Maya was seven years old the first time she understood that her body could be currency.
She lived with her mother in a two-bedroom apartment that sweated through every Atlanta summer. The complex crouched behind a highway overpass, and at night the trucks shook the windows like distant thunder, their headlights sweeping across her ceiling in slow, predictable arcs. Maya shared a wall with the neighbors, a young couple who fought in Spanish and made up in silence, their bed frame knocking against the plaster at odd hours.
Her mother worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at Denny's. She came home with tired eyes and the smell of bacon in her hair, with sore feet and tips that barely covered their groceries. Sometimes Maya pretended to be asleep when Mom checked on her, because it was easier than watching her count quarters at the kitchen table, the lamplight catching the exhaustion in her knuckles.
The laptop was old, a hand-me-down from a customer who'd felt sorry for Mom. It took five minutes to start up and overheated if you used it too long. But it was Maya's window to everywhere else—to worlds where girls had ponytails that never frizzed and kitchens that never smelled like old grease.
On this particular Tuesday, Mom had fallen asleep on the couch before she even made it to her bedroom. Maya waited until the snoring started—a soft, whistling sound—then crept out of bed and opened the laptop in her room.
The screen glowed blue in the darkness.
She wanted cartoons. She always wanted cartoons. The world inside her screen was brighter than the one outside her window, where the hallway light stayed broken and the landlord never fixed it.
She opened the browser and typed "cartoons" into the search bar. A list of results appeared. She clicked the first one—but nothing happened. The page wouldn't load.
Frustrated, Maya clicked the little arrow next to the search bar. A dropdown menu appeared, showing websites her mother had visited recently. Mom wasn't good with computers. She never cleared her history.
One link stood out. It had a name Maya didn't recognize and a series of symbols she couldn't pronounce. Curious, she clicked.
The video loaded fast. Much faster than cartoons ever did.
For thirty seconds, Maya watched adults doing things she didn't understand. Her face remained calm, expressionless, the way she'd learned to look when adults did confusing things. She'd perfected that look at school, at the grocery store, at the landlord's office. Inside, she felt mostly nothing—a vague confusion, a sense that she was seeing something meant to be hidden, like the sounds through the wall at night.
The woman on screen was young. Younger than Mom. She had dark hair and dark eyes and a way of looking at the camera that made Maya feel like she was being watched back. The woman moved slowly, deliberately, like she knew exactly what every inch of her body was doing. Like she owned it completely.
And she was laughing. Not fake laughing, not performing. Real laughter, the kind that crinkled your eyes and made your shoulders shake. The kind Mom used to do, before the shifts got longer and the tips got smaller.
At the end of the scene, someone off-camera handed her a stack of cash. The woman counted it, still laughing, and tucked it into her bag. She kissed the money before she disappeared from frame.
Maya stared at the screen long after the video ended.
People get money for that?
She didn't understand what she'd seen. Not really. But she understood money. Money meant Mom didn't have to work double shifts. Money meant groceries without counting. Money meant a landlord who smiled instead of yelled. Money meant Mom might laugh again, really laugh, the way she used to before Maya's father left and the apartment got smaller and the nights got longer.
Maya sat in the blue glow of the laptop, her small hands resting on the keyboard. She thought about the woman's laugh. She thought about the way she'd moved, like water, like she was made of something soft and powerful at the same time. She thought about the money disappearing into her bag.
Somewhere out there, people were getting paid just for being looked at. Just for being beautiful. Just for letting the camera drink them in.
Maya looked down at her own small hands. At the scab on her knee from falling off her bike. At the gap where she'd lost a tooth last week. She was seven. Her body was just beginning to feel like something that belonged to her, something she was still learning to inhabit.
But she understood, even then, that bodies had power. She'd seen it in the way men looked at Mom at the grocery store, the way their eyes followed her even when she was just buying milk and bread. She'd seen it in the way Mom walked different after her shower, wrapped in a towel, like she was something precious and breakable.
The woman on screen had known something. Had understood something about herself that Maya was only beginning to suspect.
She closed the laptop and lay back in bed, staring at the ceiling. The trucks rumbled past on the highway, shaking her walls, and somewhere in the apartment a pipe knocked. Through the wall, the neighbors' bed frame started its slow rhythm again.
Somewhere out there, people were laughing and getting paid for being beautiful.
Maya touched her own face in the darkness. Her cheekbones, still soft with baby fat. Her lips, still small. Her eyes, which Mom said were old already, too old for a seven-year-old.
She filed that video away like a secret. She didn't know what it meant yet. But she knew, with the absolute certainty of a child who'd learned to watch and wait, that it meant something. That somewhere between being looked at and being paid, there was a door she hadn't known existed.
She was seven years old.
She'd just found her first clue about what her body might be worth.