“Thank you.”
“It will hold curl.”
I looked at the tray of pins and powders beside her elbow. In this room, even hair was something they measured.
She wound sections around a hot iron until my hair fell in soft, shining waves. An attendant came with powder, blush, mascara, and a rose-pink lipstick that made my mouth look softer than the red had. Younger. Sweeter. Easier to imagine silent.
I gripped the edge of the vanity beneath the counter where no one could see my fingers.
The mirror gave me a stranger with my eyes.
Bare shoulders. Pale silk. Dark hair curled loose. A hint of color in my cheeks that had not come from blood. I looked expensive, which turned out to mean I looked less like I belonged to myself.
Polina set a glass of water beside me. “Drink.”
I took one sip. My stomach folded around it. I hadn’t eaten since the rice at the apartment, and even that had been mostly staring into the refrigerator and pretending the light didn’t make everything look worse.
“More,” she said.
“I’ll throw up.”
“Then hold it.”
I took another sip because she stood there until I did.
A bell chimed softly somewhere outside the prep room.
The red-haired woman flinched. One of the attendants touched her shoulder and leaned close to her ear. The woman nodded, but her mouth had gone white at the edges.
Polina took the glass from me. “When they call you, you walk. You stand where you’re placed. You answer only if they ask you a direct question. Don’t speak to bidders.”
“Do they speak to me?”
“Some try.”
“And then?”
“Then you remember why you came and keep breathing.”
I looked at her in the mirror. “Did that line help the last girl?”
Polina’s hand stilled near my shoulder.
For a second, her eyes met mine in the glass, and something tired moved behind the lashes and powder. Then she picked up a comb.
“It’s the only line I have,” she said.
The first woman left at 10:12.
I knew because a clock above the prep room door ticked with a tiny gold second hand, and once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop looking.
She was called “Lot Eight” by a staff member with a tablet. Not her name. Never her name. The red-haired woman stood, smoothed the front of her pale slip, and followed an attendant through the door. She didn’t come back.
The room swallowed that.
A brunette with a beauty mark above her lip whispered, “How long?”
No one answered.
