Free The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian Page B

morning, after the teenage girl has somehow cried herself to sleep in the middle of the night, you return with some other young thug and say to the teenage girl, “You take clothes off and suck dick and then we take you home. We promise. This was all big mistake. You are not ready for this life.” The girl resists, but then she sees it as her only hope, and so she does it. Somehow she stifles her desire to throw up. She does just what you tell her to do. She does it on her knees for both men. Then for a third. She does more—far more, things she never imagined people did—because this is what you are demanding and because she sees it as her only way home.
    Then when she is done, you show her the video you have made. There she is. There you are. Her face is clear. Recognizable. Your face? No one ever sees your face in the video. How clever. You tell her that you will show the video to the whole world—including the girl’s grandmother and the reverent fathers and her dance teacher and her schoolteachers and all of her friends—if she doesn’t follow your instructions to the letter and do everything you say.
    Then, that night, you bring in a woman to convince the teenage girl to eat a little something—and to explain to her just how fucked she really is.

Chapter Four
    When Melissa awoke, she could hear her mother and her grandmother speaking in the apartment kitchen, their voices an underwater-like thrum from which only an occasional word would bubble to the surface. She thought the plan was for her mother to go home to Bronxville on the first train; she’d expected that her mother would be gone by now. Apparently, something had changed. She looked at the antique clock on the nightstand—it was so old that a person had to wind it, and the twin bells on the top were lusterless with age—and saw it was not quite seven-thirty. The curtains were drawn on the window, and so she emerged from beneath the quilt and opened one side: it was the sort of city morning where the clouds hung so low that the fog looked a little grimy. She jumped back into bed and curled her body into an egg, wrapping her arms as tightly as she could around her ankles and bringing her forehead to her knees. She liked to lie like this, her eyes shut tight. After a few moments, when she felt her forehead and the back of her neck starting to burn, she would pretend that she was a mythical bird being born, and slowly—as slowly as possible—stretch out her arms and her legs and her torso. She would blink. She would flutter her eyes like a creature seeing the world for the very first time. She would lie like this in the mornings some days before school, just after waking up, but she would also do it some evenings before finally getting undressed and into her pajamas before bed. It was especially fun to do it at the end of the day when she was wearing her more interesting tights. She would sit up and gaze at the patterns, and feel unexpectedly rewarded: the tights that looked like the night sky or the ceiling of a planetarium were always fascinating to her after she had emerged from her egg or (sometimes in her mind) her cocoon. She was intrigued by what the constellations and zodiac signs looked like after opening her eyes and uncoiling her body. She would compare the universe on her legs to the universe her father had created for her on the ceiling of her bedroom, a world of glow-in-the-dark stars (some shooting) and planets (Jupiter, with its playful, winking eye; a cherry red Mars; Uranus, with its celestial hula hoops).
    She also liked to do this when she was wearing the tights with the pretend color comics that looked as if they belonged in a Sunday newspaper. She and her parents had gotten that pair at a museum’s gift shop a few blocks south on Fifth Avenue. The images were actually paintings by some famous modern artist. But her very favorite tights to be wearing when she was lying like this were the ones with the covers of old children’s