Free The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian Page A

glamorous thing I had ever done, except dance. (Dancing—real dancing on a real stage, not teasing men in my lingerie—will always be the most glamorous thing I ever did.) I felt like royalty.
    Some girls asked me later why I was not suspicious. They wanted to know why I thought Vasily was spending all this money on me: airplane tickets, the chance to study dance in Moscow, a place to stay. One girl said I must have been a mountain-sized dope not to have known that something was up. Maybe. But I just thought Vasily was doing it for my mother. I thought he cared about her because she had been his secretary for so many years—and that meant he cared about me. I thought this was my break, my future.
    I believed that. Really I did.
    …
    What did my dance teacher think? Even though her name was Seta, we always called her Madame as students. I will never know what she thought because she wasn’t at the studio when I went to share with her my good news and say good-bye. She had been told by some government official that there was a permit issue with her studio space—which meant that someone wanted a bribe—and she was trying to straighten out the problem with the bureaucrat at his office. Andrei and one more of Vasily’s bodyguards brought me there to tell her about my audition. But in Madame’s place at the studio was an assistant named Maria, who was kind of a dull knife. Still, she was happy for me. She was teaching one of the classes of little girls. She thought this was all very exciting and—because she always seemed to say the first thing that came into her head—told me how surprised she was that I was getting this opportunity and not Nayiri. She implied that Nayiri was a better dancer. (Nayiri was an excellent dancer, but I was better. As I said, I was the best in the class.) The bodyguards explained that Vasily wanted to do my mother a favor. They did not say, which is what I would have liked them to have said, that Vasily had seen me dance and I had earned this honor. But the truth was that Vasily had never, ever seen me dance, which—in front of Maria—made me uncomfortable. I wanted to say something to defend myself, but there really wasn’t anything I could say. I thought I looked nervous that moment in the long wall of studio mirrors. It felt odd to be there in pants instead of my leotard. Still, Maria wished me good luck and said that she would clap for me someday when I was on the stage at the opera house.
    But it was disappointing for me that Madame was not there. I remember when I told my grandmother that she was gone my voice had broken—which I hadn’t expected when I had opened my mouth.
    Later I would figure something out: Madame was not at the studio because Vasily did not want her at the studio. The guy had his grubby hands in everything. Everything! He had made sure that Madame was summoned to the government building when I was supposed to be at the studio to say good-bye. Madame knew way more about ballet and my prospects than Maria: she might have tried to stop me from going, even if it would have meant breaking the news to me that I was no Velvet Bird.
    But you never know. How do you dim the light of promise? How do you wake someone from such a beautiful dream? How do you break a teenage girl’s heart?
    …
    Here is how you do all three of those things: you take the teenage girl from the Moscow airport to a carefully selected Moscow hotel where you own or have rented all the rooms on a corridor. Then you rape her so violently that when you’re done, the girl just puts the sheet with the bloodstain in the gray plastic trash bag that was in the wastepaper basket, so that later she can secretly throw it away.
    That is what Andrei did to me.
    Then you take away her luggage and her passport and her cell phone, and you have someone stand guard all night long outside her hotel room door so the teenage girl can’t run away.
    So none of the girls in the other rooms can run away.
    Then the next