A Beautiful Girl I Knew Became a High-Class Escort — And Paid a Terrible Price

I studied at a private school for a while.

And in that private school, there were all sorts of characters.

One of the most memorable was Gideon. He was an amateur bodybuilder, attractively tanned, with biceps the size of my head.

Despite all of these things, Gideon was also one of the nerdiest guys I know. I mean, the guy had a comic book collection that could make the weebos in Tokyo blush green with envy.

Perhaps owing to the contrasting clash of his dual nature, women were very attracted to him.

He had a revolving series of girlfriends like he was not a mere mortal but some sort of divine rotisserie spit. And what’s more, all of his dates, without exception, were exceptionally beautiful — beautiful enough to make the cover of A-list magazines.

But only one of them stood out to me, long after the others have faded from memory.

For the purpose of anonymity, we’ll call her Mona.

Mona was Mongolian, and like the rest of Gideon’s girlfriends, very attractive. She was slim in a model-like way, and had long black hair that tumbled from her shoulders to frame the swan-shaped curve of her lower back.

But the most alluring thing about her was her eyes. They were large. They were doe-like. They were innocent — or at least they appeared to be. Upon closer inspection, you’d see that her eyes were infused with an air of innocence mixed with mischief.

The first time I saw her, I knew that Gideon had, at long last, met his match. “He’ll never be able to tame her,” I thought. “This girl is a Venus flytrap masquerading as a mimosa.”

I was right.

Gideon and Mona had several happy months together.

I say this without a hint of sarcasm.

For Gideon, going steady with a girl for anything more than a week was nothing short of a minor miracle.

Gideon and Mona would walk, hand in hand, up and down the halls of our school, and there, many a man’s eyes turned to watch them in envy. Many a woman’s too.

Yes they would walk, and Mona would have Gideon’s arm in one hand and an LV handbag hooked on another. Her red-soled Louboutins would make pretty clacking sounds as she walked.

That was another thing about Mona. She was a girl from Inner Mongolia, and having dated a Central Asian myself, I knew how much they prided themselves on their appearance, on dressing appropriately — and by appropriately, I mean at least two rungs more well-put together than everybody else.

Yes, Mona was a beautiful girl, with a taste for luxury — but none of that, in the end, helped her in this particular relationship.

Gideon and Mona eventually broke up.

Their breakup happened suddenly.

One moment they were a happy couple, as young and as indefatigable as the sun, the next they were not.

Neither of them gave a reason for their breakup. Indeed, they both kept mum, and studiously avoided one another whenever they passed each other in the halls, the halls they once walked so happily together in.

And because they were silent, the rumors, as they do, abounded unceasingly. Most of these rumors were the usual: Gideon cheated on Mona, Mona cheated on Gideon, or a dozen or so other permutations of the two.

For once, the rumors were right…sort of.

One day, Gideon sat me down and told me the truth.

It was a regular school day, and we were having lunch at the cafeteria.

He suddenly blurted out, “So, you’ve heard the rumors too, huh?”

For a moment, I thought about lying to him. Then I remembered he was my friend. “I have,” I admitted. “I don’t believe in any of them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“I’ve known you for some time, Gideon, and I flatter myself when I say that I’m a pretty good judge of character. You don’t strike me as the cheating type.”

At this, Gideon snorted outwardly, but I could see, inwardly, that he was reassured by my faith in him. Then, after a long moment, Gideon said in a low voice, “You’re right, man. I didn’t cheat on her…it was she who cheated on me.”

And then it came out, the Truth, as it always does, in a seemingly unstoppable flood.

It turns out that Mona had not just cheated on Gideon.

Mona had, Gideon told me, been an escort the entire time they were dating.

And not just any escort, either. She was an upscale escort, a courtesan that only accompanied a select clientele of the well-connected and the wealthy, both of which there were plenty on the Little Red Dot we call home.

Why, just a couple of weeks ago, Gideon told me, Mona had been partying at a yacht with a dozen or so other girls, all of them beautiful, all of them escorts. The yacht was owned by a rich guy, very old.

Mona had had an orgy with him and the rest of the other girls on that yacht.

This realization broke him, I could tell. His eyes were not on me but shifting about, and if I looked closely, I could see there was something bright and shiny in their corners, threatening to trickle out.

“And she wasn’t doing it just to survive or anything like that, either,” Gideon said, eyes still averted from me. “She didn’t have a sob story. She simply loved luxury, loved the handbags and the money the lifestyle could bring.”

I was surprised by the fact that Mona was an escort — but I wasn’t at all shocked by the luxury thing.

I thought about the LV’s and the Louboutins Mona would wear, and at that moment, I concurred that the twin desires of Greed and Want are embedded in the very fabric of our imperfect human natures.

Then I thought about Mona and the group of girls on the old man’s fine yacht, and concurred that it is up to us to figure out if we want to give in to it.

Then, several months later, Mona disappeared.

Soon after that, we got news of her.

Mona had been caught selling sex. She put up a strong argument (she was just a student, nothing more!!!) but her arguments failed, and she was deported back to Mongolia.

Even more troublingly, Mona had run into some trouble back home.

Her little brother had suddenly become sick. What little money Mona made with her moonlighting had not been enough to support him — ostensibly because she had spent so much on Luxury.

She was now forced to work a real job to make ends meet. And to make matters worse, because of the manner she left town, she will never be allowed back in the country again.

She will never be able to attain a Singaporean degree and enjoy the myriad of financial benefits that come with it.

Reading this, Dear Reader, you might think that I have something against sex work.

Rest assured that I don’t.

I do not have anything against escorts. I am not disgusted by them, nor do I detest them. On the contrary, I am rather obsessed with sex-service providers and the clients that they service — so much so that I am writing a book about them.

I am writing this not to gloat or to gossip, but because Mona’s tale can teach us all a poignant lesson about life.

And that lesson is…

Patience is a virtue, the love of luxury (before you’ve earned it) is death, and your choices have a ripple effect more far-reaching than you’d think.

There is nothing wrong with loving the good life and all the fine things that come with it.

But should Mona have waited a little longer, she would’ve most certainly found a fine job. She was smart, beautiful, and apparently a rather good student.

Instead, she got impatient. She became mystified by the allure of quick cash. She chose to sell her Self for Money — torpedoing her relationship and flouting the law in the process. And for these things, Mona paid a heavy price.

It took Gideon a long time to get over Mona, but he is a better man in the process. The last I checked, he was in a stable relationship. He was as jacked as ever, and like his arms, his comic book collection grows larger and more impressive with every passing year.

Mona has since dropped off the face of the Earth. Her socials were last updated a couple of years ago.

Wherever she is, I hope she’s doing fine. I hope her brother is well, and I wish her nothing but the best.

Because whenever I think of Mona, the image that comes to my mind is not that of her lying bare-backed with her working sisters in that yacht, but that of her looking hopeful and radiant, the morning sun illuminating her goddess-like profile as she clacked down the halls, with every eye in a ten-meter radius watching her go.

A single mistake does not and should not determine a person’s life. It is a blip on the radar, nothing more, a minute grammatical error in the penning of the ever-growing book that is our lives.

Yes, the blunders we make do not matter. What matters is how well we recover from our failures, and how finely we write the following chapters of our story.

This is a lesson I have learned only recently in life — and I hope that Mona, beautiful Mona, wherever she is, is figuring this out for herself too.