The phone buzzed against the dresser, and Maya felt the sound before she heard it — a small electric shiver up through the wood, through the mattress, into the base of her spine, where she was still coming down from a long, slow wave of something she didn't have the vocabulary for yet.

Sunita rolled onto her side. The movement was casual, careless, the way a woman moves when she's never had to be careful about being watched. Her arm reached past Maya's hip, past the curve of her waist, and the phone lit up in her hand. She glanced at the screen. Then she glanced at Maya. Then she held the phone up so Maya could see it — the screen tilted toward her like a mirror.

New girl. Interested in a scene? Male performer, $1,000. Confirm availability.

Maya read it twice. The words didn't move, but they rearranged themselves in her chest. The new girl. Not a boy. Not a question. Not is she real or is she serious or does she know what she's doing. Just — the new girl. Somebody at the agency had seen something, decided something, typed the new girl like it was already true.

The ceiling fan clicked. Once. Twice. The incense had burned down to a dark curl of ash on the dresser, and under it, the smell of what they'd just done — salt, sex, her own come going tacky on her belly.

"They think you're beautiful," Sunita said.

Her voice was the same voice that had told Maya to open her legs, the same voice that had said good, that's good. Soft and mean and patient. Maya's fingers found the edge of the sheet and pulled it up over her stomach, an old reflex, and Sunita's eyes followed the movement and didn't comment on it.

"Who sent that."

"The agency. One of the booking girls, probably Nisha — she handles the new talent." Sunita scrolled with her thumb. "You're in the system now. That's what happens when you're in the system."

"I'm not in the system."

"You are." Sunita turned the phone so Maya could see the contact card at the top of the message — no photograph, just a name, a number, a small line of text that said agency: talent inquiries. "I put you in last week. Before the recording. So it wouldn't be a scramble later."

Maya sat up. The sheet fell. Her heels were still on, and the ankle straps had left faint red lines across her arches, and she noticed this the way she noticed everything now — as evidence. As a body that had happened.

"You put me in last week," she repeated.

"Mm."

"Before you asked me."

"I asked you the night you came out to me, Maya. You were fourteen. You said you wanted to be a woman. I said, then we start now. " Sunita's thumb moved over the screen, lazy, unhurried. "This is the next thing. It's not a different thing."

The fan clicked. Outside the window, a car went by — low, slow, the bass of someone's music bleeding through the glass and gone again. Maya looked at her mother's face in the blue light of the phone, and Sunita looked back, and neither of them said anything for long enough that the silence became its own kind of sentence.

"A thousand dollars," Maya said finally.

"A thousand dollars for a first scene. That's a good number. That's a we think you're going to be worth something number." Sunita set the phone down on the sheet between them, screen up, and the message stayed there like a small open door. "The performer's name isn't in the text. That means they're still casting him. It means they're waiting on your yes before they lock him in."

Maya's hand went to her nose ring without her telling it to. She twisted it, once, the way she did when she was thinking, and the metal was cool and familiar and hers.

"What would I —" She stopped. Started again. "What would it be. The scene."

"Depends who they book." Sunita stretched, one arm overhead, the long line of her body going taut and then loose again. The sheet slipped off her hip and she didn't bother pulling it back. "Could be straightforward. Could be a lot of things. You'd have a conversation first, you'd have a safe word, you'd have me in the room if you wanted me. That's how I'd set it up."

"Would you want to be in the room."

"I'd be in the room either way. That's not negotiable." Sunita said it flat, without heat, the way she said most true things. "You're eighteen and you've been on camera once, and it was your own hand. I'm not handing you to a stranger and walking out to get coffee."

Maya picked up the phone. She hadn't decided to. Her hand just did it, and then the phone was in her palm, and it was heavier than it looked — the case was leather, worn soft at the corners, and warm from Sunita's grip. The message was still open. The cursor blinked at the end of Confirm availability, patient, indifferent, waiting for someone to type a letter.

"You want me to say yes," Maya said. Not quite a question.

"I want you to say whatever you say." Sunita reached over and put her hand on Maya's thigh, just above the knee, where the skin was still flushed from earlier. "But I'll tell you what I think, because you asked. I think you've spent your whole life being looked at and never once being paid for it. That's a different thing. That's a thing where you decide the price."

Maya looked down at the phone. The blue light made her own thumbnail look pale, almost translucent, and she noticed the polish was chipping at the corner — she'd have to fix that before anything, before a scene, before a camera, before a man she'd never met saw her hands.

"I don't know how to do it," she said. "The — the actual thing. With a man."

"You don't know how to do it with that man. You know how to do it." Sunita's hand moved up, slow, palm flat, until her fingers found the soft swell of Maya's belly — still tacky, still hers. "You've been practicing on yourself for four years. You know what you like. You know what you want. The rest is choreography, and choreography is what I'm for."

"You'd teach me."

"I'd teach you." Sunita's thumb pressed into the come on Maya's belly, a small deliberate smear, and Maya felt her whole body answer it — not arousal, exactly. Something quieter. Something like being signed for. "You know what I did my first scene?"

"No."

"I threw up in the bathroom after. Twice. The performer was kind about it. The director was not." Sunita smiled, and it was the softer, meaner smile, the one Maya had seen behind the phone. "I don't want that for you. That's the whole reason for the next two weeks."

"Two weeks."

"That's how long I'd want. Before you say yes to anybody." Sunita pulled her hand back and picked up the phone again, and now she was the one holding it, and Maya's palm felt cold where the leather had been. "Two weeks of me teaching you what a scene actually is. What a client actually wants. How to keep your body yours inside somebody else's fantasy. Then you decide. Not now, not tonight, not in the middle of —" she gestured vaguely at the bed, at the sheet, at the two of them — "this."

Maya looked at the window. Her reflection was there, faint, doubled against the dark glass — the long fall of her hair, the curve of her shoulder, the small point of her nose ring catching the room's low light. She looked like the woman she'd been building for four years. She looked like someone who could be the new girl.

"If I said yes tonight," she said. "What would happen."

"I'd call Nisha. I'd tell her you're interested but unavailable for two weeks. She'd put you on the shortlist. When you're ready, we'd set up a meet with the performer and the director, and you'd walk in knowing what you were walking into." Sunita turned the phone over in her hand, screen down now, and the room went darker by one small degree. "If you said no tonight, I'd tell her the same thing, minus the shortlist. Same two weeks either way. I'm not going to let you rush a decision you're going to live with."

"What do you want."

Sunita was quiet. The fan clicked. Somewhere in the building, water moved in a pipe.

"I want you to stop holding your breath," she said. "That's what I want. Whether it's in front of a camera or not."

Maya's fingers found the phone again. She didn't take it out of her mother's hand — she just rested her fingertips on the edge of it, the way you touch a thing you're not sure is yours yet. The leather was warm. The message was still there under the screen, unseen, waiting.

"Can I hold it," she said.

Sunita looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned the phone back over and pressed it into Maya's palm — not a handoff, a placing, deliberate, the way you hand someone a key or a knife. Her fingers closed around Maya's fingers and squeezed once, tight, before she let go.

The phone was in Maya's hand. The message was on the screen. Confirm availability. The cursor blinked.

"Read it again," Sunita said.

Maya read it again. The new girl. Interested in a scene? Male performer, $1,000.

"Out loud."

"The new girl," Maya said, and her voice came out lower than she expected, lower than her own voice, a voice she hadn't heard before. "Interested in a scene. Male performer. A thousand dollars."

"Say the last part."

"Confirm availability."

"Good." Sunita's hand slid down, down, past Maya's navel, into the soft crease where her thigh met her hip, and stopped there, warm, waiting. "Now take a breath."

Maya took a breath.

"Yes," she said.

The word landed between them on the sheet, small and enormous, and neither of them moved for a second. Then Sunita's hand slid down the rest of the way, palm flat against Maya's belly, and her other hand reached for the phone in Maya's grip — and Maya watched her mother's thumb find the call button, press it, and lift the phone to her own ear.

The line rang once. Twice.

The phone was still warm from Maya's hand, and now it was against Sunita's ear, and Maya could hear the ring tone leaking out of the speaker — a thin electronic pulse, faint, tinny, like something small and alive trapped in the casing. She watched her mother's face go still and listening, the way it did when she was working, when the client on the other end was someone with money and a mood and Sunita was already three moves ahead of him.

Maya's own hand was still up where the phone had been, fingers half-curled around nothing. She put it down on the sheet and looked at the shape it made — five long nails, pale polish chipping at the corner of the thumb, the small crescent of her own palm. She'd done that polish herself, two nights ago, sitting on the floor of her bathroom with a towel under her hands, and now it was coming apart at one edge like everything else tonight.

"Nisha," Sunita said into the phone. Not a question. Just the name, dropped flat, and then a pause where the other woman must have been talking. Sunita's eyes came back to Maya and stayed there, and there was something in them that wasn't the softer, meaner smile and wasn't quite anything Maya had a word for — a watching, an appraisal, the look you give a thing you've made with your own hands and are about to hand to somebody else.

"She's here," Sunita said. "She's holding the phone. She's deciding."

A beat. The fan clicked. The incense ash on the dresser had gone completely cold, and the smell of it had thinned out into the room's older smells — the mattress, the leather of the phone case, the salt of two bodies that had spent the last hour doing something they weren't going to talk about in daylight.

Maya pulled the sheet up again, higher this time, up to her collarbone, and the cotton was cool where it hadn't been lying against her. She could feel the come drying on her belly in a thin, tacky film, and she could feel the ankle straps of her heels still biting faintly into her arches, and she could feel, more than any of it, the shape of the word she'd just said sitting in the middle of the bed like a third person.

"Two weeks," Sunita said into the phone. "She's not available for two weeks. Put her on the shortlist and tell whoever's casting that the two weeks is mine, not hers."

Maya's fingers tightened on the edge of the sheet. Mine, not hers. She didn't know if that was a fence or a promise or a leash, and she didn't know which one she wanted it to be, and the not-knowing was its own hot thing in the middle of her chest.

"Mm. A thousand's low for a first scene and you know it." Sunita's voice had gone lazy, almost bored, the way it went when she was negotiating. "She's got a look. She's got the body. She's got the face and she's got the mouth and she's got a following waiting to happen. A thousand's an opening bid and we both know it."

The window had gone fully dark now and Maya could see herself in it, properly this time — not the faint doubling from before but a real reflection, blue-lit and clear, the long fall of her black hair down past her shoulder blades, the wide flare of her hips where the sheet gathered, the small point of her nose ring catching the light from the phone. She looked at the shape of herself and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that's what they saw. That's what they're buying.

She'd spent four years building this — the hormones, the injections, the hours in front of her own bathroom mirror checking for the softening at the jaw, the widening at the hip, the slow disappearance of the boy she'd never been. She'd built the hourglass and the hair and the face and the nails, and now somebody at an agency she'd never met had looked at a photograph of her and typed the new girl and put a number on it, and the number was real, and it was hers.

"Fine," Sunita said. "I'll tell her. I'll have her confirm in the morning."

Maya's hand went to her nose ring again, the small cool loop, and she turned it once. The gesture was a thing she did when she was thinking and had been doing since she was fifteen and had pierced it herself in a bathroom with a needle she'd sterilized over a candle flame, and her mother had found her bleeding into the sink and hadn't yelled, had just cleaned it and said next time tell me and I'll take you to someone who knows what they're doing.

"She's still here," Sunita said. "She's listening to every word. That's good. That's the right instinct." A pause. "Yeah. Tomorrow."

And then she lowered the phone from her ear, and her thumb pressed the screen, and the call was over, and the room went back to being just a room — the fan, the window, the two of them, the sheet, the smell of sex going stale in the warm air.