The Education of a Very Young Madam (4 page)

I didn't realize it at the time, but I wouldn't see much more of my mom after that and I'd never live with her again. She stayed at the hospital receiving treatment for depression for quite some time after I left. Once in a while she'd come visit me wherever I happened to be at the time, but we never really connected. I used to call her the "robot mom" because she was always so intent on "following the rules." Whose rules, I don't know exactly—society's, I guess— but I obviously didn't live up to her standards for good behavior.

After the hospital I ended up in a group home way up in northern Maine, which was practically the wilderness. It wasn't nearly as nice as the hospital, but there was a boy there I liked named Dominik. Practically my first day there, he became my boyfriend, even though we didn't really know each other that well. He was fun, everyone liked him, and he was easy to talk to, all of which made life at the group home bearable for a while. That is until he ran away with a big guy named Don. The news that Dom and Don had split traveled fast around the home. It traveled even faster when the police finally caught up to them. Word came back that Dominik had died after he fell off a construction site during their run.

After Dominik was gone, I couldn't take it anymore. I was sad to lose him, but what was even worse was that everyone in the whole place was so upset about it all the time. It was way too depressing to stay there. I decided that if Dominik could do it, I could too, so I ran away. But my freedom didn't last long. I got arrested for stealing cigarettes and ended up in another youth center, and this one was run by the state. It was the worst place I'd been so far, but I remember it fondly because it was there that I became best friends with Natasha, who would come to shape the rest of my short-lived childhood.

I still remember the first time I saw Natasha. It was actually at the group home where Dominik and I were living. Her younger brother lived there, and one afternoon she came to visit him. As soon as she walked in the room, all the boys stopped what they were doing and just stared at her. All the girls did too. She was just so gorgeous, it was impossible to ignore her. She had this long blond hair and a curvy body like a Barbie doll's. She looked older than the rest ofus, even though she was just a year older than me. She could knock people off their feet with just one piercing look, and she knew it too. She was powerful and charming. She flashed me a big smile when she caught me looking at her, and I couldn't help but like her.

I didn't talk to her that day, but not long afterward I got my chance. When I arrived at the state youth center, she was already living there. Maine may be a big state, but there are so few people that, whether I was on the streets or in one of the state-run centers, there were familiar faces everywhere I went. There just weren't that many "problem kids" in Maine, and as a result, there were only so many places we could end up. In that way we made up our own kind of extended dysfunctional family.

"You must know my brother!" Natasha said to me when she realized where I'd come from. She made me feel immediately comfortable, and I latched on to her after that. She didn't seem to mind. I think she liked me right away too, probably because I bothered her less than the other kids did. Besides being beautiful, she was much wiser and more worldly than the rest of us, so kids were always asking her advice about this, what she thought about that, if she liked such-and-such person/band/outfit. And her opinion reigned—whatever she thought was considered cool. She always knew what to say to people and was too sweet to tell anyone to leave her alone. Everyone looked up to her, including me, but I was best at playing it cool.

All the kids at the youth center had to have jobs, so Natasha and I got jobs working together in the kitchen. It was our responsibility to clean up after dinner. The whole place looked like a summer camp. Kids lived in seven or eight cottages grouped together—boys on one side, girls on the other—in a clearing surrounded by woods. Each evening we would carry a big plastic bucket from cottage to cottage collecting leftover food to be brought back to the kitchen and thrown away. There were so many rules at that place and so little to do that this was one of the highlights of our very dull days.

One day, while we were making our rounds of the cottages, Natasha looked at me and, for no apparent reason, said, "Let's see if we can make it to the woods!"

I paused for a moment and then smiled in agreement. We were bored and it was something to do. We dropped our buckets and made a break for it, running as fast as we could toward the tree line before someone could catch us.

I didn't really think we would make it very far, but to my surprise, we did. Once we made it into the woods, we didn't stop. We just kept on running and running until we were out ofbreath. We stopped to rest in an area near a few houses. By that time, we were already pretty far away from the center.

Once we finally stopped running, neither of us really knew what to do next. We knew that the center would send the police after us as soon as they noticed we were gone, so we were afraid to venture out of the woods. The police would likely be checking the roads, so we didn't want to go near them. We also didn't want to walk by the houses, which was the direction we needed to go if we wanted to get farther away from the center, because someone might see us. "Let's just stay here for a while," Natasha finally decided. "When it gets dark enough that no one can see us, then we can leave."

As it grew darker and darker, I began to get nervous. Suddenly our game didn't seem like so much fun anymore. I think Natasha must have been nervous too, but she didn't let on. Instead, to pass the time, we quietly sang our favorite songs from the radio to each other—songs by Melissa Etheridge, Whitney Houston, George Michael. We sang songs about relationships and betrayal, desire and passion, all things that we were too young to really understand. Our absolute favorite was "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins. It became like a theme song after that because we felt like practically everything that was good in our lives happened "against all odds." We sang it to each other that night, I think, as a way of saying we'd stay friends forever, no matter what, even if we got caught or separated, both of which were pretty likely. Kids in state facilities were always getting transferred or released or moved to a different kind of program, so even though I recognized kids everywhere I went, it was hard to keep any really strong ties to anyone. Natasha and I didn't want that to happen to us. That song meant so much to us that I still remember most of the lyrics: "We've shared the laughter and the pain, and even shared the tears / You're the only one who really knew me at all ... Oh take a look at me now, well there's just an empty space / And you coming back to me is against all odds and that's what I've got to face."

We must have stayed in the woods for hours. Finally, when it was dark, Natasha whispered to me, "Let's get out of here."

We crept quietly past the houses and down to the nearest road. Our plan was to walk, or hitch a ride if we could, toward Natasha's hometown, which was not far away, and meet up with some of her childhood friends. So that's what we did.

The first thing we did when we hooked up with Natasha's friends was get our hands on some good clothes and makeup. We knew that we should leave Maine as soon as possible, since there would be people out looking for us by then, and the farther away we got, the safer we'd be. But we never got to have much fun at the youth center, so all we wanted to do that night was party to celebrate our newfound freedom. Natasha's friends were having a bonfire on the beach, and we couldn't turn that down. When I look back now, I realize they were mostly a group of high school deadbeats, but at the time, they seemed like the coolest people I'd ever met.

When we woke up the next morning, I don't think Natasha, who was really our leader and made all the big decisions for both of us, really knew what to do next. "We've got to keep moving farther away from the center" was all she said, so we started hitchhiking. Through a combination of rides and walking, we made it to Massachusetts by nighttime. We were near Boston when a man stopped to pick us up. "If you want to come back to my place with me tonight, we can have something to eat and then get a good night's sleep," he said. "I'm heading out early tomorrow morning, so I'll take you where you want to go then."

Since we hadn't eaten all day, we happily agreed. The man drove us to his house, where he made us dinner, which we ate ravenously, and then Natasha and I fell asleep together in his bed.

It was the middle of the night when I woke up, not sure where I was or what was going on. As the haze of sleep lifted, I realized that the bed was shaking and that must have been what had startled me out of my sleep. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the man was right next to me, lying on top of Natasha. She wasn't looking at me, but I could still see by the faint light coming in through a nearby window that her eyes were filled with tears. I knew something very bad was happening, but I was so scared that I just closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I could hear the man grunting but not a sound from Natasha. She was dead silent the whole time.

As I was lying there wishing the man would leave us alone, I felt a hand drift over to my leg. I was still pretending to be asleep as he began to run his big, clumsy hand up and down my thigh. I had no idea what to do, so I just froze. Suddenly, I felt Natasha knock his hand away and hiss at him in a harsh tone that meant business: "No! Not her!"

The man stopped touching me after that, and I cracked open one eye to see if he was mad at Natasha. But he didn't seem to be angry at all. He was actually grinning as he grabbed Natasha's T-shirt, which she still had on, and yanked it up to reveal her breasts. He squeezed them roughly, and I could tell that it hurt her. He pinched her nipples and continued grunting until he seemed to run out of breath. Moments later, he fell fast asleep alongside Natasha, who was crying softly. Not sure what else to do, I reached over and grabbed her hand. She didn't look at me, but she did tenderly touch my arm and whispered to me: "Everything's okay. Just get some sleep."

I wanted to trust Natasha, but I couldn't sleep. I lay there quietly for a while, too scared to move, but the longer I did, the worse I felt. I was afraid the man might wake up, and I didn't think we wanted to be there when that happened. I looked over at Natasha and could tell that she wasn't asleep either, so I waved my hand at her to get her attention and then motioned toward the door. We got up quietly and tiptoed out of the room.

Before we left, we took a few things that we needed: a half-empty pack of cigarettes and about ten dollars that we found lying on the kitchen counter. That was a lot of money to us at the time, so we were pretty psyched about it. When we got outside, we took off running until we couldn't see the man's house anymore. We made it to a highway and decided to try hitchhiking again. This time we weren't going to let whoever picked us up take us just anywhere. We had decided on a destination, and it was there or nothing. We were heading for New York City.

CHAPTER 4

The Pimp and Ho Game

Despite our big-city plans, we made it only as far as Worcester, Massachusetts, that night. We were heading south, which was the right direction, but if you've ever been to Worcester, you know it's no substitute for New York City. It's a dull and ugly place filled with highways and low-income houses. There was a mall and a concert arena, but not much else of excitement for two teenage girls. The only reason we ended up staying there for several months is because we were able to make friends quickly and get jobs, two things we sorely needed.

For the first couple of weeks we were in Worcester, we stayed with a girl Natasha knew. The girl wasn't going to let us stay forever, however, so we had to make some new connections. In any town, kids who are bored and looking for trouble will eventually find one another, or at least that has been my experience. That's how Natasha and I became friends with members of the local Puerto Rican gang. When we were bored, we'd walk up and down Main Street looking for something to do. The street passed right by the projects where a lot of Puerto Rican kids lived, and they'd do the same thing. "Hey,
ninas!"
they'd yell at us, and if we had nothing better to do, we'd answer them.

The gang was all too happy to adopt us for a while. It never hurts to have two cute young girls following you around. Some of them had cars, and we didn't mind being their arm candy as long as they'd drive us places once in a while. One of them started seeing Natasha, and when we had to leave her friend's place, he let us move in with him. We needed some money, so one of the guys took us to a local strip club, where he said we could make some easy cash. He introduced us to the owner, and pretty soon we had jobs. We danced for a flat fee of $150 a day. The owner would take all our tips, but I never questioned this practice because I understood instinctively how things like that worked. It was his place and he was entitled to make the rules since he was taking all the risk, especially with girls as young as us working there. I was fifteen at the time, and he must have known that Natasha and I were underage, he just didn't care. That guy was my first real boss. I knew even then that someday I wanted to be the one who was in the position to make all the rules.

After about a month, Natasha and I were getting used to life on our own. None of this had been our plan—we never really had a plan in the first place—but the longer we were out in the world, the more sure we were that we never wanted to go back to any state facility. We had both hated the center, and life now was pretty entertaining by comparison. Everything was an adventure, and we did it all together. We always worked the same shifts at the strip club so we could keep an eye on each other. When we had nothing better to do, we'd go to the park and find a baseball game to watch. We'd sit in the stands, pick a side to root for, and make friends with whoever was there just for fun. Even if we sometimes didn't know where we were going to live or how we'd be able to eat, we weren't all that scared to be on our own. It never really occurred to us how vulnerable we were out in the world at our age with no one to look out for us but each other.