Jennifer Schneider

❝ [she is cigarette smoke and cheap perfume, black lace and cold hands, a girl who has spent her whole life learning how to be wanted without ever being loved.]

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Jeanny was born with bad luck stitched into the seams of her existence and if there was ever a moment she was wanted, it ended the second she took her first breath. Her mother was a girl too young, and her father was a question no one ever answered. They gave her away like a mistake that could be erased if they just didn’t look at it too long. So she learned early that love was conditional, that kindness had a price, that the world didn’t give a damn whether she sank or swam. The family that took her in treated her like a chore, and when she was too much work, they reminded her with belt buckles and backhands. At sixteen, she ran, because staying meant dying slow, and she had always preferred things quick and painless. Berlin swallowed her whole, as cities do, and spat her back out with her ribs showing through her skin and a mouth that knew how to say yes when she meant no. She slept in train stations and alleyways, on the floors of kind strangers and the beds of less kind ones. She learned to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling. She learned to touch without feeling. And in time, she learned that a girl like her—young, pretty, always a little sad-looking—was worth something to men who liked breaking things just to hear how they sounded when they shattered.

Now, she works the streets because hunger is louder than pride and because it is easier to let strangers touch her body than to let them touch anything deeper. She is a girl for sale, a girl made of cigarette smoke and borrowed time, a girl who has learned that men only want her when she is on her knees or on her back or looking at them like they are gods instead of gnawing, hollow things with hands that always took too much.

She told herself she wouldn’t do it forever.

That someday, she’d have a life that belonged to her. That she’d be more than just a body someone else had bought for the night.

She has dreams, but she does not tell anyone about them. They are fragile things, made of music and poetry, of stages and spotlights and the sound of