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three burly men to use and abuse Somaly’s body however they wished. Each of them was more ferocious than the last. One of the men beat Somaly with a belt buckle and a crutch before forcing his way inside her. She later found out that he was actually Aunty Peuve’s husband.
    But marriage meant nothing. Love meant nothing. The only reason why men came into Aunty Peuve’s hellhole was to grab a young girl and molest her any way he wanted. Then the girls were thrown back on their pallets, limp and lifeless. Their painted-doll faces made it even easier for the men to toss them around like toys.
    After night two, just to show her who was boss, Aunty Peuve took Somaly down to a cellar that was filled with snakes, scorpions, and sewage. They tied her up and poured snakes all over her. Somaly screamed and cried for hours. She was loud—louder than she’d ever been before. Not because she was scared, but because she was enraged. She didn’t know how or why there was an entire planet of people walking, eating, and dreaming, and not one of them could save her.
    How was it possible that she was here? Who were these aunties, and since when did Grandfather “owe” them something? And why did Somaly have to pay this cruel man’s debts with her life?
    When Somaly was released from the punishment room, the same girl who’d warned Somaly the first night found her again. She slowly wiped Somaly’s wounds with peroxide. It was the first gentle touch Somaly had felt in years.
    Isn’t there some way out? Somaly longed to ask the girl. But the girl’s lips were shut tight. When she was done wiping away the blood and sewage from Somaly, she walked away. Then she started putting on her white face paint again. Silently.
    Whether she wanted to or not, Somaly fell into a kind of routine and learned the ropes. Aunty Peuve and Aunty Nop were meebons . That meant they were in charge of feeding, clothing, and housing the girls during the day. Every night the meebons rented out the girls to whoever came by. Somaly had no choice but to obey if she wanted to stay alive. Most nights, she wondered if she did want to stay alive in a world like this.
    Life at the brothel meant that each night Somaly had to have sex with a new lineup of angry, heartless men: soldiers, shopkeepers, truck drivers, even policemen. The soldiers were definitely the fiercest. They threw Somaly around like a rag doll. Sometimes she was forced to go to the central market and have sex with taxi drivers. The taxi drivers rented wooden planks and lined them up on the sidewalk, so people walking past could see them with Somaly. She felt so horribly degraded with every footstep she heard going by.
    Other times she was sent away with businessmen for the night. Most of the time these were Chinese men who had a lot of money or a lot of friends. They would throw parties with ten or twenty of their pals. They would pass Somaly around like a bottle of wine, and she couldn’t leave until she gave them each pleasure.
    When daylight came, Somaly tried desperately to purify her body. Smelling the stink of these men was the worst torture of all. There was no soap at the brothel, so she boiled tamarind leaves in salt water and dressed her wounds just like she’d done for the soldiers back in Chup. It wasn’t that she cared about the scars on her skin so much. She just wanted so badly to feel clean, to wash away everything that happened the night before, hoping for a new today.
    After she soaked her skin in the tamarind water, Somaly slept in fitful nightmares. If she earned enough, the aunties fed her a bowl of rice when she woke up.
    And then it was time to start all over again.
    Somaly decided that in order to survive she had to pretend she was a magician. Every night at dusk, while she stirred together the coconut oil and white powder for her face, she imagined that she was turning into a wide, snowy plain. Or a mountain peak so high it kissed the sky. Untouched and untouchable.
    She took