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So, I wasn’t fooling anyone.
He smirks, his mouth the only thing visible from under the shadows. “You will begin your work tonight. Enjoy your evening.”
Then the women drag me out of the room and whisk me away down a long corridor. At the end, there is a room where ten other women are being coiffed and primped for whatever is coming tonight.
I still smart between my legs where I was “examined” by the turd, using his fingers. I’m no idiot. I might not be able to read paper, but I’m perfectly capable of reading people. My virginity is being sold tonight.
“Ack, dearie, what a shame about your hair,” one of the three women says, tugging painfully at the short ends. “And dirty, too.”
My hair is only long enough to frame my face. Mother always told me to hide my beauty, which included keeping my hair short and my face dirty. I scrubbed both to come here and sell myself as a slave.
As they strip me of my clothes and shove me back into a large tub to scrub me within an inch of my life, I realize my efforts were not good enough.
“Rouge?” one of the women asks. While the other ten girls are smiling and tittering with each other, I am feeling about as ornery as a drowned cat and nervous to boot.
The third woman grabs me roughly by the chin and turns my face this way and that. “No. No rouge. They don’t usually like that sort of thing, anyway.”
They?
“Who-?”
One of the women plugs my nose and plunges my head underwater, then proceeds to keep scrubbing my hair while I cough.
As the rest of the dirt falls away, the other girls start looking at me. I fold my arms over my pink-tipped breasts, but apparently those are dirty, too, so my attempt at modesty doesn’t last long.
“Ugh, these fingernails! Whathaveyou done, girlie?” The second woman clucks at the ragged state of my nails.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have bitten the last one off before I came.
“False nails,” the second woman calls.
Yet another woman runs up, and then garish – or at least I think so – bright pink false nails are pressed over my real ones with some goo that hardens as it dries.
“They won’t like it,” the third woman sighs.
The second woman shrugs. “It’s better than the mess underneath them.”
The women nod to each other. Then they pull me from the tub and dry me, poke me, prod me, and shove me into a dress that leaves nothing – absolutely nothing – to the imagination. It fits my body tighter than a glove, and the fabric is diaphanous, giving peek-a-boo glimpses of my skin and other bits.
“I’m meant to wear this?” I gasp.
“Maybe not for long,” the fourth woman snickers, but the other three, who are older, stare her down and she falls silent.
I swallow. Well, I had sold this, hadn’t I? The last and only thing I’d ever had to sell.
Mother and Jamie, though. They are going to be okay.
“Ah, finishing touch,” the first woman says.
She drops a dark veil over my head.
“I can’t see!” I protest.
“You don’t need to,” the first woman says. “We’ll get you where you’re going.”
I, indeed, stumble over something as they move me through the room.
“Honestly, Carissa, a hairbrush on the floor?” one of the women scolds, then navigates me back around the obstacle.
