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

guests.
    The Westin Stamford Singapore is the tallest hotel in the world, a cylinder rising seventy-three floors above the harbor. When we got there, I didn’t have the energy to explore even the rest of the hotel, much less the streets of the city. I ordered satay from room service and passed out with the lights still on. When I opened my eyes eight hours later, jet-lagged and wide awake, it was just before dawn. I got out of bed, hugging my own naked ribs, and pulled the heavy drapes to reveal a navy sky shifting to cobalt. One or two stars still shone out beyond the balcony. I walked out into the warm, soft air and watched the fishing skiffs glide out of the harbor. I was alone, exactly halfway around the world from where I had started, and I had an ocean of unknown possibilities in front of me.
    I was sure that this was how I had been waiting to feel.

chapter 8
     
     
     
     
    T wo serious men dressed in matching white shirts, ties, and sunglasses greeted Ari, Serena, Destiny, and me at the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan. I thought it was funny how much they looked like secret-service agents. I was thrilled that they had received the memo about me starring in my own personal spy movie. In retrospect I realize, of course, that they were secret-service agents. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that I was the clandestine guest of the leaders of a foreign government—an extremely wealthy and therefore influential foreign government. There was a whole apparatus at work that facilitated our trips to Brunei, but we never saw the man behind the curtain. In Brunei, there were elaborate ciphers in the clothes people wore, the food they ate, their gestures, but it was a language I didn’t speak.
    A triad of huge photographs hung on the wall of the Bandar Seri Begawan airport. The same images decorated the walls of every restaurant, business, bank, and beauty shop in the country. The center picture was of Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah, the Sultan of Brunei, a man I would come to know as Martin. In the photo, the Sultan wears a white military jacket laden with medals, a round hat, and a gold sash across his chest. Slightly lower and to either side of the Sultan hung pictures of his two wives: his formidable first wife, Saleha, and his scandalous second wife, Miriam, a former Royal Brunei Airlines flight attendant. The wives wear beauty-pageant makeup, elaborately beaded gowns, and enormous diamond tiaras.
    Looking up at the pictures while we waited by the luggage carousel, I imagined children playing at being kings and queens: Two little girls fight over who gets to be the queen and someone’s mother settles it by telling them there can be two queens. The mother cuts two crowns out of yellow construction paper to prove her point. The little girls are happy for a minute with their saw-toothed headgear, but somewhere they know that it’s not the same as being the only queen. They learn that sometimes you take what you can get.

    The airport doors opened and the Southeast Asian humidity hit us like a wall. It soaked into my skin immediately, slowing me down. It soaked into my suitcase, making it feel ten times heavier. An irregularity in the pavement caught the toe of my shoe and I tripped, my suitcase falling to the ground and my arms pinwheeling like in a comedy gag. Like the Powerful Katrinka. I caught myself before I went for a tumble. Everyone in our little party turned to look and I did a little dance move.
    “I meant to do that.”
    I try so hard to be graceful, but I’ve always been the girl with the bruised knees and the Band-Aids on her elbows. The stripper who wanted to be a ballerina. The circus clown who wanted to be an aerialist. Indeed, sometimes you take what you can get.
    We piled into two black Mercedes with windows tinted nearly opaque and traveled the perimeter of the city before plunging into what seemed like a jungle. Brunei was green—sticky, overgrown, ancient green. Through openings