Young woman holding sign 'I'm Not For Sale'. O n the last night of her life as a normal small-town teenager, Sara Slattery bounced through the front doors of the Cheap Skate roller rink, passed the gift stand that sold colored laces and glow sticks, and settled down with her friends by the arcade mall. Sara laced up her pink-and-white skates, ate a pretzel and hit the oval as the DJ cranked the music up a notch. Theresa Krueger introduced herself as Nikki.
She was pretty and cool. She got high. She was twenty and had money to burn. Come on a road trip, Nikki suggested. The way Sara and other former prostitutes tell it, one day a pimp is your best friend, the next your master. Krueger told the girls there was no money to get home.
They knew no one in Piano, Texas, and had nowhere to go. You need to help pay your way, she said. Sara went first. She followed an older prostitute everyone knew as Twerk to a hotel room.
Twerk told her what to do. Her first trick, Sara remembers, looked just like her dad. So did a cocaine habit and regular beatings at the hands of her pimp.
In between Johns, the girls would nap in their room, where they shared a single futon. After a while I knew what to do, so it was like a cakewalk. Her mother, Donna, spent so many days looking for her daughter that she lost her job at a local hospital. State officials realized they had a problem five years ago, when cops stumbled across a prostitution ring so deeply embedded in the foundations of daily life, it was likened to a colony of termites.
