundational garments. I continued to stall, watching the woman for her response. Her gaze flickered to me, then narrowed. I made a bit more haste heading to the bathroom door, fiddling with the box of dye as I walked.
“I can fix the mild acne and the other minor cosmetic flaws” she said. “But there’s no need to do anything extensive. You got a good batch this time. They are beautiful. I don’t want to mar their natural beauty, and the boss doesn’t want to have a group of porn-star looking girls on the auction block.” She waved a dismissive hand and turned to approach Sugar who was watching her with a wary gaze.
Pockmarks put his hand on the woman’s arm. His fingers tightened enough to dent her flesh. I stopped and held my breath. She was tiny and he looked like he could snap her in two, but I got the feeling if they came to blows, Pockmarks wouldn’t be walking away from the fight.
“I’m taking pictures for the sale ads in three hours and these girls need to be ready. Auction’s in less than five days and they have to look perfect. Bigger boobs. Lift that one’s ass. And you will do any cosmetic stuff you need to do to make them worth a million bucks. Cheekbones, jaw angles, longer legs, nose jobs. Everything.”
I saw the woman’s mouth thin, the muscle in her jaw twitch. “There are repercussions. It’s not like high-end cosmetics or plastic surgery. I do these things and…and people eventually die.”
I heard Kitten choke back a frightened sob.
“You’re better than plastic surgery. Faster too. And they’re going to die anyway. They’ll probably die before anything you do causes any problems. Boss says do it, so do it.” Pockmark and the others turned to leave. “Three hours.” The men filed out the door. I heard the lock slide home.
Were they putting on a show to scare us? Because we really didn’t need any more to be terrified. Bras and make-up and hair dye. That was all they were going to do. All this people-dying talk was just to keep us on edge and make sure we didn’t try to get out of line. Well, they were wrong. We were strong, determined woman, and together we were going to escape, to survive. They could try all they wanted to scare us, but a cornered animal was even more vicious and desperate. Frighten us, make us feel like we had nothing left to lose, and just see what we could do.
The woman turned, her eyes meeting mine. There was more than suppressed anger in her gaze, there was regret and…sympathy. Then in an instant it was gone, and the woman seemed harder than a slab of granite. “Go dye your hair. Now. The next time I see you, you had better be a blonde.”
I scurried through the door and into the shower area while the woman barked instructions to the others. Inside, Pistol had already mixed up the bleach solution in a plastic bottle and was beginning to apply it. Pillow was staring at her box, a resigned expression on her face.
“Do you know how much money I paid to get my hair this shade of blue?” Pistol lowered the bottle, looked at herself in the mirror, gently touching a finger to the dark bruise on her cheekbone. With a sigh she continued squirting the white liquid on her head. “More than a hundred bucks. And I like it short. If they wanted a bunch of blondes, why didn’t they just take girls who were already blonde? There were plenty of women in New York City to choose from.”
“I’ve never dyed my hair,” Pillow jabbed a finger at the box. “I’m going to look like a cheap two-bit tramp as a blonde. They should do Kitten instead. At least her natural hair color is closer to this.”
I looked at my box and saw that the demon woman had picked a strawberry blonde color for me, no doubt worrying the red would be too difficult to completely strip out. I was surprised she didn’t have me pre-bleaching like Pistol.
“Come on. Let’s start dyeing before she comes in here and beats us or something.” I’d been joking, but as soon as I said the words I heard a scream of pain from the room and the sound of someone crying. We all froze and turned to stare at the door.
Bras and make-up. Bras and make-up. I remembered the guards beating Pistol and shivered. Pillow shot me a nervous glance, and tore open her box with shaking hands. We hurriedly mixed the solution and slathered it on our hair, stuffing the gloves and empty bottles back into the boxes.
None of us had watches or phones and there wasn’t a clock anywhere to be seen, so we sat on our towels on the cold tile floor and took turns counting. We hadn’t eaten last night or this morning, and I could tell the girls were starting to feel light-headed. After more than twenty-four hours without even bread, they were weak. If they didn’t feed us soon, one or more of us was going to be passing out.
But not me. I felt…fine. Strong. Almost as though I didn’t even need food. It must have been some lingering effects of the heroin, I figured. Which meant whenever those effects wore off I’d be in the same boat as the rest of these girls. We had to get out of here. Now. Before we were too weak to help ourselves. Before whatever I was on wore off and I was too weak to help them.
There was another scream. Pillow lost count and turned to me, her eyes huge. “What is she doing to them?”
“I’m guessing that she’s making their boobs bigger,” Pistol commented dryly. “Be glad you’ve got a big rack. I’m probably next as soon as I’m done with my hair.”
She probably was, from what that guard had said. I looked down at my chest, wondering why no one had insisted I get an augmentation. I wasn’t much bigger than Pistol.
“She’s just got bras and make-up and stuff in those bags,” I said with faltering confidence.
“Then why are they screaming?” Pillow asked.
“She’s…she’s probably hitting them because they’re not cooperating.”
“No, they’d cooperate.” Pillow echoed my doubts. “Everyone is so scared right now that no one is going to sass back or try anything.”
“Then she just likes hurting people.” I was really grasping at straws now. “Or she’s trying to scare and intimidate us, like the guards are. They’ll make us think they’re going to k
ill us, or hurt us real bad. They’ll make us think that woman is some kind of supernatural creature, a mythical monster, just so we don’t try to escape. They beat Pistol, broke Tasha’s arm and did other things to her. They’re trying to beat us down, to make us so scared that we’ll do anything they want.”
“Well, it’s working,” Pillow said. “I’d rather screw twenty guys a day than have them work me over with those sticks, or worse.”
“Not me.” Pistol glared at the door. “Yeah, I’m scared. I don’t want to be beat again. I don’t want to be raped, or sliced up, or have my bones broken, but I’m not going to give in. We’re getting out of here. Even if they break every bone in my body, I’ll still fight them. I’ll still try to escape if I have the chance.”
“Good. You do that.” There was another scream and Pillow huddled in on herself, her shoulders trembling.
“Okay, change of subject.” Pistol scooted to lean her back against the wall. “I graduated high school a year early, and started college last fall. My birthday’s in August, so I’ll be nineteen going into my sophomore year. I can’t wait to go back. I love living in a dorm, all the classes. I love it.”
It worked. Pillow raised her head, eyeing Pistol with interest. “College. You must be smart. And rich.”
The other girl shook her head. “Not so rich. My mom teaches school. My dad is an electrician. We’ve got a small house, but I had my own bedroom with posters all over the walls. It helps being the only girl. My two brothers had to share a bedroom. Mine is barely big enough for a twin-sized bed and a little dresser, but it was all mine.”
A smile trembled at the edge of Pillow’s lips. “Wow. White picket fence and all.”
Pistol nodded. “Pretty much. Every weekend we’d go for a family hike. When I was little I loved it. I’d find all these cool rocks along the path and make my dad carry half of them for me. Mom would bring a nature book and we’d look up birds and flowers that we saw along the trails. My brothers would run off and sword fight with sticks.” She laughed. “Half the time they’d come back with poison ivy. When I got older, I never wanted to go. I wanted to hang with my friends instead, or just sit in my room on my phone, but Mom and Dad always insisted. They said we were all growing up too fast, that soon we’d be gone and there would be no more family hikes.” Pistol paused, her voice growing soft and misty. “I’d give anything to go on a stupid hike with them again, to pick up rocks and look up flowers in the book, and watch my brothers be total weirdos. I’d give anything to do that just one more time.”
Images flickered through my mind—her memories, not mine. Pot roast with potatoes and little carrots on a big oak table set with colorful plates. A tiny, cookie-cutter split level house on a postage-stamp-sized lawn. A woman’s warm voice pointing out Mountain Bluets while boys shouted gleefully in the distance.
“Tell us about college.” I urged, trying to break the painful nostalgia and feeling of loss and bring the conversation back to a more light-hearted tone.
She smiled. “College is amazing. It was like I was finally a grown-up. I loved my classes. I made new friends. I was in a big city with all this glitz and glamour, so far from my little home town. It felt like a fairy tale.”
“But it’s summer,” Pillow interjected. “Why were you still in New York and not home with your parents? Isn’t that what college people do? Go home for the summers?”
The girl’s smile faded. “Yeah. If I’d been home, I guess this wouldn’t have happened to me. But I stayed in New York for the summer. The work-study job I had during the school year offered to keep me on, so I stayed. I love the city. It’s so different than home, so alive. There’s something surprising around every corner—little out-of-the-way curio shops, unusual ethnic groceries. Even the graffiti looks like works of art.”
“Are we talking about the same New York, here?” Pillow teased. “You do realize there are probably drug deals going down in that cute curio shop, and the graffiti are gang tags showing their territory?”
Pistol shook her head with a sad smile. “I know. Naïve college kid from the sticks, looking at the big city through rose-colored glasses. I wanted to get my degree in social work, and I was full of blind optimism about how I was going to save the world, how I would pat some gangbanger on the back and suddenly he’d give up his lawless and violent ways. I should have been scared to death to go to some of the places my friends and I partied at. I thought I was safe, like a saint in holy armor walking through the slums and blessing the poor.”
“Saints get killed.” Pistol shot the other girl an ironic glance, her arched eyebrow making her look far older than sixteen. “That’s how they get to be saints, you know. Somebody kills them.”
“Yeah.” Pistol laughed. “If someone had told me a week ago that I’d be in a warehouse in God-knows-where, beaten, forced to dye my hair, and about to be sold into sex slavery, I would have laughed my head off.”
“When I first saw you, I thought maybe you were a runaway like me.” Pillow said, shooting the door a nervous glance as we heard another scream.
Pistol shook her head. “My family in Swansboro is frantically looking for me right now. Friends at college probably have flyers up everywhere. There will be missing person’s reports, rewards, and everything. If I could just get out of here and get to a phone, my folks would have the cavalry riding in to rescue us in under an hour. All of us.” She turned to Pillow with a smile. “If you don’t have anywhere to go, you can stay with me at my folks’ house. You can stay for the summer until I go back to school. Have my room, and I’ll take the couch.”
“Go on weekend hikes with your family?” Pillow grinned. “That sounds fun. I’d miss the city, though. I’m not sure how much I’d like living the white-picket-fence life.”
Pistol’s background was so different than the other girls’. Tasha and Baa had been lured to the country with the promise of jobs. Sugar and Mess were already prostitutes, Pillow a runaway, me an addict, and Kitten caught up in an internet scam. If Pistol was right, her family might be the ones that got us found. Although I wasn’t sure they’d be in time to save us all. They might not even be in time to save their own daughter.
“So, how did you end up here?” I asked her. “I mean, why you? You seem too high-risk a target for human traffickers to grab.”
She shrugged. “Honestly? I think it was a mistake. There’s this seedy club that some friends and I wanted to go to. Last thing I remember I was sipping a margarita and feeling insanely, fall-down drunk even though I only had two drinks. Next thing I know, I wake up in a warehouse chained to a bed. I guess they thought with the blue hair, and me being in that club, that I was someone who wouldn’t be missed.”
“Then there is hope….” Pillow’s voice trailed off and she smiled at the two of us. I knew what she was thinking. Pistol’s family was the middle-class American stereotype. If they went to the police, they’d be believed. Maybe they’d track her down and save us all. I didn’t want to burst her hopes with the reality that they’d need to do it fast if we were going to be sold in five days and split up all over the place to our “owners.”
“Yeah,” Pistol patted the girl’s shoulder, but I could see the shadow of doubt in her eyes. “There’s hope. I know my family is looking for me.”
Pillow shook her head. “I don’t have anyone looking for me. At least, I hope I don’t. I doubt if that foster family they stuck me with ever reported me missing. They’re probably still getting checks for me.”
“Your mom ran off?” Pistol asked. “And……you said your dad was in jail?” She winced as she said the last bit.
“Mom ran off when I was little. I was born here, in Dallas. Dad says after I was born, Mom had a real hard time of things. She cried a lot and one day when I was about two he came home and she was just gone. We never heard from her again. I don’t know if she’s even alive or not.” Pillow looked down at her hands. “I don’t have anything of hers. Dad threw it all away when she left. I don’t even know what
she looked like, or what her name is.”
Or if she ever thinks of me. Does she ever think of me? Does she ever wonder what happened to the daughter she left behind?
The words slid into my mind and I turned to look at Pillow. I saw her father, loving but overworked and clueless about how to care for a child. I saw her climbing up on the counters at age two to put bread in the toaster for her breakfast because her father had already left for work. She’d be locked in all day, but he always left her with food and she’d felt safe. There had been warm blankets and stuffed animals, and coloring books, and when he came home after work they’d snuggle on the couch together and watch television. A neighbor found out and called social services. Pillow had hidden under the bed, terrified while they banged on the door. After that, an old woman stayed with her during the day, sleeping as Pillow colored and got her own meals.
“Dad’s in jail,” she continued, unaware that I’d been sensing her most personal memories. “He wrote to me a few times. I think he gets out in a couple of years.”
He just hadn’t come home one night. She’d gone everywhere—even to check at the hospital—then found out from one of his friends that he’d gotten caught in a drug bust. There was no money for bail, and with him in jail there was no money for rent or food. In two months she was out on the streets. There she had lived for a few weeks until she got picked up and put into foster care.
With all that, the thing that saddened her the most was that she had nothing from her childhood. All their belongings had been put out on the curb. She’d shoved a stuffed bear in a bag with some clothes when she’d been evicted. It was all she’d had, the only thing tying her to those nights on the couch with her father, those imaginary tea parties during the day when she’d been all alone. The guy who’d come to New York with her, the one who supposedly loved her, had taken her bag and she hadn’t seen it since. They’d probably thrown it away.
I drew a ragged breath, struggling to keep the tears down. It hurt. I couldn’t block Pillow’s memories, her emotions, and they tore through me like a wildfire. The girl sat on the floor, her hair wet with dye, telling her story with complete composure, even nonchalance, but I felt the fear and loss that boiled underneath.