Free Lost Girls by Robert Kolker Page A

twenty-five dollars of her own commission over to Kim for every call, which translated into hundreds of dollars a night. Kim poured herself into the job, working nights and days, skipping classes. Before long, she sat in on interviews for new girls. One night, when a few of the girls were hired to perform during a bachelor party at the Beau Rivage, a golf club in Wilmington, Kim decided to go and observe. The guests were a bunch of doctors and lawyers from New York and New Jersey, about seventeen in all. Kim watched as the girls brought in suitcases with black lights and glow-in-the-dark body paint. One girl brought vibrators to play with while she stripped. Another brought Ping-Pong balls with which to perform the crudest, most notorious bachelor-party trick. They were all just stripping and dancing, no full service, and still Kim saw how the money—the tips—flew. One girl gave a hand job. Kim had never watched someone do that before, and she was a little stunned to be right there in the room while it happened. The takeaway for Kim was more than powerful. It was seismic. For just two hours of work, each girl made five hundred dollars plus tips. She figured they each came home with close to nine hundred dollars.
    On her first call, Kim used the name Mia. The john was a guy named Vinnie who owned a backhoe service in Raleigh. He was nearly twenty years older than Kim, and she was scared to death. But when he opened the door, he seemed nice, so she danced and stripped to the music she played on a boom box. He was a gentleman and tipped her and kept her an extra hour. She walked out with hundreds of dollars and a regular customer.
    Once she signed, Kim became part of a little sorority of full-timers. Kim already knew a couple of them from school. June’s working name was Cameron. Crystal’s was Mocha; she was one of the few black escorts working consistently in this part of Wilmington. Like any sorority, they threw a great party: a DJ for one part of the house, a band for the other. Once they took aluminum foil, poked holes in it, and covered the TV screen like a Lite-Brite. They turned the volume down on a cartoon, threw on the Doors and Pink Floyd, and sat there, high, staring at the light shining out of the holes, laughing. Another time they filled a bathtub with purple Jesus—vodka and grape juice and whatever else was around—and guys came by and dipped their cups. A guy who was seeing one of the girls brought ecstasy. Someone else’s boyfriend walked around administering acid directly into people’s eyes with a dropper.
    Kim became fixated on making more. Her family was a parade of tragedy, and Kim was the one who always had to fix it. Now that she was making real money, she felt empowered. She learned tricks to maximize revenue. Even though the fee was $175, the guy usually had $200, and if by chance you couldn’t make change, that was an automatic $25 tip. Sometimes she’d lift a john’s credit card. Other times a watch would disappear, or some checks. One look at her parents, frail and declining at home, and Kim could justify anything.
    Just as it was for all the other girls, Kim always made a show of not offering full service, at least to anyone who asked. When it was Amber’s turn, she wouldn’t bother drawing that line.
     
    Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse turn their back on sex altogether. Others turn the tap on full blast, trying in vain to trivialize it even as they reopen the wound over and over. By the time Amber was a teenager, sex had become meaningless to her, even as it came to define her. Even before she worked for Teresa, Amber tried to make money for herself as a free agent in and around Nesbitt Courts. When she was sixteen, Amber charged some neighborhood boys for sex. Her first trick, according to an old neighbor named Carl King, earned her seventy-five dollars. Carl eventually lost his virginity to her—for free, or so he says—and so did a friend of his. “She didn’t care