Her name was Sasha, and she sometimes thought she could smell her death, blowing in from the cemetery that lay south of her building in East New York. Sometimes she even hoped for it. Stinking, muttering, moldering death. Cold and dark. On these occasions, she felt as if even the dirty embrace of the grave would be better for her than the squalor she lived in now. She thought, maybe, she might find some sort of peace that had been missing all her life.
Darren owned her building, like he owned the girls who occupied it. Three stories tall, four rooms to a floor. They lived Sasha to a room, Sasha bathrooms per floor, Sasha kitchens in the building. Just over twenty girls, every single one of them selling her body each night at his command. In return for the money they brought him, he gave them food. He gave them shelter. He gave them drugs, and the drugs gave them escape.
Sasha was not supposed to be here. She reflected on that often, and if she'd ever believed in a God, she'd have cursed him now. Fickle, twisted fate had delivered her into Darren's arms. Promises of salvation, undercurrents of doubt, desire, desperation. The cold prick of a needle.
She tried not to think about it.
Darren held the plastic bag filled with heroin above her now, like a treat for a dog. Little better than a dog she was, really, down on her knees, eyes wet with tears ready to spill over. Angry, vengeful Darren, so filled with hate. Hate for his parents, who'd given him his gorgeous mulatto features and then abandoned him on the street. Hate for his ex-wife, who'd left him immediately upon discovering the nature of his business, but still found fit to take half of what it had earned him. Hate for the girls he had made his slaves, and who had made him rich. Hate for the very money they handed over to him every night.
Darren didn't know of his own hate, but it burned in him so brightly it scarred his features. Twisted, cruel lips. Pinched brow. Sasha might have understood this hate, seen reflected in it her own self-loathing, but Sasha spent most of her time thinking about the heroin now. She had no sympathy for Darren, or his girls, no sympathy for herself. Lucid existence was the time between sleep and drug, drug and sex, sex and sleep. Short bursts of clarity, ever more painful, amid an otherwise blurred, waking dream.
“Beg for it, Sasha,” Darren snarled, and Sasha's mouth formed words of penitence against her will, pleading through tears without even realizing she'd meant to do it. She begged apology for some imagined slight, some invented twist in her voice that had caused this punishment.
“Darren, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry for what I said!” But what had she said? She'd only asked for her daily ration of the drug, in the same manner she had for the past four months. If Darren had detected any real change of inflection, it hadn't been intended. But here she was, on the floor, begging and pleading for something she didn't even want. Begging and pleading and dreaming of death.
Born Sasha Ashley Majors, her initials – substituting the number for her first name – worked out to the approximate time she had been conceived. Her parents had thought this terribly clever. Sasha would have gladly held it up as evidence before God that, whatever mistakes she had made in her life, never appreciating her parents was not one of them.
For her first fourteen years, she was Ashley, and no one was allowed to call her otherwise. Maturity had lent a different outlook, and she had begun to see the name as a sign of what was becoming a fierce individuality. She would never like it, perhaps, but she was most definitely not an Ashley.
She’d left her father at the age of sixteen, her mother long in the grave. Alcohol, and the overwhelming desire to fill the void Sasha’s mother had left, had brought rage and lust into him when before he’d felt only apathy for the girl. He’d never touched her, either in punishment or in passion, but the tension and the fighting, starting around her twelfth birthday, had over the course of years grown unbearable. At times Sasha found herself wishing he would simply rape her, so she could have him arrested. She wondered if that was a healthy line of thought, and decided it likely was not.
She took with her very little when she finally left. She had very little to take. Trinkets, clothes, shoes … these things meant nothing to her, as during life her mother could never be bothered to pass down any of the traditional, societal definitions of womanhood. Could never be bothered with her daughter at all, really, nor with her husband. Sasha had learned by herself about womanhood, in back alleys and cheap motels, years after her mother had died. Her education handed down by what men told her to be, what they told her to do. Promises of love, drops of blood on the sheets.
When that didn’t work, when she realized she could be more than this, it came as an epiphany. A rare glimpse of sunlight in an otherwise dark life. She’d left her father, apoplectic with desire and dismay and alcohol-fueled rage. She’d left behind their hole of an apartment. She could do better on her own.
And she had, for a time.
Pool was easy, the angles naturally making sense to her. Slipping into a bar even easier. New York City cops had far better things to worry about. Bouncers knew it, owners knew it, and a patron was a patron. Particularly short, pretty blondes with good legs and a cute face. The type of girl who could entice an entire crowd of rowdy young men to stick around for more drinks, dropping dollar after dollar into pool tournaments that, invariably, they lost.
She didn’t go home with these men, though many had asked, and in the end this factored into her undoing. Descent and rebirth, and descent and rebirth again. These men could not understand her, or why she spurned them. She’d leave them with a knowing smile, standing dismayed in the street. Sometimes she kissed them lightly, thanked them for their interest, but always with that mischievous gleam in her eyes, that sardonic grin on her face. The look that proved that, regardless of pretty words, she took vicious pleasure in walking away.
It was power, and Sasha reveled in it. The ability to make men throw their money, their bodies, their hearts at her. Lots of men. Lots of bars. She walked away from every one … walked away grinning her savage grin. For eight months Sasha lived, celibate as a nun, feeding on the hearts of men.
Eventually they tired of it. Patrons began complaining. Bouncers began carding. Bets around the pool table, even when Sasha could manage to enter the bar in the first place, dried up. People had heard of her. Sasha was forced to give up the pool earnings, and her tiny studio apartment with the mattress on the floor, the only piece of furniture she owned.
One bar remained, the only one at which she’d allowed herself to develop friends. The owner, Sid. The bouncer, Rhes. She didn’t play her game here. She didn’t taunt the men, break their hearts. It was here she went when she wanted a glass of beer and a conversation. It was here she turned now, desperate for somewhere to stay. Rhes offered the use of his apartment. Sasha didn’t decline the offer.
Her relationship with Rhes was entirely platonic. This surprised her; surprised both of them. Sasha was attractive, young, charming. Rhes was in his mid-twenties, with a powerful build and a handsome face. Sasha would have broken her celibacy for him, if he’d asked. Sometimes she wished he would. Rhes never did, and Sasha came to realize that he could not. He knew her age. He knew her past. It would have felt like taking advantage of her, regardless of her own willingness.
After nearly eighteen months of living with Sasha, Rhes had been forced to turn her out. He was in a new relationship with a young woman named Sarah, a blind girl he had met with her seeing-eye dog at a jazz club, and this new girlfriend worried about him sharing a studio apartment with a teenage runaway. Eventually Sarah warmed to Sasha, and would likely have accepted her as a roommate in a new, larger apartment, but by then it was too late. By then Darren, and the needle, had hold of Sasha. For better or for worse, it would change her life forever.
