Anonymity (6 page)

BLACK WAS already pooling under the boy's right eye. A crust of blood ringed his nose. His posture said he was used to abuse. After fifteen years counseling homeless kids, David could spot certain indicators—the hunched stature, the hanging head, the sideways glance that never quite made eye contact.

The black eye and bloody nose would normally have been an indicator too, but apparently the boy had brought that bit of hurt upon himself voluntarily. David had seen this kid around. He ran with Mook's clan. He was one of the skaters. Everybody called him Freestyle.

David had been doing his usual rounds on The Drag, walking around outside the drop-in, talking to kids in the alley behind the churches on Guadalupe. He knew this community and it knew him. Some were local kids from destitute, dysfunctional homes, but most were transplants, children who had escaped abusive situations or foster care kids who aged out of the system and were on the streets at eighteen. They had to make money, find a place to live and something to eat. They had to deal with sex and drugs and danger. Their adolescent minds often made bad decisions about adult issues.

David spotted an Austin beat cop and a UT campus officer talking to a group of young men. Three boys stood on the sidewalk while a fourth, Freestyle, sat on the curb, holding his nose. David walked up to check out the situation.

“Officer Dance, Officer Sanchez, is there anything I can help you with here?” he asked. David knew the city police and university officers even better than the homeless youth.

Officer Dance, the cop, motioned to Freestyle. On the sidewalk beside the boy lay a hand-scrawled sign that read, “HIT ME $5.”

“These individuals here thought they'd take this young fellow up on his offer.” The cop turned to the students. “What the hell's wrong with you guys? This is assault.”

The students had lost all bravado.

One of them whined, “It was just a game.”

“To you maybe,” Officer Sanchez said. “Do you think he thinks it's a game?”

Officer Dance said, “Too bad this isn't campus jurisdiction. You're in my territory now. I think we need to take a ride to the station, see if this fellow wants to press charges. Assault is a serious offense.”

Horror eclipsed the students’ smug faces.

“We're sorry, man,” one of them said. The kid stepped forward and extended a hand, but Freestyle ignored the gesture.

Freestyle struggled to his feet on his own. David saw his chance to further defuse the situation. He handed Freestyle a wad of napkins from his pocket. The boy pressed the napkins to his face.

“Officers,” David said. “Why don't you let me take this young man with me? You take care of those three, and we'll be on our way.”

“Son, do you want to press charges?” Officer Dance asked.

“No harm. No foul,” Freestyle said.

A knowing glance passed between the officers. It was a common enough situation—two introduced species bound to clash. Avoidance was usually the best approach. The officers nodded and David quickly guided the injured boy back toward the drop-in. As they walked away, one of the students pleaded, “Yes, sir. But he asked for it.”

David slid a bottle of Coke across his desk. Freestyle drank half with a greediness the counselor had seen many times.

“Why'd you fly that sign?” David asked.

The boy shrugged. “Why not?”

“Letting people hit you is no way to make money.”

He shrugged again. “I used to get hit for no money. Seemed like an improvement.” He gave the mock grin that so many of the street kids had perfected. The look that said they couldn't care less what happened to them. “Sides, man. I'm a skater. I live for bruises.”

“Look, you can't do that again.”

“Duh.”

“Dude, how can you expect other people to respect you if you don't respect yourself?”

He met David's eyes, hate simmering inside him.

“Look, man, I'm just an abortion that couldn't get paid for. That's all.”

“That's not true.”

“Yes, it is. My mother told me that. More than once.”

Counselors had a bad habit of saying, “I understand.” You're hungry? I understand. You're frightened? I understand. You've been hurt? I understand. But truly, how could anyone who grew up in a loving family ever understand that level of rejection?

Even after all these years, David could still be stunned by the wickedness in the world. His job was to take this broken soul and try to patch him together again, give him purpose and a little self-esteem.

And sometimes it was the worst of jobs. David had been spit on. Cussed out. He'd been hit. Kids had screamed at him. Cried in his arms. Slept on the floor in his office. Bled on him. Sometimes they disappeared on him. Occasionally they even died on his watch.

David had given out as many hugs and tissues as he had meals. But only occasionally did he ever get a call from someone who made it, one of his kids who had managed to escape the downward spiral and have a normal life.

David dreamed of building a huge lodge out on Lake Austin where he would feed his kids steak and baked potatoes for dinner every night. He'd enroll them in school and churn out a legion of new doctors and teachers and social workers. But the reality of limited resources always meant more demand for beds, food and services than Tumbleweed could provide. On any given night, David had only one bed for every seven kids under eighteen who showed up in need. He hated to turn anyone away, but it was something he did on a daily basis. He hoped he had a space for Freestyle.

“You got to get that eye looked at. Ever been to our clinic?”

“No.”

“Our people can patch you up. You hungry?”

David opened a desk drawer and handed over the sandwich and chips he'd brought for lunch. The boy didn't bother to say thank you. He made short work of the food and then said, “Can I use your bathroom?”

“Sure, down the hall on the right. Come straight back, okay?”

Freestyle nodded and walked out gingerly, touching the bridge of his nose.

David picked up the phone and called one of his caseworkers.

“Amelia, what's our census look like for tonight? We got any beds open?”

He could hear her riffling papers on her desk.

She came back on. “One.”

“Great. I need it. Hold it for me, will you?”

“Sure thing. What's the client's name?”

“Freestyle.”

She laughed. “That's a good one.”

“I know. They just get more and more creative, don't they?”

“Yeah. Want me to take Mr. Freestyle?”

“No. That's okay. I've got a little rapport going. I think I'll keep him for a while.”

“Fine. You going to send him on to the shelter now?”

“No. I'm sending him to the clinic first. He got beat down.”

“Poor thing. He get jumped?”

“Something like that.”

After ten minutes, David had waited long enough to know that Freestyle had taken off. After a feed and a bathroom break, he probably decided against a visit to the clinic. David hadn't even mentioned the shelter to him. That's usually when the wilder kids bolted. Many needed help, but they split if they thought they'd have to give up information or abide by a few rules.

David could try to find him later, maybe stop by Mook's squat down by Shoal Creek and try again to convince Freestyle that he needed to have his face checked out. It was difficult to keep track of them all, but David had a long mental roster of his kids, their character, their track record and their health situations.

He pondered Freestyle's story. Maybe it was a true tale, maybe not. Homeless youth were not the most honest people. Why not lie? They had nothing to lose. They were survivalists. They would tell you what they thought you wanted to hear just to get what they needed. They all had a heartbreaking story and even after all this time, David was not immune.

He decided not to pursue Freestyle, reminding himself that he had to maintain strong professional boundaries. Freestyle would have to decide on his own to seek help. David picked up the phone and dialed Amelia.

“Hey,” she said.

“That bed we talked about?”

“Yeah.”

“I won't be needing it after all.”

“What happened?”

“He bolted.”

“Happens.”

“Right,” he said and sighed.

“You all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Sure. No worries,” David said. But some days, like today, David could use a hug himself.

SINCE SHE stepped off the bus in Austin, the weather had been unmercifully hot and dry. Drought was wearing on the city. Municipal fountains were shut down, a water source the homeless used to spot bathe and cool their tired feet. Irrigation was restricted, so landscaping provided less shade and camouflage. Every gust of wind swept up a whorl of dust, and some of the kids had taken to wearing bandanas over their faces, making the public walk an even wider swath around them.

City beat cops had started to patrol the creeks and wooded areas of town, looking for campfires. While most days were still hot, temperatures dropped at night. Mook's squat was one of many encampments building fires to knock the four a.m. chill.

Lorelei had grown accustomed to the unexpected appearance of cops in the middle of their squat. Mook never got defensive or seemed upset by their surprise arrivals. Often, he walked away into the trees to have a conversation with them. Once, Lorelei saw them show Mook pictures. She figured he told them about other street rats and in exchange they left him alone. While other squats were broken up and forced to move, Mook maintained a steady, enviable spot and a relatively hassle-free existence. It was one of the reasons Lorelei had joined his group.

But police had been cracking down on urban campfires. Even though both camping and fires were against city ordinances, the cops usually looked the other way unless there were complaints. The drought had made it more dangerous for surrounding neighborhoods. Anybody caught with a fire would be written up, and their camp would be torn apart. Before they left, the cops made the kids use their precious jugs of water to douse the glowing remains of the previous night.

Without fire, Lorelei needed a sleeping bag. The ground was still warm, but her thin blanket wasn't enough in the middle of the night. Other kids talked about the bone-chilling Texas nights to come. She had an idea of what to expect. She had camped in California desert. Sleeping bags were bulky and heavy and hard to hide, but she had put it off as long as she could.

Lorelei made her way to the drop-in, about half an hour's walk, a gradual uphill climb from Shoal Creek. She rested on the way, stopping to watch women in bright-white tennis suits play on a court at a fenced-in club.

It was early and the drop-in was nearly empty. David was in his closet-sized office, his face creased in deep concentration. She knocked and as he looked up, his expression changed. He always seemed glad to see her. If she didn't know better, she would swear he actually cared about her. He never picked her for information. He never pushed. It seemed as if David saw her as a real person.

There was only one sleeping bag in the supply room. It had a jagged rip along the bottom panel. When she told David she could mend it, he handed her two tiny hotel sewing kits. She pocketed a couple of batteries for her flashlight. She didn't take any canned or dehydrated food since she no longer had access to fire. She'd have to spange for fast-food money instead of living on the Ramen diet.

Lorelei had learned that if she arrived early enough, she could do laundry and shower in peace. She put her clothes in to wash, then took a long shower letting hot water prickle her face and back. She never felt clean, no matter how much she lathered and rinsed. It was as if something other than dirt and body odor clung to her skin, something that tainted her from the inside.

The drop-in didn't usually serve breakfast, but when she walked back to the lobby there were miniature boxes of cheerfully colored cereal scattered on the food table. Alongside those were small squat cartons of milk. Lorelei used a plastic spoon to punch through the perforated H-cut on the front of a box. She filled it with milk and shoveled the sickeningly sweet cereal into her mouth. The taste brought a flood of school memories.

She should be a junior now, excited about prom.

Instead her days would be filled with the relentless search for food and a safe place to sleep. And boredom. Long days with nothing to do, no one worth talking to. She had thought when she left home that she would get to see the world. And in the beginning she'd had a fun group to hang with in Oregon. She'd seen some pretty phenomenal natural spots in the Pacific Northwest—massive sequoia, redwoods and rocky beaches strewn with giant elephant seals. She'd been to music festivals all down the California coast where she'd met hippies and performance artists and people dressed in Renaissance garb. She'd slept in a barn on an organic farm and once woke up on a freezing beach with pebbles pressed into her cheek.

It had been an adventure, but along the way she'd been hungry and tired and scared. Travel companions flowed in and out of her life, so she'd learned to keep to cities with youth services. At one point, she realized that she rarely saw the pretty parts of town. Shelters were never in nice areas; nobody wanted transients hanging around their neighborhood, gumming up their pretty views.

While she waited for her clothes to dry, Lorelei used the drop-in's computer. She had long ago stopped checking her Gmail. The few old friends who did know her e-mail address had stopped responding. She was left with only junk mail.

Instead, Lorelei checked her Facebook page. She always smiled when she saw the redheaded superheroine she used as her profile pic. All her Facebook friends were travelers like herself, nobody who was a risk to her anonymity. She kept up with a dozen travelers who posted sporadically. Sometimes she was able to reconnect with a friend lost to her, but nobody had posted anything to Lorelei's wall and she had no messages.

She posted,
Anybody in Austin?

A hefty girl asked her how long she was going to be on the computer, so Lorelei logged off.

Next, she picked through the deteriorating boxes of board games. She would have enjoyed a game of Monopoly or Risk, but there was nobody around to play. Every Monday after dinner, her family had gathered to eat dessert and play board games. It was a Latter-day Saints’ tradition called Family Home Evening. The sad, torn boxes of Scrabble and Yahtzee made her remember the laughter, the happiness before things spun so out of control. She used to hate Family Home Evening, but now she couldn't really remember why.

She checked out the shabby selection of paperbacks on the drop-in's shelves.

David walked by on his way out, and she stopped him.

“Dude,” she said. “Your books are all bodice rippers and lawyer stories. Where do you keep the good books?”

“That's just what people donate,” David said. “The library is a short walk from here. You can use the drop-in's address and telephone to apply for a library card.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “Have a party.”

The Austin Public Library was a beige-concrete four-story building with a couple of metal benches outside. Lorelei knew that its austere exterior was a way to discourage the homeless from hanging around, but it hadn't worked. There was an older lady sitting on a pile of backpacks and bedrolls gumming a cigarette. The woman looked up at Lorelei and held out her hand.

“Sorry, ma'am,” she said and shrugged as if to say,
we're in the same boat.

Lorelei's mother used to take her to their local library. She remembered seeing a few homeless men sleeping in the lobby. Her mother called them “the unfortunates.” She never fully explained their presence, so Lorelei didn't understand homelessness. She thought that it would be the coolest thing in the world to live in a library. To her, that was the opposite of unfortunate.

At the entrance, Lorelei was confronted by a large sign that read
No Bedrolls.
She couldn't leave her new sleeping bag outside to be stolen.

“Would you like to leave some of your things here, young lady?” a kindly older woman asked her from behind a high counter. Lorelei hesitated. She'd learned never to be separated from her possessions.

“Do I have to?”

“It's library policy—no bedrolls,” the lady said. “I don't usually do this, but yours looks nice and clean, so I'll keep it behind the desk with my things if you like. Otherwise you'll be asked to leave. Don't worry. I'll take good care of it. You can keep your pack.”

Lorelei saw she was being offered a kindness, and she reluctantly handed over her new sleeping bag. Now she understood the lone gypsy guarding the pile of possessions outside.

She found the graphic novel section and read two in an hour. While her mother had always wanted her to read books like
Anne of Green Gables
and
Little Women
, she'd always been attracted to the action adventure panels of Manga and comic books. Her mother called them boy books, but Lorelei didn't think art of any kind had a gender bias. She just liked more contemporary story lines with situations and problems that could apply to a girl like her.

She could only add the weight of one book to her already heavy load, so she decided to reread
Twilight.
She loved the descriptions of Washington state, so much like the Oregon she had run away to. She understood clumsy, pale Bella and her emotionally clumsy parents. But what she liked most of all was the love story of Edward and Bella, love that was pure, without restrictions or conditions. That was what parents were supposed to have for their children—unconditional love. What a joke. Parental love came with nothing but conditions.

Lorelei found a large paperback edition of
Twilight
and approached the front desk. A different volunteer was behind the circulation desk. The new woman slid her a library card application. Lorelei quickly filled it out and handed it back. The woman began to enter information into the computer. Her eyes fell upon the address and she stopped typing and gave Lorelei a quick disapproving glance.

With clipped efficiency, the woman scanned Lorelei's new library card. The volunteer printed out a return sheet, slid it inside the book and snapped the cover closed.

“This book is due back in two weeks,” the woman said. “It's a high demand book, so please return it so others can enjoy it as well.”

Lorelei thanked her and headed to retrieve her bedroll from the other desk. As she walked away she heard the woman say to no one in particular, “Well, we'll never see that book again.”

That night, after mending the sleeping bag, Lorelei propped up against a log, switched on her flashlight and began to read. This would be her third time reading
Twilight.
At home, she had borrowed a girlfriend's copy and hidden it under her bed. She knew her parents wouldn't approve, even though Stephanie Meyer was LDS too. Mormons were a diverse group, a confusing thing for a kid.

Mook and Elda were gone somewhere, probably somewhere warm, but the others had set up camp again. Freestyle was slumped in a rotten lawn chair, one of his eyes ringed like a raccoon. College boys had jumped him.

Minion picked out Green Day's
Good Riddance
on the strings of an old guitar.

He sang, “I hope you had the time of your life.”

Lorelei always liked the song, particularly the part about tattoos of memories.

When she felt the tug of sleep, she snuggled down into the comforting confinement of the sleeping bag. One advantage to sleeping bags was she could stuff her things into the bottom and not worry that someone would steal them while she slept.

She was soon dreaming about walking to school through powdery snow a foot deep. Above her, slate-gray mountains pushed against a blue, blue sky. Her breath grew short, and she struggled through deeper and deeper drifts. Snowbanks rose around her ten feet high. She fell. She got up and trudged on. She fell again. She hurt her hand.

She jolted awake. Pain seared her fingers and up her arm. She screamed and kicked, struggling to free herself from the sleeping bag. Another hot poker pierced her skin. She screamed again and fought the confines of the fabric.

Then, somehow, Mook was there, unzipping her sleeping bag, rolling her out onto the hard ground. Flashlight beams scraped the night. Mook cursed and crushed something under his boot.

She shrieked and slapped hysterically at her hand.

“Calm down.” Elda tried to wrap her arms around her. “It's gone. He killed it.”

“Get it off! Get it off!” Lorelei screamed. The pain streaked up past her wrist. She swatted at her stinging arm.

Mook grabbed her and gave her a solid shake. “Shit, girl. It's just a big bug. You're okay. Calm down.”

Her terror broke and she came to her senses.

“Look,” Mook said as he lifted a six-inch centipede with the end of his knife. He held the black bug out in front of him. Its yellow pinchers slowly opened and closed; a few of its many red legs twitched in agony.

“Yuck,” Elda said.

“Texas centipede,” he said. “Hurts like a mother, but it won't kill you.”

“Unless you're allergic to bee stings,” Elda said. “You aren't allergic, are you?”

“No,” Lorelei whimpered. “I don't think so.”

“It was just looking for a little warmth.” Mook flung the bug into the woods. “We've all been stung by some big nasty Texas bug. Just be glad it wasn't a scorpion. Comes with the territory. You're official now.”

He walked back into the lean-to. The others scanned around them before they lay down again.

“You should go to the clinic in the morning,” Elda whispered. “Just to be safe.”

Lorelei sat alone on a log for the rest of the night, holding her injured hand out in front of her. Tears rolled out of her for a long while after she had calmed down. She was embarrassed by her inability to regain full control, and she tried to be quiet so she wouldn't wake the others again.

The pain settled in her arm and started a throb in her shoulder. She grew cold but couldn't bear to get inside her sleeping bag again. She rocked herself, weeping softly, as she waited for daybreak.