Free Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren

for her daughter. We ate at a boardwalk café connected to a little bookstore and then played on the swings in the sand. I have a picture of me dressed in black jeans and big, dark glasses, laughing hysterically as I begin to swing backward, my hair flying in the wind. Destiny caught the exact moment that my forward momentum stopped and gravity pulled me back down.

    That evening Ari met us at the airport with a freshly scrubbed face and a monogrammed tote bag. California was not New York, I decided. In the New York sex industry, I had encountered neurotic, carefully coiffed, mercenary people in positions of authority. That or Hells Angels. Serena stood by Ari’s side at the ticket counter. She was a platinum blonde, porcelain-skinned, poor-man’s Marilyn with mean blue eyes. She had the kind of upturned nose that grandmother would have said could catch raindrops. I immediately didn’t trust her.
    Ari, I learned as we waited, hadn’t started out as a procuress. She was a nice girl from Northern California, a rich girl, a girl with a close family who imported French wines and sold them to most of the upscale restaurants in the Bay Area. She had begun working for the royal family of Brunei as a property manager and personal assistant, whose duties included looking after one of their many palatial Bel Air estates and regularly traveling back and forth between the two countries to meet with the Prince.
    On one of Ari’s trips, the Prince casually suggested she bring a friend with her next time, preferably one who looked like Marilyn Monroe. I guess he thought that Marilyn Monroes were walking around all over the place in Los Angeles—surely everyone knew one. No one ever said no to the Prince, so Ari had scoured the city until she found Serena, a Marilyn look-alike with dreams of stardom, grudgingly working a retail job at the Beverly Center. The next time Ari returned to Brunei, she had Serena in tow.
    So these were the women with whom I was traveling halfway around the world: a Jesus-loving Hustler centerfold, an evil shadow Marilyn, and a summer-camp counselor gone wrong. This was Serena’s third trip to Brunei, but she wasn’t exactly bubbling over with helpful hints. Even after a half hour of plying her with chardonnay at the airport bar, I was no wiser about what lay ahead of me. She enjoyed her seniority, blowing us off with a little wave over her shoulder as she passed through the first-class doorway with Ari while Destiny and I stayed in business class.
    We stretched often, complained even more often, sucked down champagne, and requested extra cookies from the pretty flight attendants in long, dragon-pattern skirts. We watched Beauty and the Beast and eventually sort of slept. Business class was kind of like a flying hotel, but even a flying hotel wears on you after a while. I imagined my mother and my aunt at that moment, probably perched on plastic chairs at my father’s bedside. Then I shoved the thought aside. No point in worrying about something I had no control over. No point in rehashing a decision I’d already made. We changed planes in Tokyo and did it all over again, for a total of about eighteen hours. Thus began my hard lesson of parking it and chilling—not easy for such a restless girl. If I had learned the lesson better, I’d have become a lot richer.
     
    I rubbed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the window, watching the miles and miles of stormy blue slip by underneath us. By the time Singapore’s narrow hem of coastal beach appeared, I was so exhausted that I was seeing halos around all the lights and starbursts every time I blinked. My tongue and my brain had both grown a coat of fur. I was grateful to have our den mother, Ari, to take charge and herd us through customs and into the cabs to the hotel. On the ride, Serena let it slip that the royal family actually owned the hotel and that the sixty-third floor, where we would be staying, was always reserved strictly for their