THEY IN THE family room, most of ’em in their underwear. Carolina is in the kitchen. She said it was up to me to introduce myself.

I stay where I am in the living room, staring in. The two I seen upstairs wave at me at the same time. “Hi, I’m Rosalie.” The other one don’t have to say that her name is Kianna. But I’m glad when she smile. A girl lying on the floor, belly down, playing Fortnite, tell me to call her Earle. Her lipstick is dark purple, maybe blue. She got yellow cat eyes. Contacts. Kate, the white girl on the rocker, walks up to me. “It gets better,” she say, helping me in. Katrina nods her head.

Rosalie is sitting on the floor between Kianna’s legs getting her hair braided. “I only charge fifteen dollars.” She stop to crack her back. “I’ll do yours anytime you want.”

I stop in the middle of the room. “I’m Char—I mean Charlie.”

A girl at a card table by the window say it’s okay if I use my real name around them. “But not around the customers. Always keep something for yourself.” She lays down four cards—spades. “He makes me call myself Roxanna. My real name is Roxanne.” Roxanne got a face full of freckles, tiny brown flat bubbles sitting in the middle of her face. She say she’s fourteen, but she look more like twelve. She stick her hand out, gets paid in cigarettes from the girl next to her. I walk up to their table, limping. They act like they don’t see. She pat the seat on the other side of hers and says, “You won’t always be sad. Right, Gem?”

Gem is thick all over, short, maybe five two. She got cute dimples and wears braces. When she smile, her face shines. “I was never sad.” She pick up the four of spades and sits down a club. “Daddy took me off the street.” Her nails seem long as chopsticks. She talk about girls on the stroll. The ones she know anyhow. “They got nobody to take care of them or to handle the crazies.” Some girls get beat by their daddies on the regular, she says. “Not us. Not if we good.” Her eyes stay on me. “He say you don’t listen so well.”

“Did y’all know April?”

Seem like they deaf or I didn’t say nothing at all. ’Cause everybody ignores me, look any place else in the room but right here where I am.

“She was my friend and—” I think about Carolina. Her telling me Daddy had to break me ’cause I don’t listen so good, and he would do it again if I didn’t learn the first time. “Never mind.” I sniff. “She wasn’t nobody.” I try not to think about her in the river, or Cricket crying for me.

“Daddy got all kinds of businesses, different girls,” Gem says. “We’re his favorites. He keeps us close.” She tells me that I’m lucky. “This is a nice house, warm. There’s a Jacuzzi in our bathroom.”

“A pretty-ass prison.” Earle look back at me. “And don’t pay attention to Gem. She like to drink the Kool-Aid.”

“Leave, then.” A pack of new cards fly over Earle’s head. “But you won’t.” Gem smiles at me. “She did twice and—”

Kianna asks me to go to the kitchen and get them some snacks. I don’t want to go, but I do. A bag of honey mustard pretzels and bowl of dip is waiting for me when I get there. Carolina is flouring chicken to fry for dinner. She say not to believe everything them girls say. Earle is gone when I get back.

I take the chips and dip from one girl to the next. Some dig in the bag with their hands. Roxanne uses napkins to get hers, then asks if I ever done this before. I never liked games all that much, I tell her. They think that’s funny. She stick two pretzels in the dip, eats ’em at the same time. It’s the worst job you ever gonna have, she say, licking her fingers. “A lot of times you gonna wish you was dead.”

“I wish I was dead now.”

Gem hunches her shoulders, changes the subject. “I do nails.” She move her fingers like she typing on a laptop. “Plus, if you need your makeup done right—I’m your girl—not Earle.” Gem wants to be a cosmetologist. To work in Hollywood with movie stars. “Go to Roxanne for—”

“I’m not good at anything.” Roxanne lift up the chain on her neck and make the cross swing. She asks how I met Anthony but don’t wait to hear the answer. She was at work, pumping gas, when she first ran into him. “Hungrier than I ever been.” She got a chip in her mouth when she say that Anthony came in the store and offered to buy her lunch. At first, she ain’t go. But he came three days in a row. “He probably heard my stomach growling.”

“Where we at?” I say. “What part of town, what’s the address?”

They don’t know. He don’t say. There ain’t no address outside the house neither. We all get quiet, sit still for a long time. “God knows,” Roxanne says.

“Daddy’s God to me.” Gem was on her own, getting beat up almost every day till Daddy found her and brung her here to live.

I ask who been here the longest. Rosalie raise her hand. She met Daddy online. Thought he was sixteen. Left with him anyway after he showed up at school one day. Gem’s hand goes up next. She been here two years, three months, fifteen days. She fourteen. Her mom got her the braces, she say, before she gave her back to the state. She clicks her teeth. “One day they’ll come off, I guess.” For the first time, she seem sad.

“When your birthday comes,” Roxanne says, “Carolina will make you a cake. Then we’ll make you one that taste good.”

I laugh. Them too.

“Rum cake!” It’s Katrina. “That’s what I want for my birthday next month. With plenty of sprinkles.”

Gem always buy the candles and gift wrap. Roxanne offers to get me a gift. Katrina wants a pack of cigarettes from every one of us. “And no loosies. Plus, I want my hair did. Flat-ironed.”

They got rules about birthdays. If you in this house one minute or ten years, you give something to the birthday girl. “You can make it,” Roxanne says. “What you good at?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes roll.

“Well, I used to be good at coloring.”

“Good. Do that.”

I think about my crayons, smashed, broken. And remind myself to throw my coloring books in the trash. They get back to doing whatever they was doing before I walked in. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, so I sit at the card table, listen, watch, and try to remember.