1 The So-Called Life They Planned

Charlie's smile was just as fake as her stepmother's as she greeted business associate after business associate. The party was supposedly for her half-sister, Neveah's eighteenth birthday but it was far more realistic to say that it was a business gathering. A place to make connections, to brown nose people who were more influential and to be brown nosed by those looking to climb up the ladder. Charlie's father and stepmother had very carefully complied the guest list so that they were in the middle of the present families. There were sufficient butt kissers and butts for them to kiss for the party to be fairly useful to them.

Additionally, there was a plan to make Charlie useful in their attempts to land a business deal with a company higher up the ladder of influence. She had overheard the conversation quite on accident two weeks before.

"Darling," Charlie's stepmother Tiffany said, "Mr. Silva has expressed... an interest... in the girl." Charlie's father and stepmother never referred to her by her name unless in public. In public, Mr. Callahan's illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, was treated no different from her half siblings. Her stepmother was a loving and forgiving woman. After all she had adopted her husband's bastard child after the girl's mother had died tragically when the baby was barely one year old. Of course the fact that the family treated her as a servant privately was not public knowledge.

"Mr. Silva..." Mr. Callahan mused, "How interested?"

"I am certain it is just a passing interest but he will agree to collaborate on the Golden City project as long as she will be at he disposal until he tires of her."

Charlie couldn't quite process the words immediately as she stood outside her parents's bedroom door with their 'night caps' a brandy old fashioned and a cognac, and yet some instinct prompted her to stay quite and not knock on the door, to stand there with her hand raised and keep listening.

"I have no objections, we need the deal to go through. How do you plan to keep the girl from going to the authorities. She is quite passive but I don't she will go to the man's bed just based on your orders." Mr. Callahan took a long drag on his cigarette.

"She will no doubt be resistant at first, I have procured a drug to make her compliant, and after the fact I doubt she will put up much of a fight. She isn't unintelligent after all. I will simply lay the options out for her, she can serve the people we choose as a sort of high end mistress, or she can become a common whore in the gutter. She won't resist for long. In the mean time, I will make sure that I have film evidence that she won't want to see released on the internet."

"When?"

"Naveah's eighteenth birthday party will be a the Monarch Hotel. I give her a drink to toast to her sister. When it starts to kick in, we have Don deliver her to Mr. Silva's room to 'rest,'" Tiffany laughed, "No one will notice her absence."

Charlie crept back to the connecting door and made sure that it squeaked as it opened and approached the bedroom once again.

"Girl! What have I told you about making a ruckus in this house?!" Charlie's father yelled.

Charlie opened the door to the bedroom quietly, her eyes lowered in apparent respect.

"My apologies Sir, Madame" she said as she served their drinks, "I will be sure to oil the

hinges immediately."

She fled the room as soon as she could. Only to collapse onto her twin sized bed and wallow in the fact her father and stepmother intended to pimp her out for business benefits.

Charlie had always known that Mr. and Mrs. Callahan did not like her. She knew the rules. Mother and Father were only for public occasions. In private it was Sir and Madame. It was the same with her half siblings. And yet. She was the only one. She was the only illegitimate child and they had taken her in from when she was very small. Her father had an endless stream of lovers. Yet those women never got pregnant. At least not to Charlie's knowledge.

There was some part of Charlie that had believed her father and stepmother had to have some affection for her. She had believed if she had just done well enough, tried hard enough, been successful enough, that they would love her. Maybe not her stepmother but her father at least should be able to love her if she made him proud, if she gave him something to brag about. But now, as she lay on her bed reliving the conversation she had overheard again and again all the little things that had been built up over a lifetime and dismissed because the truth was too painful for a child such as her to endure came crashing back to her.

"Your only luck was being born a girl!" Her half brother, Damien, had shouted at her once, "If you had been a boy you would have been killed with your whore of a mother."

She had ignored the part about gender, but looking back, it was true that if she had been male then according to the family rules she would have been in the running to inherit. Something her stepmother would never allow.

"You? Get married?" Her half sister had laughed, "You'll never marry. You'll be a mistress passed from man to man until you are either to ugly to screw or you die of some STD or other."

She had been ten when her sister had said that in one of her rants. Six years before. Had this always been the plan? Had her father and stepmother kept her with the intention of whoring her out? Who looks at an infant and decides to raise her to be a whore?

The evidence was there. Charlie could no longer pretend that being the good daughter would get her anywhere. She spent the night with all the thoughts, memories, and regrets running through her mind like an endless liturgy of personal failure.

Luckily, it had been two weeks before the party when Charlie had overheard the conversation and Charlie was not completely without resources. She had spent the two weeks planning her escape from the party, her parents, and the so called life they had planned for her.

When she was thirteen, she had started taking online translating jobs without her parents knowledge. One of her friends had set up a online account and gave her cash in exchange for a small percentage of the transactions. Charlie knew that her family wouldn't let her open her own account. She had lost that battle many years ago. At the time, she thought that they were afraid that she would waste any allowance she was given. She thought that if she earned her own money, a lot of money, she would prove herself to them somehow. She had this idea that on her eighteenth birthday she would present her parents with an extravagant gift purchased with her own money and chosen by her, unlike the gifts that she had presented them for every major event up until this point. Those gifts had been purchased by someone else for her to present to them during the party. Gifts that never could outshine the gifts of her half siblings but still showed her 'love' and 'filial piety'.

After discovering her parents's plans for her she no longer had any intention to ever spend a single penny on them. But she had accumulated a stockpile of cash sitting in a couple of duffle bags in different subway stations throughout the city.

She should have realized what her subconscious was telling her when she chose not to keep the cash in her room. She should have realized that she couldn't trust her so-called family. She should have realized. The self-scorn was inescapable.

Anyway, her plan was pretty simple. She knew that she could only pretend to drink or eat at the party, otherwise she would be drugged. She knew that she had to pretend to be drugged anyway preferably at the correct moment, and she knew that she had to somehow get rid of whomever was going to take her to the room where her would be rapist waited. That would be the most difficult part. After that, she had to run. The hotel wasn't that far from the subway, once she got into the station, she would be fine. She could collect her stashes one at a time and catch a bus to somewhere else. After that, she wasn't sure. But she knew it would be better than staying.