I shook my head. It was not possible. Not for me. Not for Lily. She was only a small child. “No,” I whispered. “This cannot be true.”
She looked at me, and behind her eyes I saw nothing. It was blank. “You must take yourself away when it happens,” she said. “In your mind. It is the only way you can keep yourself safe.”
~
How many months later it was, when I was selected, I did not know. I had lost track of time. Days, months...it could have been a year. Time blended together, an endless sea of lessons. They taught us English, Thai. Taught us how to eat and drink with fine china, sitting at a table with tablecloths and silverware so elegant that they seemed to be made for a Queen. Of course, it was all pretend. The plates held tiny servings of rice and a vegetable curry they fed us, small portions so we would not gain weight. I was always hungry.
And then there were the other lessons. The ones I couldn’t think about without feeling the pain that made it difficult to sit. One of the other girls, Yamin, said we would be kept virgins, that there was a price for us. They did things to me, though. Everywhere else.
Lily was no longer herself. At night, when she would crawl back to her cot, huddled into a ball, I would climb into her bed, hold her tiny body close to mine. At first, she would cry. But after a long while, she no longer cried anymore.
I no longer cried anymore.
I wondered what hell could be worse than this.
~
The day Lily hung herself, I died inside.
It was after a particularly brutal lesson. I had held her, like always, my heart no longer torn in two each time I saw what had happened. I imagined that my heart had built up callouses now, that it was no longer vulnerable to seeing this type of suffering. I could barely feel pain anymore.
That was what I thought.
Until later.
I was the one who found her, hanging from a beam, the sheet she had used as a noose wrapped around her neck, her face slumped forward. The stool she had stood on wasn’t even kicked out from under her. She had no second thoughts, even at the end. She hadn’t even tried to stand on it, to save herself from death. She had only wanted to die.
I didn’t think my heart could break anymore. But that day, it did.
Everything around me shut down when I saw her. I was in a tunnel. I could only see her, straight in front of me.
Lifeless.
Broken.
I heard myself wail, then, this sound that rose up from the depths of my soul. I ran to her, my arms wrapped around her legs, trying to lift her up. Screaming.
I was pulled off her, ripped from her by the women who came running. The women who ran the place, who colluded with the men who stole away the most vulnerable parts of me.
They yelled at me in Thai, dragged me from her.
Left me wailing on the floor when they took her body away. I lay there, a broken heap.
What happened to me didn’t matter anymore.
Now I was dead inside.