Chapter Seven
Angela
I have a lot of debts to pay. Blood debts that no amount of money can cover.
Technically, they aren’t my debts. They’re my family’s.
But the knowledge of what my family is involved in, what they want me to be involved in, literally keeps me awake at night.
If someone were to ask me, “How do you sleep at night?” I could honestly answer, “I don’t.
” Drug running, money laundering, and the worst of it: human trafficking.
It’s enough to keep anyone with a conscience addicted to sleep aids.
When I first moved to this sleepy little college town back in May, the first order of business was finding a job and a place to live. As soon as that was taken care of, I looked for a way to start repaying those debts. Much to my relief, it was easy to find.
The regional Legal Aid office maintains its offices in the well-worn “downtown” area, sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and a juice bar, close enough that I can bike there from home or school.
I read up on the kinds of services they offered and saw that they were a member of a statewide anti-trafficking task force.
Anti-trafficking! That was perfect. I immediately applied to be a volunteer, explaining that I was starting law school and wanted to work on human trafficking cases.
About a week after submitting my materials in person, I got a call from Elisa Perez, the head of the Legal Aid anti-trafficking team, inviting me in for an interview.
We met in her windowless office, the only decor for which was her UCLA undergraduate degree, Harvard Law degree, and battered oscillating fan.
A gray suit with a generic label on the jacket slouched on a hanger behind the door.
Piles of manila case files covered every available surface.
Despite the dingy interior, she and the space around her crackled with energy and optimism as she explained the work she did. I was hooked.
“Why are you interested in human trafficking cases?” Elisa had asked. She looked like she wasn’t even thirty years old, with black hair braided and wrapped into a bun at the nape of her neck, dark eyes, and lips pink from red lipstick that had worn off.
I fidgeted slightly in my Chanel suit, acutely aware that she was wearing jeans and a blouse.
“It was all around me, and I didn’t know it,” I said, keeping as close to the truth as I could.
“I learned about it in college and wrote my senior thesis paper on it. Now I want to do something real to help.”
She looked at me and nodded, then smiled. “That’s good enough for me!” she said, slapping her hands down on her cluttered desk and making me jump. “When can you start?”
I started the next day. I cut the Chanel tags off of my suit and dressed in my new thrift-store casual style.
When I got to work, Elisa made room for me to hang my suit jacket up next to hers.
I started out stapling and copying, but before a month had gone by, I was sitting in on client meetings, accompanying Elisa to court, and attending Anti-Trafficking Task Force meetings.
I’m at one such meeting, taking notes on a new law enforcement training program the group is developing, when my phone vibrates with a text. When I see that it’s a New York number, my stomach drops into my feet. But then I see the message:
Got your number from the bathroom wall. Can I hit you up?
I smile with relief and… Oh, no, Angela. No, no, no. You can absolutely not get excited about hearing from him.
I turn my attention back to the meeting. But now all I can think about is green-eyed, copper-haired, freckle-faced Brady McDaniels. Damn it.
When the meeting is over and Elisa and I are back at the office, we review some intake files for trafficking victims. The clients are poor seamstresses from Southeast Asia.
A company called Vista International had “hired” them to work in factories all over the western United States.
It was supposed to be the chance of a lifetime for the women, an opportunity to make U.S.
minimum wage, a fortune compared to what they usually made as seamstresses in their part of the world.
Instead, they’d been shipped off to sweatshops around the West Coast, where they were housed in rooms unfit for animals, denied their wages, billed for their visas and “amenities,” overworked half the time and deprived of work for the other half.
Armed guards patrolled their living quarters and worksites, preventing escape.
But when one of them managed to escape from a sweatshop outside of Los Angeles, it had set in motion a police inquiry that ultimately led to an FBI investigation.
The FBI had sent the seamstresses to Elisa to see if they qualified for special visas for trafficking victims.
“Um, Elisa,” I say, shuffling the papers in front of me after reading through about a dozen intakes. “Have you done cases like these before? Ones involving a recruiting company like this?”
“Not one from a business this big, no,” she says.
“Okay…”
“What?” she asks, looking up at me.
I should just keep my mouth shut, but I’m worried about the clients. No matter how much they cooperated with the police and prosecutors, there would be no convictions forthcoming. So I tell her. “This is a mob operation.”
She frowns and squints at the intake in front of her, flipping through the pages intently. “I didn’t see anything in any of my intakes about that…”
“It’s all over the intakes,” I say, my voice low and hesitant.
Now she’s looking at me intently. “What do you mean, Angela?”
Vista International is operating within a different industry from the one I’m familiar with, but they’re committing the same crime: severe human trafficking.
Traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to smuggle people into the United States or other countries where there’s a market for their labor.
Sometimes they procure legitimate visas for their victims; other times they kidnap them and smuggle them across borders, sight unseen.
But regardless of the means, the goal is the same: get free labor out of them.
Pay them as little as possible by racking up imaginary debts (including, ironically enough, the cost of kidnapping and imprisoning them), instill so much fear of violent retribution in them that they’ll never go to the police, and use them over and over until they end up sick or injured or dead. It’s a gold mine.
“The shell business, the procurers in the country of origin who can’t be tied back to the business, the brutal security…” I say.
“I mean, that’s how a lot of trafficking operations are,” says Elisa uncertainly.
“But this one is airtight,” I point out. It’s far more professional than the one-offs and the mom-and-pop operations we usually deal with. This has organized crime written all over it.
“So…what does that mean?” she asks.
I’m not sure what it means. “Can we still help them even if there’s no indictment and no convictions?” I ask.
“Yes, the visa just requires cooperation on the part of the victims, not a successful prosecution, but…” Elisa is looking at me strangely. “Why wouldn’t there be convictions? Or at the very least an indictment? Do you know something about Vista International?”
I feel weird and awkward venturing into this territory. “I don’t know about them specifically. But I know about businesses like them.”
She eyes me keenly. “You do.”
I nod.
“Is it…uh…dangerous for us to be involved with this particular case?” she asks hesitantly.
“No,” I assure her. “Not in this capacity, where we’re just helping the victims get visas. The bosses would only go after people on the inside who snitch. You know, rats. That’s why there’ll probably not be much of an investigation, let alone convictions.”
“Rats…”
I nod.
“And you know this because…”
“My senior thesis,” I say. “Remember?”
“Wow. That must have been some thesis project.” She’s watching me with raised eyebrows. Definitely time to change the subject.
It’s nearly six o’clock, so I tell Elisa I need to go home and study for tomorrow’s classes. She’s still looking at me speculatively as I head out the door.
I bike home in the evening heat and dust, take a long, intermittently hot shower, dry my hair, paint my toes, and ignore my phone for as long as I can.
Finally, having no excuse to put it off any longer, I check my text messages.
There are two: the one from Brady and one from a girl in my study group. I pull that one up first.
Hi! Study group at Silver Spoon Coffee on Sunday.
See you there , I text back.
Still stalling, I read my mom’s latest email, in which she recounts her current redecorating endeavor. I reply with as much enthusiasm as I can muster.
Finally, I open Brady’s text, read it again, and type out a reply.
The guy who wrote my number on the wall doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
His reply comes back almost immediately. He did mention you have a nice ass.
I laugh, outraged, embarrassed, and oddly flattered all at the same time. Thanks, I guess. Yours isn’t bad, either.
That’s what all the girls say.
So modest, Brady.
Brady? Who’s Brady? This is Professor Baker.
I burst out laughing, falling back onto the cushions of the battered brown plaid couch that had come with the apartment. That is disgusting!!!
You’re laughing, though, aren’t you?
I’m nauseous.
From laughing so hard.
OK, yeah, I’m practically falling off my sofa I’m laughing so hard. Happy?
Yeah , he texts back. You’re beautiful even when you’re all pissy and uptight. When you smile you take it to a whole other level.
Pissy and uptight… Wow. You really know how to make a girl swoon.
Did you miss the beautiful part?
That’s what all the boys say.
Touché, Pines.
I smile as I type my reply. Pines? Who’s Pines? This is Professor Camacho and I’m filing a sexual harassment complaint against you, Mr. McDaniels.
Nice. Now I’m the one falling off my sofa.
He texts again. Beautiful and funny. Deadly combo.
Don’t forget not a Red Sox fan , I text back.
That’s it. You’ve hit my 3 criteria. Will you marry me?
I laugh. Time and place, McDaniels.
See you in class tomorrow, princess.
I put my phone down and stretch out on my sofa, one arm flung off the side and the other covering my eyes.
A guy is flirting with me. A hot, funny, cool, sweet guy is flirting with me. Not just flirting with me. Actively pursuing me, it seems. Texting me for no particular reason, taking me out for coffee, and asking me out for Saturday.
This is new to me. In high school and even in college, my family’s name and reputation kept the boys at a distance.
No one wanted to be in the unenviable position of breaking my heart or taking my V-card.
Either one, legend had it, would result in the corpse of a beloved pet ending up in their bed—unless they caught my dad on a really bad day, in which case their own corpse would end up at the bottom of the East River.
The denouement of that bit of folklore is that I’m still a virgin.
The really funny part about it? My dad didn’t give half a shit what I did in my social life.
I could have gang-banged the football team on his pool table for all he cared.
All that crap about men like him protecting their daughters’ virtue is just that: crap.
So long as I stayed out of his way and didn’t seek much attention from him, we were cool.
Well, those days are over. I’m not my father’s daughter anymore.
I’m my own person, and a boy likes me. A man, really, even though he has those freckles and that unruly hair, and even though he grins like a kid about to steal your last gummy bear.
He’s a man who looks at me like I’m a woman, not a shortcut to a dead end.
Okay, it’s obviously time for a reality check.
Too much is riding on me being able to handle my shit for me to get all doe-eyed over the first guy in years to pay me some attention.
Even if not a man-whore, Brady is obviously a social butterfly of the highest order and has probably text-bantered with at least five other girls tonight.
I wish I had someone to call to get some advice and perspective.
Elisa is my boss, Kelsey’s working, I’m not close to anyone at school, and my few friends back home are 100 percent off-limits.
I’m under no illusions about how precarious my situation is.
As far as my family knows, I’m on the other side of the world and off the grid.
One phone call, one email, one hint to anyone outside my family that I’m not where I’m supposed to be, and my parents will find me in a week, tops.
My disappearance has to be complete and unrelenting if I truly want to be free.
So I’m going to have to forget girl talk, avoid distractions, and focus on something actually important—like school.
Unfortunately, my hormones have other plans for me.
I might be a law student, but they’re lovestruck high schoolers writing anonymous notes to slip into their crush’s locker.
I try to read about strict liability for Torts class, but two cases in, all I can think about is how it would have felt if it had been Brady’s arms wrapped around me at work that night, his body pinning me to the bar, his breath in my ear and against my neck.
Shit! I slam my book closed and push it off the sofa. It lands with a thud on the floor. I cap my highlighter and drop it on the floor next to the book. It’s no use. I’m just going to go to bed.
I grab the sweatshirt I promised to keep safe. It smells like Brady’s cologne mixed with my perfume. It’s old but in good condition. I notice that there’s a name written with a Sharpie inside the collar. B. McDaniels. I fold it up and put it back safely in my drawer.
I lie in bed alone in the dark and wait for the fear and anxiety to descend.
As I wait, I imagine Brady’s laughing green eyes.
But they aren’t laughing. They’re drinking me in as I lie in bed in nothing but my thin cotton camisole and lacy underwear.
I imagine that his hands are everywhere his eyes had been—in my hair, on my face, touching me from my neck down to my toes.
And I’m not afraid. As much as he’s distracted me from my work, he’s distracted me from my fear. For the first time since I’ve left home, I don’t fall asleep thinking about bills, grades, or hiding. I fall asleep thinking about Brady’s lips all over my body.