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grades and give her an edge. How they felt betrayed. How if the colleges found
out she read this stuff, they'd never let her in. On and on and on-
And then they took it and her into the living room and burned the books in the
trendy gas-log fireplace, right in front of her.
"No living in a dream-world for you, Tania," Father had said, as he fed the
brightly colored books to the flames. "It's time to wake up to the real
world."
Well, I'm in the real world now, Father, she thought at him, her eyes
stinging. It's more real than yours.
They hadn't been able to do much to her, other than spend every minute they
had to spare lecturing her. What could they do, after all? She wasn't allowed
to "waste" her time on clubs, boyfriends, hobbies, music for pleasure-the only
time she was ever outside the townhouse was when she was at school or at her
after-school lessons: ballet on Monday, piano on Wednesday, tennis on
Saturday. She didn't like any of those outside lessons; they couldn't punish
her by taking any of them away. She didn't have any friends but Meg, she
wasn't allowed to have any friends but Meg, and she only saw Meg on Saturday,
at the club for tennis lessons.
Then she found one Saturday that there was still one thing they could do. They
moved her lesson, from Saturday morning, to Saturday afternoon. She'd lost
even Meg's tenuous friendship.
They told her Friday night. That was when she decided to run away.
Father always accused her of being unable to plan ahead, of forgetting about
the future. Well, he was wrong.
She knew the combination of the safe, and how much money her parents kept in
it. She went to it by the light of a tiny flashlight, opened it, and counted .
. . she didn't dare take too much, or they might miss it if they happened to
need money for something on Saturday, but she made sure she had enough for the
fare. Then she packed her tennis bag, taking everything she could fit into it,
stuffing it and her purse to bursting. Father was on the way to New York,
Mother was seeing a friend of Meg's father, helping him find a house for a
relocating veep. She did things like that for her clients; that was why she
got so many accounts.
Too bad she didn't do things like that for her kid. Or maybe I was like a
"declining account" to her.
When Mother dropped her off at the club, she'd gone around to the kitchen
instead of to her lesson. She asked one of the busboys how to get to the city
bus, figuring they'd know, if anyone would.
It was easier than she'd thought; many of the employees at the club used the
bus as their primary transportation. She'd taken the city bus downtown, and
from there it was a simple matter to get to the Greyhound depot. Before the
four-hour tennis lesson was over, she was on her way to Savannah. There was no
special reason to go there, it was just a place somewhere, anywhere, else.
She'd picked it more-or-less at random, figuring if she hadn't known in
advance where she was going neither would her parents. Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina, vanished behind her.
If Father'd been more like Tannim. . . . She let a little more hot water into
the tub, and sank back with a wistful sigh.
Money didn't last as long as she'd thought it would. Really, she didn't have
any idea how much things cost. She made the mistake of buying a couple of
nylon bags and a lot of t-shirts and things to wear so she didn't look so
conspicuous. By the time she reached Savannah, she was down to her last twenty
dollars, and desperate. The bus arrived after midnight, and had dumped her out
on the street, cold and scared. Afraid to hang around the bus terminal, she'd
wandered the streets, jumping at every shadow, expecting to get mugged at any
moment.
That was when Jamie found her; she found out later he'd just turned a really
good trick, and was a little high, and feeling very generous and expansive.
All she knew was that this really cute guy came up to her, as she was sitting
on a bench in some kind of little park, and looked at her kind of funny. Then
he'd said, "You're in trouble, aren't you?" and offered her a place to stay.
If she hadn't been so exhausted, she'd have been horrified by the awful
apartment. The place was musty, full of mildew, with stained ceilings where
leaks had sprung. Two rooms, on the top floor of an old, unpainted building so
rickety that it leaned. No furniture, cracks in all the walls, carpeting with
about a hundred years of dirt ground into it, bugs crawling everywhere-she'd
never seen a place like it before.
Laura had been waiting, and when she saw that Jamie'd brought Tania with him,
she started to yell at him. But then she'd taken a second look, and just gave
Tania a couple of blankets and a pillow, and said they'd talk in the morning.
They talked, all right. Or rather, Tania talked. When she was through, Jamie'd
looked at Laura, and Laura had nodded slowly. "All right," Laura had said.
"Y'all can stay. But y'all gotta pay your own share. We ain't got anythin' t'
spare a-tall."
She'd thought it would be easy. She didn't know that no one was going to hire
a fourteen-year-old with no experience, no phone, and no transportation. Not
when there were so many SCAD students looking for jobs. After a week of
filling out applications and getting turned down, she was getting desperate.
If Laura and Jamie threw her out-
She asked Laura to get her a job where she worked. That was when Laura
laughed, and told her what she, Jamie, and the other kids sharing the
apartment did all night. And offered to show her how.
"It's easy," Laura'd said cynically, in her thick, Georgia-cracker accent.
"They pay y'forty bucks, and y'just lie there. Half hour, and it's over, an'
ya go find another john."
She'd had sex education; she knew about all of it, from contraceptives to
AIDs. As desperate as she'd been, she hadn't thought it would be that bad.
So she'd been deflowered by some guy in the back seat of his car and gotten
forty bucks out of the experience; he hadn't even known she'd been a virgin.
It had hurt a lot, but she soaked away the pain in the bathtub, and went out
the next night. After a while it stopped hurting-physically.
It could have been worse, she told herself. In fact, she'd been incredibly
lucky, and she knew it. There were guys who hung around the bus station
waiting for kids like her; they'd offer a place to stay, and the next thing
the kid knew, she was hooked and he was her pimp. Jamie saved her from that,
anyway. At least she wasn't doing drugs, her money was her own, and she could
make her johns wear rubbers.
She sat up a little in the tub, thinking she heard the key in the lock. But
no, it wasn't Laura or Jamie. It was getting awfully late, and she was
beginning to worry. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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