The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

I stifle a laugh, gazing on Maddie in the mirror.

“The man begs me to come over here and make you look respectable, and that’s what I’m going to do. Now be quiet,” Eastlin says, reaching for a tub of some dun-colored cream. He dips in a finger and starts dabbing it on Maddie’s neck. “Too dark,” he mutters to himself, wiping it off with a cotton ball. He puts the tub down and rummages for a different one.

“Yo! I’m here!” a boy hollers from the front vestibule. “Did I miss anything?”

It’s Tyler, who bursts through the bedroom door with a grin on his face, carrying a giant bag bulging with what I imagine to be recording equipment.

“God!” Maddie says. “What is this, Extreme Makeover, Maddie Edition?”

Tyler has fixed a recording box to his face and creeps up to where Maddie’s sitting. “Annie, you look awesome,” he says.

“Maddie,” Maddie corrects him. “Annie’s over there. And I look like a bourgeois sellout.”

“No,” Eastlin says with exaggerated patience. “You look like a lady. Now hold still.”

Maddie rolls her eyes and looks pleadingly at me. “You see what I have to go through?”

I rub the sore spot on my side where my stays are digging in, and say nothing.

“Where’d you get all that stuff, anyway?” Tyler asks, aiming the camera at Eastlin’s potions and boxes of clothes.

“Abraham Mas did their first show for Fashion Week this year,” he says through his nose as he draws a careful line along Maddie’s eyelid. “Kind of on a shoestring, though. I helped dress the models. This stuff is leftover from that.”

“Oh my God,” Tyler moans. “You got to touch real models, and you don’t even appreciate it.”

Eastlin smirks without moving his hands, drawing a delicate line on Maddie’s other eyelid. “I appreciated it more than you would,” he says.

“Maddie,” Wes asks from his vantage point in the bed. “This is a pretty sweet apartment.”

She grumbles, but doesn’t say anything, as Tyler adds, “Seriously.”

“Why would you want to stay in some squat, if you could stay here?” He drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Did they throw you out or something?”

Maddie huffs in annoyance and bats Eastlin away from her face, turning her back on the boys in her plush little girl’s bedroom, her hands on her cheeks. She stares at herself in the mirror, and in her reflection she meets my gaze. She looks older, dressed up in this way. I can see the outlines of the woman they’re planning for her to be. It’s a trap they’ve laid. They cosset you, and pet you, and tighten the screws so slowly you don’t even feel them sink into your skin.

I know exactly how that feels.

Who’s going to offer to drive her away on a stolen cart until the wheels falls off? Whose secret cameo will invite her into a world of her own making?

I rest a hand on her shoulder. I’m looking at her hard so that I don’t have to look at myself. I don’t trust mirrors.

“Because . . . ,” Maddie starts. She swallows the tears that are welling up in the lower lids of her painted eyes.

“Because they’re slavemongers, aren’t they,” I whisper in her ear.

Maddie closes her mouth and nods. She looks down into her lap as Eastlin steps away and studies his handiwork.

“Not bad,” he says. “If I do say so myself.” To Maddie, he adds, “While you’re gone I’m just going to burn these fishnets, okay? You don’t mind, do you?”

Maddie wipes a tear out from under her eye and makes a face at him, but the glower subsides into a smile. She gets to her feet, smoothing the front of the dress down with her hands.

The transformation is remarkable. Her tattoos are hidden under flesh-colored paint, like actresses use, and her eyes have less soot around them. He’s urged her dyed hair into a low chignon, and the dress skims her form most becomingly. It must be so much more comfortable, wearing dresses like that, with no lacing.