“No, sir. What I wanted was for my mom not to move in with her druggie boyfriend, but she chose him over me.” She shrugs. “I guess a foster family has to be better than this shit, right?” She gestures around herself.
I stop rooting through the glove compartment and sit up to look at the kid. I make a snap decision in that moment. I’m going to help this kid. “Get in the car,” I say.
The kid starts to back off and I realize how that must have sounded.
“Wait,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Let me explain. The lady who ran the charity, Ashley, she’s a friend of mine. Actually, she was more than a friend, but I screwed up and… never mind. Anyway, I know Ashley and she wouldn’t have given up on you, so don’t give up on her, okay? Get in the car and I’m going to take you and book you into a Travel Lodge where Ashley can contact you when she finds you somewhere. Would that be all right?”
I can see the dilemma in the girl’s eyes. She so badly wants to trust me, but she’s afraid. She’s probably been let down so many times before that she’s having a hard time thinking I can be anything but one of the bad guys.
“I’m trying to help you,” I tell her gently. “What can I say to make this sound less creepy?”
The girl laughs softly and her eyes hold mine for a moment rather than flitting around looking for an escape route.
It breaks my heart a little to think she thinks there’s a good chance I’m going to drive her off somewhere and do God knows what to her, and yet she hasn’t fled because she’s too hungry to run away from the possibility of a meal. Her laugh and the fact she’s meeting my eye now gives me hope that maybe she can see I have good intentions.
“If you’re serious, then there’s a Travel Lodge just around this corner. We could walk there rather than me having to get into your car,” she remarks quietly.
Her eyes are pleading with me to be serious about this, and her body is tensed, poised to run.
“Deal,” I agree. “Why don’t you back up a bit, so I can get out of the car without you feeling like I might grab you?”
She nods her head and backs up a little.
I roll the window back up and slowly get out of the car. I lock it and double check it’s locked and then I turn to the girl. “Lead the way.”
She starts walking and I walk with her, making sure to keep a safe distance between us.
She keeps giving me furtive glances as we walk and then finally she speaks up, “What’s your deal?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Not everyone is an opportunist dick that sees me as someone to be used, I’ll admit that. But even the people who care would have given me a dollar or two and felt like they’d done their good deed for the day or whatever. But you’re different. Why?”
This kid knows too much, has seen too much of how bad people can be. I shrug my shoulders. “I used to be that dick. Not the one who would have hurt you, but the one who would have told myself you ran away and brought this whole thing on yourself,” I admit. “And on a good day, I would have done exactly what you said. Given you a couple of dollars and felt good about myself. On a bad day, I’d have shooed you away. But then I met Ashley and things changed. She made me see I’m part of the problem, and when she held up that mirror, I didn’t like what I saw.”
The girl seems to accept this and we fall back into silence for a moment before she speaks up again, “The last person before the charity lady who said they wanted to help me took me out to a parking lot and raped me. You know the worst part about that?” She looks over at me.
I shake my head, although I’m sure the worst part of that is the casual way she’s speaking about it, like experience has taught her it’s normal to be treated this way.
“Afterwards, he threw a twenty dollar bill at me and told he hadn’t raped me, he’d used my services. I was so hungry I was grateful for the money.”
“That’s …” I search for the right expression. “Hell kid, I don’t even know what to say to that. That’s… it’s just not right.”
“Yeah,” she says with a shrug. “You have to find a way through it. If you want to not go completely crazy or turn to smack to get through the day, you have to find some other way to deal with shit like that. Mine is a twisted sense of humor I guess.”