Another night.

Another chance to stare into the mirror and argue without words with the ugly-pretty girl who stared back.

I capped the lipstick, thought about my sore asshole, set my foundation aside, remembered the analytical stare of the father as he watched his son working to piston inside of me, and then snatched up my hairbrush. I began to brush. The father’s eyes cut through the time that divided us, telling (me) his son to go faster. I brushed faster. The sound of the slapping impacts at my thighs punctuated the commands, the background chorus of the boy’s grunts. Faster, faster, faster! I brushed faster, remembering the moment I realized that the boy’s grunts sounded more like whimpers; more like the early precursors to crying. That wasn’t how he wanted it to be. It wasn’t how I wanted it to be. Faster, faster, faster!

“You want her to feel it, don’t you, son?”

“Oh don’t you worry, you son of a bitch!” I muttered back at my reflection. “I felt it. I felt it where it mattered.”

Because, while my heart had been broken enough to know just how the shards fit back together—“Cannot say it’s broken if I can glue it back together,” as my mother used to say—I knew what it was I was feeling the moment that poor boy’s heart broke. I imagined he had a girl he liked back at his school; maybe a pretty little thing just a few years into her development—perhaps a pair of mounds that weren’t quite breasts; two things that were more punctuated by her nipples than vice-versa—and just beginning to feel a variety of itches in her panties. The itches of the hair that society would sneer at for the rest of her life, and the itches—deeper still—that her pubescent mind would feel conflicted about wanting to scratch. I thought of this maybe-girl—this not-quite-real fantasy of the one who had caught that boy’s eye—and how it was her that he’d been hoping would occupy the moment I’d been paid to rob from him the prior night. How many nights had he comforted himself to the thought of her and the night they might someday share?

God knew it wasn’t you he was imagining when he fantasized about that moment, I thought angrily at the girl in the not-a-window, and she flinched back.

“Faster! Faster! Faster!” the phantom-father ordered the two of us.

And so I brushed faster.

“It shouldn’t have been you,” I chastised myself, replaying those not-grunts that had resounded behind me. “It wasn’t yours to take!”

“Faster!”

My head was beginning to hurt where the teeth of the brush dragged across my scalp.

“It wasn’t—” I began again, but then another voice joined the awful song in my head, and I repeated its horrible truth: “You a whore or not?” The girl in the not-a-window stared back, defeated—too embarrassed to answer—and I remembered the nightmare that had woken me up earlier that day. I nodded, and the girl staring back at me mirrored the gesture. “You got me,” we whispered to each other in unison.

“BY ALL THE QUEEFING CUNTS OF AMERICA, MIA!” Candy bellowed, banging on the bathroom door. “WHAT”—Bang!—“IS”—Bang! Bang!—“TAKING YOU”—Bang!—“SO GODDAM LONG?”

A billion apologies, oh glorious whore-goddess, I thought back in that instant, I was just ripping my skull raw under the command of a skeevy father who I’m pretty sure whacked off to the sight of his crying son’s stolen virginity! Just let me powder my pussy like you showed me and we’ll be off down the yellow brick road, just you, Scarecrow, and Lion, and me, the Tin-Whore—just aching for a heart that’s NOT glued together with tears and semen!

What I said, however, was, “Just powdering my pussy like you showed me.”

Whoever said the CliffNotes version of fine literature was cheating never had to face the wrath of an angry hooker.

Or, I thought of T-Built with a shudder, an angry pimp.

“Well give the meat-wallet a good slap for me, okay?” she called back, her voice a great deal calmer than a moment earlier, “Remind her who’s boss!”

“If it’s the boss who’s supposed to be slapping my pussy,” I muttered, not caring if she heard or not, “then I’d do best to keep my hands off myself.”

Head still aching from the aggressive round of brushing, I stowed away my stuff and hurried out to let Candy have the bathroom. As we traded places, I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of routine she had with the girl she saw staring back in her not-a-window.

I made myself sad by getting excited when the bus managed to drop us off at our actual stop. The flood of euphoria that came as an immediate and unplanned response to the sight of our corner just a half-block away as the bus groaned to a stop carried a secondary thought that went something like this:

Your life has reached a point of such absolute and complete shit that when the smallest, simplest things go right—in this case: having public transportation successfully dump you off at the corner where you’ll be selling more blowjobs, robbed virginities, and rough anal poundings—your dumb ass actually celebrates it. What’s next, Mia? You gonna think it’s your birthday when a John’s condom doesn’t break and knock you up? You gonna play the lottery when a hundred-dollar fuck doesn’t rip up your insides? You really are just a stupid, stupid whore, aren’t you? And, what’s more, that’s all you’ll ever be! Now off with you, stupid whore, because there’s plenty more shitty ‘rights’ to celebrate, and there’s T-Built, himself, to no-doubt deliver another!

Like the thought wasn’t bad enough on its own, the observation at the end—that of the one-and-only monster who’d all-but ripped me from my blossoming life and plopped me on that very corner standing there, waiting for us—had all the immediate sadness and depression taking an instant backseat to panic and dread. In the few months I’d been working with Candy on that corner, T-Built had only shown up five times in person. It was a rare and justifiably cringe-worthy event, because he only did so for one of two reasons: he felt that one, if not both, of us were holding out on him or he had what he called a “special” job for one, if not both, of us. In cases of the first, there was guaranteed beatings and the very high likelihood of a rape—to “remind us,” as he put it, what it was we were made for—and, in cases of the second, we got to look forward to playing the role of party favors to some prospective clients.

The previous month had marked a potential contract for one of the city’s biggest dealers to carry T-Built’s (and only T-Built’s) product. The deal, which we were told represented the sort of money that “whores ain’t got sense enough to imagine,” meant enough to him to pull us off the streets and act as the dealer’s private playthings for an entire weekend. Deciding to test the offer to its fullest extent, the dealer had gone ahead and organized a gangbang, certain that T-Built would, eventually, tell him that he’d gone too far with his girls.

T-Built, smiling the entire time, had said no such thing.

After the dealer and his crew—something in the realm of twenty-or-so men, I remembered—had cycled through at least five times, they began inviting in strangers. The dealer had remarked that the offer was to “secure a connection” with potential buyers, but I, even through the haze of tears and other hindering fluids, could see that he was still testing T-Built and his offer.

But T-Built and his offer remained solid the entire time.

There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t ache from the memory of that weekend.

Begrudgingly, I realized that I was hoping he thought we were holding back on him. And that desire reawakened the other thought, which gloated in my head that, yes, life was pretty much the worst kind of shit when you were hoping for a circumstance wherein being beaten and possibly raped was the better of two options. Then, worse yet, I realized that a part of me was actually celebrating the opportunity to gloat about such things to the rest of me. Cursing inwardly, I reminded myself that we—God! Am I really starting to think of myself as “we” now?—were supposed to be in this together.

Only as we stepped up in front of T-Built did I realize that Candy had taken hold of my hand and was beginning to squeeze it.

We, being trained to do so, stayed quiet.

T-Built smiled at us as one would smile at a pair of obedient dogs who knowingly sat before their master to await another command.

Just a couple of lowly bitches, I thought to myself.

Our pimp held the silence like a treasured thing. He simply grinned, shaking his head—an oscillating fan with a leering, lecherous face in place of a cooling breeze—between the two of us, seeming to dare us to disobey our training and speak before him. We did not speak. Finally, drawing in a satisfied inhale, something between the sound one might make over a pleasant aroma and a post-orgasmic breath, he spoke:

“I have an important job for you two tomorrow.”

And, just like that, any satisfaction I might have felt at our bus dropping us off at our stop fizzled and was gone like spit on a hot sidewalk.

The phantom sting of ejaculate made my left eye twitch. In the brief moment between that winking spasm, the entire weekend of being one-half of the center of focus for what felt like a citywide gangbang flashed before me like the world’s fastest, most poorly scripted porno. Somewhere in my subconscious I heard myself think that, at least in the pornos, they found better looking guys who seemed to know what they were doing—being ugly and of mediocre size, as it turned out, made for overly aggressive “scenes,” and I almost made myself laugh with the curious mental detour that maybe I should have let myself be abducted by a pornographer rather than a pimp.

T-Built, as though he could read my thoughts, narrowed his eyes at me. I more felt the chill of his focus than saw it, and I straightened the moment I did; a loyal soldier at about-face.

“Something to say?” he asked.

I shook my head.

He held his gaze on me for another ten seconds—I counted—and I felt myself shrink an entire inch for every one of them. It was a gaze that didn’t so much meet my eye as it stood aggressively before it, refusing to shake its hand or even offer it the courtesy of a nod; his gaze had no more desire to meet mine than a king has desire to meet the man who scrapes the shit off the streets at night. He looked at me like I was old food, something he might have to consider throwing away; like I wasn’t ever really wanted, anyway—just something grabbed on a whim that wouldn’t be remembered once it was in the trash. He looked at me like I was a whore.

And nothing more.

And, what’s more, that’s all you’ll ever be!

“You a whore or not?”

If ever I felt a glimmer of doubt at those thoughts and those words, the way T-Built looked at me made short work of it. It was only because of his unchallenged rule for absolute silence that I didn’t fold in on every instinct and say “Yes, Master.”

And that that instinct existed within me at all made me furious at everyone and everything—made me furious at the world, at all the Johns, at the Carrion Crew and T-Built, at my brother, and, most of all, at myself.

And then Candy squeezed my hand, and I somehow understood the meaning behind that simple gesture:

“Your survival is how you fight.”

Whether she’d said it to me sometime before or if it was just the sort of stunning profundity I’d come to expect from her I couldn’t be certain, but it worked all the same. I let him finish the long, cold look, decide that, yes, I still had worth for the time being, and finally—FINALLY!—look away.

“We’re hosting a fund-raiser tomorrow night, and we need”—he seemed to choke on the next word and started to clear his throat, the sound coming out as a confusing hybrid of a cough and a laugh—“pleasant displays to saunter around. There will be lots of potential business partners, clients, recruits…” he trailed off and rolled his hand on his wrist in a “and so on and so forth”-gesture, his eyes rolling in a matching-yet-contradicting “who gives a shit”-fashion. “It’s all more high-brow than I like and much more than you’re fit for, but the gears of business must be greased all the same. Normally I have a set of girls trained specifically for events like these—the sort who can suck a dick while wearing diamonds, rubies, and thousand-dollar dresses without ever posing a risk to the valuables—but they’re unavailable and I’m in something of a pinch for time.”

“Unavailable?” Candy said, breaking the sacred silence with a worried tone. “You mean Tonya and Stacia, don’t you? How are they unavailable?”

“You’d better not be implying that you’re unwilling to take the job, whore!” T-Built said with a snarl, turning on her with all the intent to strike her save for the raising of his hand.

Candy winced all the same and quickly shook her head. “N-no, sir. Not at all. I’m just… I worry for the other girls—look out for them, you know?—since we’re all working together and such.”

T-Built laughed in the same way an adult laughs at a child’s joke—not really finding any humor in it but knowing they don’t understand why it wasn’t funny in the first place. It was a humoring, condescending laugh. He slapped her then, but it was a close, patting sort of slap—still painful from the looks of things, but nothing that an onlooker would truly see as a violent act. I saw in those slaps a calculated effort to put a sting in her cheeks without bruising her or making her jaw too sore to stretch around a John.

“Do you think I got this far by being so stupid as to believe that you cunts care a thing for one another? Or that you care what sort of money you earn for the greater good?” He slipped in, putting his lips near her ear but still talked loud enough for me to hear. The bastard even locked his eyes on me as he whispered into her ear! “You are dogs, mongrels—the lot of you—who are hungry, starving, and willing to bite anybody—myself, your buyers, and even each other—if it means you might actually get something to eat out of it. And I…” he withdrew his head enough to wet his lips without risking any contact with Candy’s earlobe, “I am the one that holds the chain around your necks. I hold it tight and I hold it high, so that all of you know that you’ll never be free from me and so that all of you know who stands where. Do not try to tell me you care for those girls, and do not try to tell me that you care about me—I’ll believe neither and, moreover, I’ll be inclined to not believe anything else you may try to tell me henceforth. The other girls—whatever their names were—saw fit to steal from me, and they paid for that effort.”

Candy gasped, proving then—to me, at least—that she had cared for the two girls. “Y-you killed them?” she stammered, once again forgetting herself.

T-Built rolled his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “I didn’t have to. They helped themselves to a shipment of product that I hadn’t had a chance to cut down. I would have liked to handle them myself before they had a chance to waste it, but…” he shrugged and sighed. “It’s a great inconvenience—it really was a good batch of stuff that they offed themselves over; it cost a small fortune that I’ll never see a return on—but they’re replaceable.”

Candy stared at him, horrified.

T-Built didn’t seem to notice. Shrugging again, he gave her another condescending smile and said, “As it were, if you care so much for the collective earnings that your lot brings in I suppose you’d do well to work that much harder to fill their quota. Maybe get your feet involved with those ever-popular group jobs.” His face went dour and serious in an instant. “In the meantime, however…”

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two envelopes, holding them out to us to take. Candy retrieved both and handed one to me, which I accepted with a shaky hand. I held back on looking inside, not sure if T-Built’s sacred silence carried over to acts of brazen curiosity. Candy, either knowingly or arrogantly, unfolded the top flap to investigate. Looking over her arm, I spotted a stack of bills.

Both of us, shocked at the sight of more money than our “household” had seen collectively since I’d started working, looked up in shock at T-Built.

“There’s two-grand in there,” he informed us, then corrected with, “In each of those.” He paused, once again oscillating his leer between us, to let that information seep in. “Tomorrow night at nine-o’clock sharp you will arrive at this address”—he tapped the middle finger of his left hand against my own envelope’s surface, which did, in fact, bear an address across its surface—“wearing gowns and jewelry priced at no less than the contents of those envelopes. If you do not arrive, if you arrive late, or if you arrive wearing anything that I feel is remotely less than the value of those envelopes, then I will do to you what I would have liked to have done to the bitches who should have been there in the first place.” He squared himself, stretching his shoulders back and making a generally gorilla-like display with his tall, lanky frame. “I will cut you in ways that will make you useless to your profession—useless, in fact, to any man—and I will burn you until none who ever knew you would recognize you. Simply put, I will hurt you—I will hurt you a lot—and I will do so for a very, very long time until I have grown tired of hurting you. Then, ladies”—he said the word as though he meant something else—“I will kill you. And, if all of that is not enough to convince you not to take my words lightly, this will be the fate that befalls both of you,” he said, locking his gaze on Candy for a long moment before glancing back at me. “Just something to consider in case there’s any sincerity behind your claims of ‘worrying about the other girls.’” Once more, he embraced a moment of silence between the tight triangle of our bodies, letting the unknowing din of the city hum around us. Then, smiling like an old friend, he reached out, patted our shoulders with the same stinging, condescending non-violence as he had with Candy’s cheek, and said, “And, when you’re sucking and fucking tonight, I want you two to imagine you’re wearing all sorts of pretty-pretties—because, soon enough, you will be—and training yourselves not to get the mess on any of it. Because all those pretty-pretties—two-grand worth of gown and glitter on each of you—will be making repeat performances, and you’ll be disappointed if you think we’ll be paying to handle any Bill Clintons that might occur.

After seeing Candy put her wellbeing on the line several times already and, quite frankly, getting tired of hearing in some form or another—both from others and myself—about how I was just a “stupid whore,” I surprised myself by asking, “What’s the point in buying expensive clothes and jewelry if our purpose there in the long run is just to take it off or risk messing it up? Why not just let us make the rounds at this event dressed like we normally dress? At least that way all those ‘prospective’s will know what we’re there for.”

I more felt than heard Candy gasp beside me.

T-Built’s hand, still in mid-slap at my shoulder, paused and started to squeeze.

I fought against a flinch and lost.

“Everyone knows a cheap gift when they see it,” T-Built announced, digging his fingertips further into the meat of my shoulder until my flinch escalated to an all-out whimper, “but that doesn’t mean, when you’re taking the present to a rich man’s home, that you don’t wrap it in pricey paper. Otherwise it looks out of place among all the expensive, fancy gifts.” He finally released my shoulder and stepped back, spitting at my feet like he had a bad taste in his mouth from just talking to me. “If you want to present yourself as a cheap and tawdry trinket once you’re taken to whatever private room you’re dragged off to, then that’s your decision—far be it for me to question your sales pitch provided it works—but until that moment you’d better be able to convince everyone that you’re worth something. Got it?”

“The two of us flinched as we echoed our own “Got it”s.

And then, just like that—as though he were eager to be as far from us as possible—he was gone.

After the previous night’s episode and how quick Candy was to hold me and help me through my own pain, I felt it only fair to offer her the same sympathy and aid. She’d tried to suffer through it alone, hurrying off to her trusty neighboring alley once T-Built was far from sight, and beginning to stifle her sobs into her hands. Following after, not sure which part of the awful man’s tirade against us had been the last straw that had pushed her to that point, I tried to decide how best to go about helping her. The interval between following and actually coming to her side gave me a heart-wrenching sight, and I decided then that one of the most defeating sights a person could ever experience was a broken whore trying her best not to ruin her makeup.

Screw the crying clowns, I thought, nothing’s sadder than a sobbing prostitute. At least some people see the clown as a person.

Finally, more for my sake than hers—unable to bear the sight of her crying like that—I moved in and threw my arms around her. Like a child clamoring against their mother after a bad scare, she blindly worked to embrace me back, still sobbing and working to protect the night’s “masterpiece” of her made-up face. The whole struggle made me think of somebody juggling priceless artifacts while trying to flee for their lives from some murderous beast that was hot on their heels—you wanted so badly to see them cast aside their limiting burden, but knew that to do so was to threaten the life they’d be working to save. Candy was, like me, only a prostitute, and T-Built had just made a fresh note of carving that fact into our minds. And to go on and risk marring her face—a part, in essence, of the product we were there to sell—was to risk marring the night’s earnings. Then she’d be a failing prostitute. And we’d just gotten a very good idea of what T-Built thought of failing prostitutes; hell, I’d gotten a very good idea of what T-Built thought of successful prostitutes. It wasn’t that unlike the difference between what some considered “good” cheese and “bad” cheese: the dividing line was determined solely by its worth, because, either way, it repulsed most and stank to high heaven.

Mia, I thought sarcastically to myself, you are a poster child for positive thought.

And so I held Candy, as she’d held me the night before. Just two bricks of ugly, stinking cheeses set out on display in a window to represent a possible sour taste in the mouth of some poor potential buyer.

Then, eventually—finally—she began to talk: “I-I… I st-still c-c-can’t be-lieve i-i-it…” she stammered. “D-dead! They… they’re dead! T-Tonya and… and Stacia! Dear god… F-fucking Christ, Mia, they’re really… they’re really dead? Fucking ODed on some of that… that… god, oh god! They were two of his… Mia, they were like his prized whores! I… I’d have thought he’d trade a hundred like you and me—thousands like you and me—for just one of them! They were the crown jewels of the girls that T-Built waved around when he wanted the big money to roll in and they… and he…” she was shaking her head. It was the frantic, desperate shaking of a person trying to convince themselves that some fresh terror they’d just witnessed wasn’t real—a person in the grips of a terrible haunting trying to remind themselves despite the howling specter floating before them that ghosts weren’t real. “Mia, they’re dead and… and he cared more about losing the drugs they ODed on. You saw him, Mia; you saw him! He didn’t even bat an eye at the mention of them. He was more upset that he couldn’t have done it himself! I think I saw him choke up a little over the mention of the drugs, but Tonya and Stacia…” she shook with the mention of their names. “Dead. They’re dead… they’re dead… they’re dead…” Her mouth parted, seemed ready to come unhinged like a snake, and a silent wail yawned up towards the sky as her eyes welled and flooded with tears. All her prior efforts had been in vain; her mascara was beginning to run. “The crown jewels of whores,” she repeated, whimpering her words once more, “and their deaths meant nothing to him. What are we then, Mia? What are we?”

Those were the words she said to me in that desperate instant—“What are we?”—but what I heard was a question—the question—that another, more casual asker had presented the night before:

“You a whore or not?”

“No,” I said, answering the wrong question and, in turn, earning a confused look from Candy. Her non-words from before—what I’d heard in her voice when she squeezed my hand: “Your survival is how you fight.”—echoed back to me, and I finally answered her question:

“We’re survivors.”

But I’d be damned to understand just what I meant by that.