She’s over that now. She comes and goes like a ghost, the same way she did in her house with her parents before she ever met Justin. Now she sees the new girls come in with hope in their eyes and takes any opportunity to show them how stupid they are, were. Welcome home.
Farah waits for the other girls to finish making their food at the small stove littered with old pots caked with sauces and sticky noodles, surrounded by takeout containers. None of them care to clean, despite the roaches that scurry behind the stove. When Farah first got here, she cleaned all the pots she could, sometimes during her assigned nap times. She’d throw away the containers and scrub the counters hard with a dingy sponge, barely moving the grime and grease. She did this until she learned, truly, where she was. Not just in physical space, but where she was stuck, inside.
Farah imagines herself as the other woman, living the life she was meant to live. At fifteen, Farah is sure she’s already fucked that woman’s husband. She’ll be happy to tell her so, if they ever meet.
Chickie woke up in a strange room. Across from her, a strange girl sighed in her sleep. This could be anywhere, and that girl could be any of the ones Chickie had met — other versions of herself: runaways, caretakers of drunk or high parents, abandoned or otherwise without a family.
Sleep was the only thing that gave Chickie relief. It kept her from hearing the other foster children, the twin toddlers screaming in their cribs. It was the only way to escape the television playing its gaudy reality shows throughout the night, the disembodied voices and music, the sickeningly sweet jingles that frightened her. There were too many sounds, colors, facial expressions, and products to keep track of in that perfect square. It made her believe the world was too overpowering, too complicated, and that she should just give up.
She realized her face was wet, her dark hair damp and matted. She’d dreamed of the past: Farah warming an eyeliner with a match and letting Chickie rim her eyes with the melted black. Riding in Justin’s backseat, sipping whiskey, then watching porn while his parents sat outside the room eating dinner. She’d dreamed of her mother, standing in the kitchen in a white dress, chopping nothing, then crawling toward her with the knife, like a baby.
Chickie lay in bed remembering the days before she’d been taken away, and thinking of all the days since. All the foster homes she’d been shuffled to, and the one she was in currently.
Now that she was awake, she felt greedy for that sleep that had come so easily the night before. The way she’d collapsed into her bed like it was a lake and she was sinking to the very bottom. To stop these thoughts, she threw the cover off her body and sat up. She had to leave. She wasn’t sure where she’d go or what would change, but she had to stop living this way.
She found Justin — and Farah — on the same road where he’d found Farah months before, right next to Shotwell. It was as if he’d planned this all — had seen this coming from the day the girls were born.
Sergeant Correal kicked open the door to the parlor’s back room. It was dark and smoky, but he could see a hall with a row of showers at one end, closed doors at the other. Men were lined up in the shower stalls, looking at the opened door with frantic faces. It was the typical setup Correal had seen in these salons. The men chose a girl and then showered, a sign of the owner’s “protecting” the girls from disease, since the johns refused to wear condoms. Steam from the showers pushed through the crowded entrance, carrying the smell of blood and sex and something putrid, like flood rot and bayou.
Past the stalls was a small kitchen with covered-up windows and a filthy counter stacked with pots, knives, and open food containers. As Correal’s eyes adjusted to the light, the other officers moved in beside him, and he realized there were two girls immediately to his right. They stood behind glass — a display window that revealed their faces and the upper halves of their torsos, one in garden-pink lingerie and the other in a skimpy black slip. Waiting to be chosen.
He thought of buying lunch for his daughters at a fast-food drive-thru a few days before. The window was the same height, with young women standing behind it. He saw his daughters’ faces in their place: his seven-year-old in leggings and a tank top with cartoon characters, his sixteen-year-old in faded jeans and an Astros T-shirt.
Correal looked at the two girls here, both backed against the wall. They didn’t seem afraid. Instead, their faces, masked by long fake lashes that fanned out when they blinked, glittery charcoal eyeliner, dark lipstick, were held frozen in an expression that seemed prepared for the worst. A sort of going-away glaze over their eyes. Correal was familiar with this look.
Later, when they’d been removed from display, one of the girls asked him, “How did you know I was here?”
He’d been about to say something like, Girls, you’re okay now. We’re here to help, or some other nonsense that shrunk beneath the weight of this place and its horror, its revolting smell. Then his gaze rested on her face and he recognized her as the girl who had disappeared from his neighborhood last year. His daughter’s friend. He searched his memory, past images of other such busts — black lace panties, a skirt lifted, flesh on his hands — and found her name: Chickie.
Her broad cheekbones were cut up, one side bruised purple. The lips made full with red lipstick turned hot pink in the neon light from the signs that said, Massage Alegría. The same kind of sign had glowed over him thirty years before, in this same kind of place, where his father took him for this eighteenth birthday. With a deep sinking feeling in his chest, as if some bottom had dropped beneath him, he wondered for the first time how old that woman — that sweet, delicious woman — had been. He looked at Chickie. She couldn’t have been a girl, could she? He shook his head until he realized what he was doing and stopped.
He answered her question with, “I would’ve come sooner if I did.” He knew better than to reach out or move close.
“How long will I be in jail?” the other girl asked. Her eyes were like ponds: no trace of fear or surprise — just a glassy sort of dreaminess, her dilated pupils reflecting the neon. Despite himself, Correal imagined being a customer to this child, taking her into one of the small rooms, and what would happen, however gentle or violent, and how those pond-like eyes would stay the same throughout. I’m a bastard for even thinking about this.
He remembered, now, the last time he saw Chickie. She’d been sitting with his daughter on her bed, laughing, when he opened the bedroom door to tell them to go to sleep. After he’d walked away, he heard them whisper, howl with laughter, and continue murmuring throughout the night. In the morning, he’d watched them from the living room window, looking over the backyard where they jumped on the trampoline. The way they flung themselves into the air had made him ache in his chest, his throat. Their unfiltered joy as their limbs kicked toward the wide sky, their faces in full sun. When will this end for them? he’d thought. Two years? Three? “Take a look at these girls,” he’d said to his wife. He’d watched for several minutes, making sure they didn’t fall.
“We’re here to help you,” he said to these girls now. “Not send you to jail.”
This was Farah, he now recalled, another girl from his daughter’s school. She looked bored and uninterested, with a sly pinch in her upper lip.