Day Twenty Six

Once, with another woman

Mari learned fast that you can’t afford to be picky when you’re alone at sixteen. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like mushrooms on your pizza if the only pizza you can get is the cold remains of one left in a pile of boxes on the back porch of a frat house. It doesn’t matter that you hate the way wool feels against your skin if that grey wool sweater is the warmest piece of clothing you can find to protect you from the oncoming winter chill. It doesn’t matter that there is old gum and ink and who knows what else inside the plastic tube in a playground, because the tube is a dry place to wait out the rain.

In a city as large as this one, there was always food to be found somewhere, as nasty as it might be, but it was getting it that was the problem. As a lone girl, and not a very big one at that, she was powerless against groups of other homeless people. She knew not to try and fight them off, because the last time she’d tried she had wound up bleeding and still without the day-old bread she had been defending. What you needed was money.

No one wanted to hire a homeless girl. Not even to pick up trash or mop floors. She got a few jobs distributing flyers and stickers and the like, but they didn’t pay much and there was never any guarantee she was going to get another task. But there was one way to earn enough money to eat properly. She just hadn’t wanted to try it.

It was April when Mari agreed on a fee and climbed into the back of a delivery van with the driver, stripping her t-shirt off and hanging it on an equipment rack, heaping her bra and jeans and panties and boots in a pile at the foot of the rack. He was a pimply loser with no social skills, but he also had no life, and therefore had the money she wanted, and for $150, spreading her legs for him was no big deal.

In May, she heard about a part of town where the cops were either well-bribed or too lazy to care that groups of young people would gather in old garages and back alleys for potential buyers to stroll among. Being small and curvy made her stand out among the taller, paler, skinnier competition, and being fussy about hygiene made her more desirable. She learned fast how to scope out the best mark and coax him into taking her with him.

She even went with another woman once, a big black woman who called her Sugar and made her stay for breakfast, paying extra for another session on the kitchen floor.

She has enough money now, and a tiny, dirty apartment with three little rooms. An independent coffee shop two miles away doesn’t care that sometimes she comes in late. But she still goes downtown to the garages and the alleys, and she still gets into fancy cars with silent men in suits.

Maybe some day she’ll live in a bigger apartment, with water that doesn’t taste of rust and lights that don’t flicker and a view of something other than a brick wall. Maybe she’ll stop going to the garages. But not yet.