She smiles at him, but under her breath she says to me in Russian: “What a pig. I wonder if he oinks when he comes.”
“He can hear you,” I whisper.
“He can’t understand a word.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Look, he’s smiling. He thinks I’m telling you how handsome he is.”
The man sets his empty glass on the bar and crosses toward us. I think he wishes to be with Olena, so I stand up to make room for him on the couch. But it is my wrist he reaches for, and he stops me from leaving.
“Hello,” he says. “Do you speak English?”
I nod; my throat has gone too dry to answer. I can only gaze at him in dismay. Olena rises from the couch, flashes me a sympathetic look, and wanders away.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“I am… I am seventeen.”
“You look much younger.” He sounds disappointed.
“Hey Carl,” Mr. Desmond calls out. “Why don’t you take her for a little stroll?”
Already, the other two guests have chosen their companions. One of them is now leading Katya away, down the corridor.
“Any stateroom will do,” our host adds.
Carl stares at me. Then his hand tightens around my wrist, and he leads me down the corridor. He pulls me into a handsome stateroom, paneled with gleaming wood. I back away, my heart hammering as he locks the door. When he turns back to me, I see that his pants are already bulging.
“You know what to do.”
But I don’t; I have no idea what he expects, so I am shocked by the sudden blow. His slap sends me to my knees and I huddle at his feet, bewildered.
“Don’t you listen? You stupid slut.”
I nod, dropping my head and staring at the floor. Suddenly I understand what the game is, what he craves. “I’ve been very bad,” I whisper.
“You need to be punished.”
Oh god. Let this be over soon.
“Say it!” he snaps.
“I need to be punished.”
“Take off your clothes.”
Shaking now, terrified of being hit again, I obey. I unzip my dress, pull off my stockings, my underwear. I keep my gaze lowered; a good girl must be respectful. I am completely silent as I stretch out on the bed, as I open myself to him. No resistance, just subservience.
As he undresses, he stares at me, savoring his view of compliant flesh. I swallow my disgust when he climbs on top of me, his breath sharp with scotch. I close my eyes and concentrate on the growl of the engines, on the slap of water against the hull. I float above my body, feeling nothing as he thrusts into me. As he grunts and comes.
When he is finished, he does not even wait for me to dress. He simply rises, puts on his clothes, and walks out of the stateroom. Slowly, I sit up. The boat’s engines have quieted to a low purr. Looking out the window, I see that we are returning to land. The party is over.
By the time I finally creep from the stateroom, the boat is once again docked, and the guests have left. Mr. Desmond is at the bar sipping the last of the champagne, and the Mother is gathering together her girls.
“What did he say to you?” she asks me.
I shrug. I can feel Desmond’s eyes studying me, and I am afraid of saying the wrong thing.
“Why did he choose you? Did he say?”
“He only wanted to know how old I was.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s all he cared about.”
The Mother turns to Mr. Desmond, who has been watching us both with interest. “You see? I told you,” she says to him. “He always goes for the youngest one in the room. Doesn’t care what they look like. But he wants them young.”
Mr. Desmond thinks about this for a moment. He nods. “I guess we’ll just have to keep him happy.”
Olena wakes up to find me standing at the window, staring out through the bars. I have lifted the sash and cold air pours in, but I do not care. I want only to breathe in fresh air. I want to cleanse the evening’s poison from my lungs, my soul.
“It’s too cold,” Olena says. “Close the window.”
“I am suffocating.”
“Well, it’s freezing in here.” She crosses to the window and pulls it shut. “I can’t sleep.”
“Neither can I,” I whisper.
By the glow of moonlight that shines through the grimy window, she studies me. Behind us, one of the girls whimpers in her sleep. We listen to the sound of their breathing in the darkness, and suddenly there is not enough air left in the room for me. I am fighting to breathe. I push at the window, trying to raise it again, but Olena holds it shut.
“Stop it, Mila.”
“I’m dying!”
“You’re hysterical.”
“Please open it. Open it!” I’m sobbing now, clawing at the window.
“You want to wake up the Mother? You want to get us in trouble?”
My hands have cramped into painful claws, and I cannot even clutch the sash. Olena grabs my wrists.
“Listen,” she says. “You want air? I’ll get you some air. But you have to be quiet. The others can’t know about it.” I am too panicked to care what she’s saying. She grabs my face in her hands, forces me to look at her. “You did not see this,” she whispers. Then she pulls something from her pocket, something that gleams faintly in the darkness.
A key.
“How did you-”
“Shhh.” She snatches the blanket from her cot and pulls me past the other girls, to the door. There she pauses to glance back at them, to confirm they are all asleep, then slips the key into the lock. The door swings open and she pulls me through, into the hallway.
I am stunned. Suddenly I’ve forgotten that I am suffocating, because we are out of our prison; we are free. I turn toward the stairs to flee, but she yanks me back sharply.
“Not that way,” she says. “We can’t get out. There’s no key to the front door. Only the Mother can open it.”
“Then where?”
“I’ll show you.”
She pulls me down the hallway. I can see almost nothing. I put my trust entirely in her hands, letting her lead me through a doorway. Moonlight glows through the window, and she glides like a pale ghost across the bedroom, picks up a chair, and quietly sets it down in the center of the room.
“What are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer, but climbs onto the chair and reaches toward the ceiling. A trap door creaks open above her head, and a ladder unfolds downward.
“Where does it go?” I ask.
“You wanted fresh air, didn’t you? Let’s go find some,” she says, and climbs the ladder.
I follow her up the rungs and scramble through the trap door, into an attic. Through a single window, moonlight shines in, and I see the shadows of boxes and old furniture. The air is stale up here; it is not fresh at all. She opens the window and climbs through. Suddenly it strikes me: this window has no bars. When I poke my head out, I understand why. The ground is too far below us. There is no escape here; to jump would be suicide.
“Well?” says Olena. “Aren’t you going to come out, too?”
I turn my head and see that she is sitting on the roof, lighting a cigarette. I look down again at the ground, so far away, and my hands go clammy at the thought of climbing out onto the ledge.
“Don’t be such a scared rabbit,” says Olena. “It’s nothing. The worst that can happen is you fall and break your neck.”
Her cigarette glows, and I smell the smoke as she casually exhales a breath. She is not nervous at all. At that moment, I want to be exactly like her. I want to be fearless.
I climb out the window, inch my way along the ledge, and with a heavy sigh of relief, settle down beside her on the roof. She shakes out the blanket and throws it over our shoulders so that we sit snug together, under a warm mantle of wool.
“It’s my secret,” she said. “You’re the only one I trust to keep it.”
“Why me?”
“Katya would sell me out for a box of chocolates. And that Nadia is too stupid to keep her mouth shut. But you’re different.” She looks at me, a gaze that is thoughtful. Almost tender. “You may be a scared rabbit. But you’re not stupid, and you’re not a traitor.”