I returned from Kuala Lumpur to find Serena was gone.

“Gone?”

“Gone. Closets cleared out. One-way ticket. Gone,” said Ari.

Oh, happy day! Serena gone! I think I actually did the running man. Then it hit me. Had the jab at her that I had slipped into my pillow talk with Robin caused her to be sent home? If so, who cared? I should feel victorious. She had tried to do the same to me but it hadn’t worked because she was too transparent.

I flashed back to her eating that strawberry. I knew the feeling of running your tongue over the tiny beads, anticipating the taste, pretending, always pretending, that one bite is enough, that you don’t ever need to feel full, to feel satisfied. I felt a pang of something. Not guilt, exactly. Disgust. At Serena and at myself. For what a vicious harpy she had been, for what I had been reduced to in the face of it. But isn’t this who I wanted to be? The ruthless one, the one who fights and wins, even if I come out bloody? The opposite of fighter isn’t lover, it’s runner. Who do you want to be?

I asked Ari why Serena had gone home and she finally spilled all the beans about Serena. The story of Serena was that Serena had been number one before there was ever a Fiona. Serena had been number one before there were any other Western girls in Brunei. Robin had adored Serena once. But, like the wife of Bluebeard, she just couldn’t resist the one thing that was forbidden her.

Back in the early days of the Brunei party girls, a whole eight months before, Ari, Serena, and Leanne had regularly been allowed out to the Hilton to have lunch and swim in the pool. They had gone shopping in Singapore and then gone out to the zoo together. They had each lived in their own guesthouse.

During this golden age, Prince Hakeem, Jefri’s oldest son, whom I had yet to meet, would come to the parties every night. He had a friend named Arif, the handsome counterpart to the behemoth Hakeem. Arif began to show up at the Hilton pool on certain days, which were magically the days Serena happened to be there.

Serena used the house phone to arrange the trysts. Apparently our favorite frosty blue-eyed beauty also had a taste for talking dirty on said phone and not to the Prince. Robin rarely used the phone for social reasons. Why would he? Other people made his calls for him. If he wanted to talk to someone, he mentioned it to one of his aides and the person soon appeared in front of him.

Serena was the trailblazer in Brunei. She didn’t know the phones were tapped. She never suspected that her private conversations would be played back for the Prince himself, who never confronted her directly, but rather would just drop hints by repeating, at opportune moments, choice phrases from her conversations with Arif. I imagine that he enjoyed how her body went stiff and dropped in temperature, how her eyes registered fear and guilt that not even she could conceal, how she broke a light sweat and tried ever harder to please him, feigning greater passion.

The Prince didn’t summarily cut off her head. He didn’t even present her with a one-way ticket home. What fun would that be? It wasn’t his style. If he was the Grand Inquisitor and he had you stretched out on a rack, he’d make it last for days. He’d turn the wheel in such minuscule progressions that you might not even notice you were being tortured until you saw your intestines on the ground next to you. No, he pretended he had forgiven Serena. He invited her back and sat her in a chair and proceeded to ignore her for months while he romanced every other woman in the room, but most pointedly her rival. That rival would be me.

Ari told me all this over cheese sandwiches and watermelon spears. I felt my toes turn cold. Fiona, my best buddy Fiona, must have known this and never mentioned it to me. It wasn’t like she didn’t warn me. “I’m not your friend,” she’d said. Another useful lesson I learned in Brunei: When someone tells you something like, “I’m not your friend,” believe her.

Taylor had lain next to me in bed and urged me to avenge my mistreatment. “You’re smart, too,” she had whispered in my ear.

Was I? I had made a move that looked good at the time, but it turned out the other players in this game had way more information than I did. With Serena gone, would I be cast aside, no longer needed in Robin’s scheme to torture her? He enjoyed the infighting among the girls. Would I be less fun for him without a rival? Would I go back to New York and wait for a phone call from Ari that never came, my hope fading as the months wore on? If I had even influenced Serena’s departure at all, had I been shortsighted in my manipulations?

Had Fiona seen this far ahead? Had she used me to get rid of Serena, counting on the fact that Robin would lose interest in me once Serena was gone? Or was I just constructing an elaborate soap opera in my mind?

I should have just stuck with what I was good at: looking cute and telling funny stories and selling it. My father’s words came back to me, with a twist. You’re no great international call girl, so you’ve got to sell it. I knew I’d never win in a match with Fiona, but I’d learned enough from her to give her a good game. Every time I started to get batty with boredom or sick with self-hatred and ready to beg for a plane ticket home, something happened to pull me back in.

We sped along jungle-flanked roads lit only by our headlights. Riding in a car with Robin was another strange intimacy, as if we were a normal couple and could go anywhere, could go out to dinner or to the movies. Except, of course, we were going straight back to the same place we went every night. I watched Robin watch the road. Something pulsed against his skin and behind his eyes and through the veins in his neck. It was as if he was struggling to hold himself back from driving five hundred miles per hour. He seemed almost unaware of me. I wondered if he wanted just to drive and keep driving, to go somewhere where he wasn’t a prince at all.

“What do you think?” he asked me, surprising me out of my reflection. I think we should just leave and go to Thailand, I almost said. Bring nothing at all. Buy a new wardrobe when we get there and stay in a hut on a beach in Phuket and go cliff diving.

“What do you think?” he repeated.

“Of what?”

“Of the car,” he answered, annoyed. The car. Of course. As if there were anything else.

I searched for an adjective to describe the car, something to make him feel good. What I really thought: ugly, ridiculous, pathetic. But what I said was: “Tough.”

“Tough?”

He looked unsatisfied.

“Beautiful. It’s a beautiful car.”

Beautiful got thrown around so recklessly in Brunei. Everything was beautiful: the jungle, the necklaces, the girls, the cars, his art, his home. He owned it all. It was all the same. Beautiful was always what he wanted to hear. You possess beautiful; you hold it in your palm.

I customarily bowed as I walked by him. It felt different to bow to Robin than it did to bow to a guy my own age with an oversize remote control in his hand. With Robin, the tone of the bow was submissive, sexual. With Prince Hakeem it was sarcastic.

Two new girls, Delia and Trish, had taken Serena’s place. I entered to a group squeal from the Thai girls. Yoya, Tootie, and Lili smothered me with hugs. I couldn’t figure out why they were so sweet to me. Maybe because I defied convention and frequently drifted toward their island in our little archipelago of girls. I perched on the edge of their crowded couch and asked them the words in Thai for please and thank you, and in return they treated me like a long-lost childhood friend. Some girls in Brunei were good girls, sweet girls.

Fiona greeted me with what I suppose was warmth, which for her looked something like nonchalance but not like disdain. Robin and his cronies entered to the strains of Angelique’s passionate “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You.” Eddie tapped me to leave the room about an hour after the men arrived. A guard led me to the hall of doors and opened one I hadn’t been through before. Behind door number two is a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax, behind door number six is a stack of gold bricks, behind door number three is . . . a bath. A really big bath.

Some Orientalist painter should have been sitting in the corner, brush in hand. A bath the size of a small pool stood in the center, lined with tiny gold tiles that reflected shimmering rays of light around the steamy room. A platter stacked with fruit, honey cake, and chocolate was laid out beside the tub. The rubber duck I had bought for Robin in Malaysia floated in the water, sadly tilting to one side. I didn’t want to get in the bath and get all sweaty before he got there, but I felt stupid in my gown, so I hung my clothes and lay naked on the divan, an odalisque plucked from one of his paintings. The only thing that ruined the absolute authenticity of the harem bath fantasy was the TV mounted in the corner of the room blasting CNN as usual. I guess his plan was to show me that he wasn’t afraid to take a bath with a girl after all.

It seemed like he had set up a romantic little interlude for us, but when Robin came in, his expression was chilly and hard. He had barely said a word to me in the car earlier in the evening. Our familiarity from Malaysia was gone. I suspected that he was probably disappointed to come back and find Serena missing, even though he was the one who had made the call that exiled her. But I had left him no choice. He knew she had a boyfriend and I knew he knew, so he couldn’t let her stay. It was my fault she was gone and he had no one left to punish, so the punishment fell on me.

Even if Serena hadn’t been a casualty, I knew him well enough by now not to wonder why his attitude toward me had changed so rapidly. There didn’t need to be a reason. It made me nervous when he turned icy, but not as nervous as when he was kind. When he was kind, you could be sure he was setting you up for a fall. Maybe my penalty would be mild.

“You look very nice.”

He changed in the other room and when he came back, he hung up his robe and stepped into the bath, submerging only to the waist. I slipped in beside him and he turned me around without even kissing me. I felt myself floating up toward the ceiling as he fucked me. It was the kind of fuck that was meant to make you feel bad, but it didn’t. I was less and less tethered to my body all the time. I could tumble right out of myself at will and leave behind only a hologram. Far below me the hologram grabbed the nearby leg of the divan to steady herself. But I was free. I wasn’t one of his groveling subjects. I wasn’t even subject to the laws of gravity.

“Aku cinta padamu,” I said.

Like I said before, the Sultan just wanted you to suck his dick, but Robin needed your love. People who need everyone to love them are exponentially more dangerous than people who are content merely with power and money. You have to go way further to make them happy.

“That’s nice,” he replied.

What I had said wasn’t exactly true. What I felt for him was something like love, but not quite. It was something like love but also something like nothing at all.

When I walked back into the room, Fiona beckoned to me and I crossed the room to resume my seat at Robin’s left and await my fate.