Page 24

Twenty-Four

MILLIE

The door to her room bursts open. Mother and Father stand there, looking mutinous. Millie wishes she were the type of person who could act aloof, pretend that everything is okay, but she isn’t. She’s the type of person who cowers very visibly.

“What did you tell that old bitch?” Mother says.

It takes Millie a beat to realize she’s referring to Vera, and something inside her turns sour at having Vera being referred to as a “bitch.” Vera is the opposite of a bitch, and anyway, Millie hates that word so much. “I didn’t tell Vera anything,” she says in a small voice.

“Don’t lie to us, you little bitch,” Mother says.

Millie cringes. They always call her that when they’re displeased with her. In the early days, they called her that all the time, and her older sister Yara had told her that it was because Mother and Father wanted to break her. Millie misses Yara so much. Don’t let them break you , Yara’s voice whispers in her head.

“Stop calling me that,” she whispers.

“What did you say?” Father says.

A braver person would have screamed it at them. But Millie is so tired and hungry and so goddamn scared. She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“No, it wasn’t nothing,” Father says, walking toward her.

Millie hugs her knees to her chest, wishing for the millionth time that she could disappear. “I’m sorry,” she blurts out before he gets to her. She always breaks before they can punish her even more. Yara was the fighter. She fought until she disappeared from Millie’s life. Thomas was more like Millie, pliant and soft.

Father towers over her like a god. She sneaks one quick glance up before lowering her head. “I’m sorry,” she says again. He grunts. Relief floods her. He’s accepted her apology, for now.

Then Mother says, “We found your phone, Millie.”

Oh no. Fear stabs into Millie’s stomach, cold and sharp. The back of her neck prickles with sweat. Her phone. Her secret phone. How cunning she’d thought she was being when she bought it, but of course when Mother and Father confiscated her bag, they’d found it. Stupid girl , she scolds herself. Thomas would’ve never made that mistake. Her brother and sister were so much smarter than she was, and look what happened to them. Why did Millie ever think she could get away with this?

Father bends down so his face is level with Millie. She shrinks back. “Haven’t we been clear about the rules of the house?”

Millie nods.

“Never mind that for now,” Mother says brusquely. “We’ll deal with your deception later. What does this Vera bitch know about Thomas?”

This time, Millie doesn’t even try to fight them. She shakes her head vigorously. “Nothing. I promise. All she knows is that he jumped off the bridge. That’s all.”

“Then why is she saying that she’s found out some information about him and needs to talk to you?”

There is a sliver of a second of confusion and hope—did Vera solve it after all? Then Father’s hand shoots out, and before Millie knows it, he’s grabbed her by the hair. Pain sears through her scalp, and she squeals. Vaguely, she spots someone’s head popping through the doorway. Her little sister, Mina. Millie wants to tell Mina to go away. She shouldn’t be seeing this. Then Father yanks and Millie forgets all about Mina. All she can do is squawk and flail in pain.

“We’re going to have to clean up your mess, Millie,” Mother says. “We’re very disappointed in you. Do you understand?”

Gripping Millie’s shoulder tight, Father gives her an unforgiving shake. Millie wonders if her neck is about to snap. She doesn’t want to die. Despite everything, she wants to live. “I’m sorry!” she manages to gasp out. “Sorry, sorry!” He releases her so suddenly that she thumps onto the floor, out of breath, her face wet with tears and snot.

“We’re gonna have to take care of this Vera, thanks to you,” Mother says.

No, not Vera. Vera’s warm laugh echoes in Millie’s head, and she scrambles to Mother on her hands and knees. “Don’t do anything to her. Please!” She grabs hold of Mother’s feet. “I’m sorry, I’ll do anything you want.”

“You should’ve thought of that before involving her.” Mother steps back.

“Mother, no!”

“Stop all this screaming,” Mother snarls. “You’ll wake your siblings up, you selfish little brat.”

“Please, Mother!”

Father grabs her by the hair again and flings her backward as though she were a doll. Millie crashes into the wall and the breath is punched out of her. By the time she manages to peel herself off the floor, Father and Mother have stormed out, slamming the door shut. She runs toward the door, but it’s locked. Of course it is. She pounds on it. “Leave her alone!” she shrieks.

Mother’s voice comes through the door. “Millie, if you do not behave, we will have to fix you, do you understand?”

A promise. She knows Mother always follows through on her promises. Millie slides down to the floor sobbing. Yara had fought too. She remembers all the screaming, all the shouting. She remembers hearing Mother say those exact same words to Yara right before Yara left. One day, Yara was in the room next to hers, and the next day, there was Thomas. Thomas never met Yara, though Millie told him all about her.

Millie doesn’t know how long she stays on the floor crying. It feels like forever. She runs out of tears at some point; she’s so thirsty. Father and Mother have been sliding in just one glass of water every morning. “A kindness,” Mother had said, and Millie was so stupidly grateful every time the glass of water appeared. Now she’s cried and sweated and struggled so much that she feels like a desiccated corpse. She pulls herself up. She needs to warn Vera somehow. But how? Her phone is gone. The window in her room is much too small for her to climb through. She goes to it anyway and gazes out longingly. When she first arrived here, she spent many hours just looking out the window, searching for stars to wish on. Her reflection on the window catches her eye. Millie studies it.

For once, she doesn’t have makeup on. Her face is red and blotchy and her hair is a mess, but she sees herself. “My name is Millie,” she whispers. “My name is…”

Her face scrunches up and tears slide down her cheeks again. “Fuck you,” she tells her reflection. “Fuck Millie. My name is Penxi!” She screams it. “My name is Penxi!”

There is a knock on the wall. Mina’s voice, small and scared, comes through a hole. “My name is Channary.”

Millie shuts her eyes, crying. “Hi, Channary.”

“Hi, Penxi. It’s Mina, by the way.”

A laugh burbles out of Millie’s mouth. “I know.”

“But my name is actually Channary.”

“It’s a beautiful name.”

“It’s Cambodian. That’s where I’m from. I don’t think I ever told you that before.”

Millie goes to the wall and places her hand there. “I’m from China.”

“America isn’t really like how I thought it would be.”

“Well. This part of it isn’t. But there are parts that are like a dream.”

“Next week is my twelfth birthday. I was kind of hoping I would be able to celebrate it like American kids do, but I guess that’s not something Mother and Father do, huh?”

So young. Too young. Millie rests her forehead against the wall. “You shouldn’t be here. None of us should be here.”

God, eleven. Despair threatens to swallow her whole. There is so much emotion surging through her. She needs to let something out before she bursts apart like an overripe fruit.

Millie goes to her desk and takes out a pen and paper. She sits down and takes a shuddery breath. Then she begins to write.

Dear Vera,

You know me as Millie, but my real name is Lin Penxi. I am from Yunnan, China. When I was twelve, I left my family farm and moved to Shanghai to live with my aunt, where I had hoped to become a star. Ridiculous dream, I know that now. But Shanghai has so many talent shows, and there are so many kids who do make it big, so I didn’t think it was that ridiculous at the time. Anyway, I was auditioning for one of these shows when I met a man—he told me to call him Uncle Yang. I don’t know his real name. Uncle Yang told me that American talent shows are where it’s at, and I would be wasting my talent here in Shanghai. It all sounded too good to be true. And it was.

My parents aren’t well educated. They were just as starstruck as I was when I called to tell them that Uncle Yang wanted me to go to America. He even paid them a fee. Isn’t that amazing? I begged them to let me go, and they did. Papers were signed, Uncle Yang got me a passport, and before long, I was on my way to America. I should’ve known that things were wrong during the journey there. We went on an airplane at first, which was fine. There were seven other kids and teens with me. We were all very excited. But then we stopped off somewhere, I don’t know where, and we were herded out of the airplane and led to a ship. Some of the teens asked why we were getting on a ship instead of flying to America, and Uncle Yang told them to shut up. That scared me, because up until then, Uncle Yang had been so nice to us.

The journey by sea took a very long time. Some of us got seasick. I was one of the ones who didn’t, so I spent my time rushing back and forth, fetching water for the poor kids and cleaning up their vomit. The crew didn’t seem to care very much at all about the sick kids.

Then at some point, we were taken from our rooms and marched into a shipping container. That was when the older kids started shouting. This teenaged boy named Ming struggled and fought, and one of the crew members hit Ming in the head so hard that he vomited. Most of us lost our fight then.

I don’t know how long we spent inside the shipping container. It felt like it was never going to end. I was in some kind of daze when the ship docked; I could hear horns and other noises and I sat up. Then there was this monstrous noise and the container jerked to one side suddenly. We screamed and fell. I was sure we were going to die then and there. I clung to the floor as the container swung one way, then it clanged to the ground. I guessed then that they had moved us off the ship and onto the dock. Hours crawled by and nothing happened. We called out, shouting, though to be honest, none of us had much energy by then. The container smelled so, so bad. There were no toilets in there, you know. I can still smell it even now, more than ten years later.

I was half asleep when the doors were finally opened. Flashlights shone at us, blinding me. I sat up, confused, and a pair of strong hands grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me bodily into the air. I screamed and kicked, and something was placed over my mouth and nose. It smelled sharp, and it hit immediately, like a thick fog had suddenly settled over my brain. Then my head dropped forward and all went black.

When I woke up, I found myself in what is now my current bedroom. Two people—a man and a woman—were looking down at me.

“Hello, Millie,” the man said. He had a kind voice. Reassuring.

I blinked up at them, my thoughts a blur. I knew some English then, enough to know that he was greeting me as Millie. The mistake actually gave me some comfort, because it proved that there had been some silly mistake, and once they knew I wasn’t Millie, then everything would be put right. I was very stupid. “My name is Penxi,” I said.

“That is very hard for Americans to pronounce,” the woman said. She had yellow hair, like in the movies. I thought she looked very pretty.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling bad about having a hard-to-pronounce name.

“That’s all right, dear,” the woman said. “But we’ve come up with a new name for you that we’d like you to remember.”

“Millie,” the man said. “It suits you, don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“It’s okay,” the man said. “We’ll explain everything to you. We’re very good at explaining things.”

I just stared up at them, scared and confused and hungry and all sorts of other emotions swirling through me in a mess. “I want my mama,” I said, and began to cry.

“Oh, my sweet child, I’m here,” the woman said.

“No, I want my real mama.”

“That’s me, Millie. I’m your real mama. You must call me Mother from now on. And this right here is Father. We are your parents now.”

I started crying harder, and Mother’s face turned from gentle to something else. Something that scared me.

“Millie,” she said, “I don’t like the way you’re behaving. Please stop making a fuss.”

I tried to stop crying, I really did, but that only made me sob even more. And before I knew it, Mother had grabbed me by the arm and yanked me off the bed. Father caught my other arm, and together, they dragged me out of the room. We went down a long hallway—I dimly realized that we were in some kind of warehouse that had been converted into a living space of sorts. We passed by many rooms, all of them with the doors closed. Later, I would come to find out that these rooms were occupied by Father and Mother’s other “children.” People like me, who had been stolen from various countries and sold to Father and Mother. They became my brothers and sisters. They were from all over the world. I had an older sister Yara, who was from Russia, and an older brother Jeffrey from Nigeria, and there was Thomas, of course, who was from Indonesia, and now I have a younger sister from Cambodia. Mother and Father named her Mina, but I have just learned that her real name is Channary, which I think is really very beautiful. I wonder what Yara’s, Jeffrey’s, and Thomas’s real names were.

Anyway, I am digressing because I don’t want to revisit the memory of my first day here. But I will tell you, Vera, because you deserve to know the truth about how I became who I am now. You once said scammers are the lowest of bottom feeders, and I was so sad when you said that. I agree with you, Vera, I hate scammers too. But the truth is, I am a scam artist. So were Thomas and Yara, and Channary is well on her way to becoming one as well. I hate that this is what we do, but we don’t have a choice. Father and Mother made that very clear that first day when they held down my head in a bath full of water as I screamed and thrashed around. Water surged up my nose, down my mouth, choking me. I thought I was surely going to die. Then they pulled me up and said, “This is what happens to disobedient children. Do you understand?”

I could only gasp for air like a fish out of water, and Mother snapped, “Do you understand, you little bitch?”

“Yes!” I cried. “My name is,” I said slowly, “Millie.”

A smile spread across Mother’s face. She looked beautiful when she smiled like that. “Good girl.” She patted my cheek. “Good, sweet Millie.”

“Phew!” Father said cheerfully. “I could use some lunch after that. I bet you’re hungry too, huh, Mills?”

“We’ve got a nice treat for you today. A welcome-to-America feast,” Mother said. She raised her eyebrows. “McDonald’s!”

I liked McDonald’s. In my village back in Yunnan, there were no McDonald’s, but there were a few in Shanghai, and I’d had the good fortune of having chicken nuggets from there once. They were delicious. And this was how Mother and Father broke me. Over the next few weeks, they punished me severely if I ever forgot to respond to the name Millie, until the name buried itself so deeply within my bones that I forgot my real name. Even in my dreams, people would call me Millie. Then, when they were sure that my old name and identity had been completely scrubbed from my mind, they began the lessons.

The first, and most important, lesson was learning English. I enjoyed this, actually, because a big part of it was watching American TV shows. I would be put in a room with a few other kids, and there, we would watch hours of random old shows like Friends and The Simpsons . It was the best part of my early days there. There were actual lessons too, of course, classes taught by Father where he went over the rules of grammar and tested us on our vocabulary and all sorts. He also glossed over a few other subjects like math and geography and history, because “You can’t be a scam artist if you’re an idiot.” We didn’t need to be scholars, but we had to know enough about American culture and history to be convincing.

The second lesson was with Mother, and this had to do with how to carry myself. “Young and vulnerable,” she trilled. “This is how we like our girls here.” She taught me how to stand, how to walk, even how to breathe.

The third lesson was about human interaction. “You’re salespeople,” Mother said. “You’re trying to sell a product to them. You need to know how to hook their interest, keep it, and use it to your advantage. Sell the product.”

“What is the product?” I can hear you asking, Vera. Well, the product depends on the kid. Thomas was your standard phone scammer. And here I can imagine you humphing with displeasure. I know, I know. You fell for a phone scam, and I hate the thought of it, Vera. I hope you know that. And I hope you know that Thomas did not have a choice. Father hated Thomas, I don’t know why. He took every excuse he could get to beat the crap out of Thomas. We all have quotas to meet every month, and if we don’t meet them, then we are starved or beaten or locked in our rooms for days. So that was Thomas. He’d phone people and tell them the same thing you were told, that your credit card was used by someone else to make some extravagant online purchase. Or he’d phone people and tell them they’re late on some government payment and now they’ve missed enough funds for them to lose their homes. Things like that. All of them despicable lies. Some of my brothers and sisters lost a bit of their humanity after a few years doing this. Some of them started to enjoy it, to see their victims as nothing but marks, but Thomas was never like that. He actively hated it, continued seeing his victims as people he was having to take advantage of, and he was angry at everything up until the day he died.

As for me, Mother got me to work on email scams until I was fourteen, then she said my voice sounded grown-up enough to start working the phones, so I was moved to that. Then, when I was sixteen, she said, “Would you like to start going out, Millie?”

I was so surprised. Up until that point, I wasn’t allowed to leave the warehouse. Some of us were. My older sister Yara was one of them. She’d dress up all pretty—she was so beautiful, blond hair, big green eyes, and so tall and graceful—and she’d go out on what I imagine were very glamorous dates. I was so jealous of her. I was still a stupid kid then. What can I say? So when Mother asked me that, I immediately said, “Yes!” I had no idea what was in store for me.

So Mother taught me the new product: me. She’d prepared me, all this time, for this very moment. I just didn’t know it yet. But I had been kept on a very strict diet and taught how to hold myself a certain way and to do my makeup in a very specific way, and Mother gave me all these pretty clothes, and when she was done, I looked into the mirror and was shocked at what I saw.

“You’re beautiful, Millie,” Mother said, and I hope it doesn’t make me sound arrogant to say that I agreed with her.

She uploaded my photos onto dating apps and filled out my data for me. She registered me as a nineteen-year-old so that I would be allowed to date any man. And she gave me a script. We always had a script, whether it’s for emails, phones, or in-person scams. I was Millie, a student at Cal whose major was undecided. I liked dating older men because boys my age were hopeless. I was to be fun and must be a very good listener, and then after a few dates, I would have some kind of catastrophe: my dad got cancer, or the university canceled my funding, or this and that. Basically, I would have to be on the verge of losing my spot at Cal, and I really needed some money quick.

The first guy I dated ghosted me as soon as I tried pulling the scam, and that got me locked in my room for three days. When Father and Mother let me out, they hugged me and said, “Poor Millie.” Then they gave me a treat—more McDonald’s. Break me, then soothe me, remember? It really is a very good strategy on their part. I was scared of them and grateful to them in equal measure. They then sat me down and we had a debriefing session, where they went over everything I did wrong.

The second guy I went out with, I managed to get seven thousand dollars from. Mother and Father were so happy. Father actually got a bit teary-eyed. They gave me more McDonald’s and told me they were proud of me. I was so happy to have made them proud. And this became my twenty-four-seven job. In order to meet my new monthly quota, I dated so many men, as many as five at a time, juggling them carefully so they would never guess that the sweet, attentive girl they were seeing was seeing multiple people at once. Not all of the scams were successful, of course, but enough were to make Mother and Father happy.

Here, I can feel you wondering how far did I go with these men to get money out of them? I don’t think you’d want to know the answer to that, Vera. I’ll say this much: I would have done anything to not be locked in my room for days with a bucket.

And now, I can sense you wondering, Why didn’t I run away? I could get out, surely I could’ve gone to the police station and reported Mother and Father.

Aha. Well, here’s where I tell you that Mother and Father are extremely clever people. They don’t work alone. They’re part of an international organization. Uncle Yang is just one of their many, many contacts. And with each child they bought, Mother and Father made sure that they always had something over the child. They told me that if I ever made the mistake of running away, that Uncle Yang would call up his friends and have my parents killed. That’s the thing with all of us kids, we were all in this situation in the first place because we were all from impoverished families. None of our families had any connections. We were the children of farmers or sweatshop workers or street urchins. It would’ve been far too easy for Uncle Yang to have my parents killed. A pair of poor farmers in a tiny village in Yunnan? Nobody would give a shit.

Then, after killing our parents, Father and Mother would hunt us down—and make no mistake about it, they would find us, no matter where we hid—and they would make an example out of us. My sister Yara, did I mention that she was a fighter? She ran away. I thought she’d made it out safely, but about a week later, Father and Mother came back to the warehouse and tossed something on the dining table. It was Yara’s necklace. I was there, doing the dishes, and a couple other kids were there as well, cleaning up. Father and Mother made sure we’d all seen the necklace before they said, “Well, that was a shame. All that time and money we spent on her.”

I thought of my beautiful sister Yara, and I went on doing the dishes, but my hands were shaking too hard and I smashed one of the glasses. Earned myself twenty-four hours of being locked up in my room.

The other thing that Father and Mother often reminded us, as though all the threats weren’t enough, is “You are all illegal aliens in America. There is nothing we hate more here than illegal immigrants. Not to mention the fact that you’re not just illegal immigrants but criminals as well. If you go to the police, they will arrest you .”

So. Now do you see why I didn’t just escape? I had nowhere to escape to, and although I knew the cops would arrest Mother and Father if they knew about their operation, I was also convinced that I would be arrested as well. Especially since Mother and Father documented all of my scams. Not to mention my countless victims, who would only be too happy to testify against me. I would rot in prison as a scam artist, and rightfully so, I guess. But maybe all of this is just an excuse to avoid facing the truth, which is that I am a coward, Vera. I have forgotten the faces of my parents, and I’m sure that by now they have assumed that I died and moved on with their lives. I hope they have, anyway. Sometimes, in the very early mornings, when I wake up and I am in that state between sleeping and waking, I think, I’m home with Mother and Father. Sometimes I forget, you see, that they are not my real parents. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like before I came here.

Oh, Vera, I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t mean to ramble on and on the way I did here. Meeting you was the best thing that has happened to me in America. I remember that day so clearly. After Thomas disappeared, I thought that maybe there was a way that I could report it to the police without exposing myself and my other brothers and sisters. But every possible story I came up with felt so flimsy. I had no idea if Thomas was okay, maybe he’d made it out, maybe he managed to outsmart Mother and Father, or maybe not. That was why I was loitering outside of the police station that day. I was so scared and had no idea what was the right thing to do. I thought maybe I should just turn myself in, consequences be damned. If you hadn’t found me, I would’ve probably given up and gone back to the warehouse. But you did find me, and you whisked me off to your magical little teahouse, and Vera, I need you to understand how much everything you’ve done meant to me.

I think I am going to die here. I have gone against Mother and Father in a way that is simply unforgivable, and I think they no longer trust me to behave myself, and when a child loses Father and Mother’s trust, that child is no longer a useful product. They will discard me the same way they discarded Thomas and Yara and Jeffrey and probably others I don’t know about. I’ve accepted it. But what I can’t accept is what they might do to you, and all because of me. If I were less selfish, I would wish that I had never met you, but I am selfish, so I’m glad that I got to know you, but now you’re in danger because of me, and I am locked up in this room.

I’m so sorry, Vera.

With love,

Penxi