Daddy took over the new girl tour. As we walked, he kept his hand on my lower back and I remember thinking, He feels good. He did. He felt warm, strong, and he applied pressure in whichever direction he wanted me to turn and I liked being told what to do. And when he looked at me . . . well, I liked the reflection of myself I saw in Daddy’s eyes. Ma always looked at me like I was potential wasted. Daddy looked at me like I was potential waiting to happen.
“New Zealand, huh,” is what Daddy said. “Lord of the Rings,” he said. “Hobbiton. It’s meant to be pretty down there. Good hiking.”
“I guess.”
* * *
But my New Zealand wasn’t pretty, and I never hiked a day in my life except for when our car broke down and I had to book it on foot for three hours to make it to fourth period, just in time for a detention. My New Zealand was trash-lined streets and cows being trucked to slaughter. It was sheep shit and houses with holes in the roof. Homeless people asleep on stoops and roads so potholed they popped our tires once a month. I know what people think New Zealand looks like, like blue lakes and geysers, mountains and oceans and forests and beaches, and I’m sure you can find those postcard scenes somewhere, but that wasn’t my New Zealand. People think that the country, maybe by pure geographical distance from the rest of them, somehow exists outside of the world’s issues, that it’s a little paradise where everyone is happy and healthy and looked after, and maybe people just need to think that there’s somewhere in the world like that, that there’s an Eden right here on earth, and I don’t want to tell them their heaven doesn’t exist, so I nodded and I said to Daddy, I said, “Great hiking.”
* * *
I met Cheryl, the Hooker Booker. She was middle-aged; looked like somebody’s mother. She wore a skirt suit and pantyhose and her hair was coiffed into a hump on her head and her purple lipstick was disobedient, smudged across a tooth. Lancôme’s Temptation, was my guess. When I introduced myself, she took down my name, clinical as a computer, and I tried to joke, “Hooker Booker; is that your official title?” But she only asked for the name of an emergency contact.
* * *
“Got any questions?” is what Daddy said as we walked. His body was big beside mine. Heterosexuality is easy to justify when you walk with a man and feel safe. “About anything?”
“Are they allowed to touch?” I said. “In a lineup, I mean?”
“Bunnies, yes. Guests, no. We look after our girls.”
“What’s the best way to get chosen?”
“You’re hungry.”
“No, I just mean, all the Bunnies are so, I mean, look at them.”
Daddy laughed. “So perfect,” he said. And it’s exactly what I had been thinking. They were all so different, the goth, the housewife, the dominatrix, the rebel, but they were custom-made for their roles, performing so perfectly they almost seemed real. “We sell fantasies here. Guests come to the Hop to attain the unattainable. We’re in the business of making dreams come true.”
“For the right price,” I said.
“Everything comes at a price.”
“Mia says there’s a serial killer out there,” is what I said, and I tried to sound casual, but my voice, it came out weak and wispy as smoke.
“That’s true.” Daddy nodded.
“And he’s killing hookers?”
“He’s killing girls on the streets,” he said. “And yeah, it’s terrible, it is, but that’s not you, Bunny. You’re not on the streets. You’re at the Hop and you’re safe here.”
I looked up at him. It was up, too. He was tall. He could’ve protected me from anyone at all, is what I remember thinking.
“Let’s get you on payroll, hey?” is what Daddy said. He pressed his fingertips against my back. “You asked how to get noticed in a lineup, but you just saw Mia do it, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“She was eager. She wanted it. Wanted him. I hate to say it, but there are ways for our guests to get sex from women who don’t want it. If they wanted someone unwilling, well, you know.” I winced, and Daddy pressed my back harder. He said, “You don’t have to worry about any of that here though. Like I said”—he smiled down at me—“you’re safe here. I take care of my girls.”
* * *
We liked to cut between the interdiction and the climax of the film, Ma and me.
This ship can’t sink, the captain says of the Titanic before a cut to the final bubbles of submersion.
It’s completely safe, they say of Jurassic Park before a raptor tears head from neck.