Roxy's Story

  I watched how Steve looked with interest at other people, skimming the surfaces of their faces and bodies just like someone who knew as much about people as I thought I did. He brought a smile to my face. Whenever I saw someone who interested me, I suddenly felt very good, as if there was some purpose to being born, after all, because most people bored me.

  I watched Steve walk away, and then I shoplifted the book he had been considering. It wasn’t difficult this time, because it fit so well in the inside pocket of the oversize man’s leather jacket I was wearing. Despite being caught at it three times, I was almost as good as a Las Vegas magician when it came to “now you see it, now you don’t.” I left the store right after he did, and when he stopped to look at some clothing in a window, I came up beside him and took out the book. I stood there looking at it, and then he looked at me with a smile of incredulity.

  “You just buy that book?” he asked.

  “Sorta,” I said.

  “Sorta? What’s that mean?”

  “Sorta means ‘sort of,’ ” I said, and he laughed. “Here,” I told him, handing it to him. He looked at it in my extended hand.

  “ ‘Here’? You want to give it to me? Don’t you want to read it?”

  “The last thing I read was a ticket for jaywalking, and you know how hard that is to get in New York City.”

  He laughed again, looked at the book suspiciously, looked back at the store and then at me.

  “Don’t worry. It was a clean sorta,” I said, jerking the book at him. “Take it. I don’t want it.”

  He finally took it. “If you don’t want it, why did you do this?”

  “I saw you read the cover with interest and then put it back. On a budget?”

  “Sorta,” he said, smiling.

  “There you go, then. You have what you wanted at no cost.”

  “Yes, but why did you want to do this for me? Who are you?”

  “I’m not an undercover policeman working out an entrapment or anything. Don’t worry. You looked like you really wanted it. I liked your look, so I did one of the things I do best. I made some good-looking guy happy.”

  He laughed but shook his head incredulously. I could tell he had never met anyone like me. But then again, few people had. “My name is Roxy Wilcox,” I added, and offered my hand.

  He looked at it as if taking it would doom him.

  “No diseases,” I said.

  He took it, holding it very gently, almost too gently for a man who looked as fit as he did. “Steve Carson. You liked my look?”

  “Sorta,” I said, and he did that smile and shaking of his head again.

  He looked around—to see if anyone was noticing us, I guess. Then he turned back to me. “I guess you live in New York?”

  “Right. East Side. You?”

  “I’m going to Columbia. Junior. Born and raised in Rochester, New York.”

  “Raised? What are you, corn?” I asked, and he laughed.

  “You’re funny, all right. You go to school or what?”

  “Mostly ‘or what,’ but I’m still enrolled in school. At least today.”

  “College or . . .”

  “High school,” I said. “A senior, but don’t hold it against me.”

  He nodded. Then he looked at his watch.

  “Heavy date at the dorm?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t live at the dorm. I took a studio apartment on Jerome Avenue.”

  “Oh, a loner?”

  “I’m just not into the college rah-rah stuff. Can’t afford to fail anything. Besides, I like being on my own.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “So you’re a senior in high school?”

  “I’m old enough. Don’t worry about that. I was left back three times,” I added, half in jest. He looked as if he believed it and smiled a little more warmly now. I could see he was very attracted to me, not that most boys weren’t.

  I think that was a big part of what confused my parents and my teachers. I was, in all modesty, quite beautiful, with a terrific figure, but as Billy Barton, a boy in my class, was fond of saying, I was “hell on wheels.” The contradiction probably kept me from suffering more severe punishments. Whenever I had been brought before a judge, I could see the confusion in his face. Why would someone who looked like me be so bad? Who was I, the daughter of Bonnie and Clyde? I knew how to be sweet and remorseful, too. Each time, I was sent off with warnings. Most men, especially some of my teachers, were easy to manipulate. But not my father, never mon père.

  “So what do you want to do afterward?” he asked.

  “After what?”

  “High school,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s too far away to plan.”

  He nodded. I had the feeling I was beginning to scare him now.

  “No, I don’t know. I might go into fashion modeling.”

  “You could.”

  “Thank you.”

  He glanced at his watch again and then surprised me. “How about some lunch?”

  “Lunch?”

  “That’s the least I could do for a girl who risked her reputation and her uncertain future for me.”

  I shrugged. “Why not? Only, I didn’t risk my future. I reinforced it.”

  He laughed. “You’re very funny.”

  “I’m better when I’m really trying to be. So where’s this lunch?”

  “I know this great sandwich shop on Fifty-Seventh.”

  “Lead the way,” I said, and we started out together.

  I suppose a relationship that began with a theft didn’t have a good prognosis, but I was never one to care about long relationships, anyway. Maybe my mother’s relationship with my father turned me off the idea. My guidance counselor, Miss Laura Gene, was an amateur therapist, and she often accused me of always looking for ways to blame my parents for anything and everything.

  “One of these days, you’ll have to take sole responsibility for things you do, Roxy,” she told me. “That’s when you’ll know you have become an adult.”

  “Oh, I thought that was when I had my first period,” I replied, and she turned a shade of purplish red.

  She would definitely categorize Steve as an adult. He was obviously a very responsible person and serious about his schoolwork. He was not my idea of an ideal guy, anyway. I liked guys who weren’t uptight about their futures. When he told me he was very interested in international politics, I thought he was going to start talking about current events like my father and be boring, but he had a passion for what he liked, and I was attracted to that for a while. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was not terribly experienced when it came to romance, despite his good looks. He was an only child, born to parents who had him late in their lives. Cursing, sex, drugs, and drinking were so alien to him that I thought at first he was from another planet. But he didn’t prove too difficult to corrupt.

  After lunch, we went for a walk in Central Park. He was going to go on to his apartment to work on a research paper. I asked him if he wanted company later.

  “Later? When later?”

  “I don’t care. You tell me,” I said.

  “It’s Sunday. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

  “I never let something like that interfere with my happiness,” I said.

  He smiled, now far more relaxed. I could see he was intrigued with me, and for now, that was enough for me.

  “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m good at putting out a ready-to-eat chicken with some vegetables.”

  “I’m always ready to eat,” I said. “And other things.”

  “Other things?”

  “You’ll figure it out. You seem smart.”

  He smiled and gave me his address. “Six-thirty?”

  “Fine,” I said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips, then hurried away. When I looked back, he was still standing there looking after me, glancing at the book I had swiped for him and then back at me as if he couldn’t believe that what had just happene
d was real.

  That was one of those nights when my father nearly took off my head, but I endured the pain and continued seeing Steve on and off during the next two weeks. As it turned out, he didn’t just have limited romantic experiences. He was a virgin. That ended fast. I was able to spend that night later at his place because one of the girls at my school covered for me in exchange for an iPod I had lifted. She really wasn’t much of a friend, not that any of them were. Mon père was on a short business trip, so I was able to pull it off.

  I did begin to really like being with Steve, but I still couldn’t see a long relationship with him. To his credit, he never got too emotional, never said “I love you” or even something like “I really like you, Roxy.” Maybe he realized how little that mattered to me. We just had a thing. In fact, I told him he made love like someone brushing his teeth.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked.

  “You do it like it’s simply something that has to be done. You’re afraid of cavities.”

  He thought a moment, missed the point, and shrugged. By now, he had decided not to take anything I did or said seriously, anyway. It was as if he went in and out of a dream when we were together. I really questioned whether he thought about me the day after or pushed me aside for fear he might miss an important point in political science class.

  However, the night my father threw me out, I went directly to Steve’s apartment. After I had packed, I stopped to look in on Emmie for a long moment. There was a good chance I wouldn’t see her again for some time, maybe ever. I wondered how she would react to that. We weren’t very close. There were just too many years between us, and my father did his best to keep me from doing too much with her without either my mother or him around. I could count on my fingers how many times I had taken her somewhere in the city without one of them. I wasn’t to be trusted.

  She didn’t stir. She looked like a little doll some other girl had tucked into her bed. I thought her teddy bear was looking at me suspiciously. I touched her hair softly so as not to wake her, whispered good-bye, and then descended the stairs. Mama came to the door of the living room. She looked out at me standing there with my suitcase and shook her head. She seemed unable to speak. It was hard for me, too, but I managed.

  “Have a good life,” I told her, and walked out.

  It was overcast and dreary, but even if it weren’t, the street never looked as dark or as empty to me, even though there were people walking on both sides and the traffic was heavy. I did feel a little dazed, but I wasn’t hesitant. I walked with determination to the corner and hailed a taxi to take me to Steve’s apartment building. When he opened the door and saw me standing there with a suitcase, he looked about as amazed as anyone possibly could.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m here.”

  “With a suitcase? For how long?”

  “As long as you’ll let me stay,” I said.

  His amazement changed quickly to a look of worry. “Er . . . I could get into trouble if you were here more than a night. You are underage, Roxy. You’re not quite eighteen. You know I know the truth.” He shook his head and put up his hands. “Look, I’m not ready or able to do something like this,” he said. “What did you do, run away from home?”

  “Sorta,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Go home, Roxy. This is a mistake that you’ll regret.”

  “I guess it is,” I said. “Too bad,” I told him, and left him standing there in his doorway looking quite relieved.

  I took the elevator down, walked through the small lobby, and stepped back into the street.

  And that’s how it all began.

  1

  I had learned about a neighborhood on the Lower West Side where runaways who still had a little money hung out. I had read about it in a newspaper article written by someone who was on the Pulitzer Prize short list for doing a series about “America’s Forgotten Children.” It intrigued me, and maybe, tucked way back in my brain in one of those secret places we all keep our fears and nightmares, I envisioned myself going there and checking into one of those roach nests because the cost was so minimal and no one who operated one cared who you were, how old you were, or if you lived or died that day. You could make up any name for yourself. The only identification you needed was a fifty-dollar bill.

  It was late April, and despite the threat of rain, I suppose I could have survived sleeping in some discarded old car or under a bridge somewhere, but at least at this excuse for a hotel, I could have some sense of safety once I locked the door of the room.

  Just as I had read, when I arrived at one of these places (they always had names beyond reality, like Paradise Hotel), the man behind the small, battered dark-wood desk was uninterested in me and only brightened a bit when I produced a fifty-dollar bill. I had a feeling he wasn’t as old as he looked, despite his very thin, cheaply dyed black hair and a face that looked like crinkled cellophane. He had a jaw I thought might have been squeezed with a pair of pliers while he was growing up. Deep lines rippled across his forehead. He coughed like someone suffering with emphysema, explained by an ashtray full of smoked-down thin cigars on the counter. He gave me a key to a room on the third floor and told me the only rule was no smoking in the room, which he said meant no smoking anything. Then he sat back again and closed his eyes as if I had interrupted an enjoyable dream he was having.

  For a moment, I imagined I had been talking to Charon, the mythical ferryman of Hades, the Greek version of hell, who carried the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead, because coming to this hotel made me feel I had come to the land of the dead. I smiled to myself, imagining how proud of me Mr. Wheeler would be for remembering that lesson in mythology, but the truth was that despite the act I put on, I was very attentive in his English class.

  The elevator was out of order, so I headed for the narrow stairway. The railing was loose and rattled, and the steps groaned even under my mere one hundred and twelve pounds. When I turned onto the third floor, I heard some loud music and laughter coming from the first room on the right. Fortunately, my room was four doors away, and I heard nothing from behind any of those doors at the moment. The entire hallway reeked of stale beer and cigarettes. There were no windows, no opportunity for any odor to escape or be diminished. It was as if every ugly scent was layered upon every other and now seeped through the walls.

  Because the frame of my room’s door was warped, I had to jerk it open after inserting the key, and for a few seconds, I stood in the doorway debating whether to just turn and run out or go in. I felt as if I were about to dive into a cesspool.

  I swallowed hard and entered, searching for a light switch. The small ceiling light fixture had a bulb a size or two too small, probably placed there deliberately so that the room’s new inhabitant couldn’t see just how run-down the floors and walls were or how many roaches were building their own suburb. I felt my whole body cringe as if they were already crawling up and over my ankles, joyfully and excitedly making their way to get under my bra and into my heart. I saw that wallpaper was peeled off in spots as if someone suffering from agoraphobia had been scratching at it.

  Being afraid to go outside in this neighborhood was understandable. The streets looked as if they last were cleaned around the time of the Civil War. When I had turned onto the block, I had the feeling that someone literally could die on the sidewalk and be unnoticed. What a contrast to our immaculate block on the Upper East Side.

  The room, despite what the man at the desk forbade, reeked of cigarettes. The rug was worn down, revealing the wood beneath it in most places. I was afraid to look under the bed. Maybe the last person who stayed here had died under there. I had no doubt something had died under it. There was only a four-drawer dark brown dresser and a wooden folding chair beside it, both badly scratched, the dresser actually with a hole in one side. Of course, there was no television, radio, clock, heat, or air-conditioning.

/>   The bed frame was plain, and the narrow mattress, in which some ugly, crawly thing was surely hatching, was covered by sheets that were gray and stained yellow. It looked as if there were some lipstick stains, too. At least, I hoped it was only lipstick. I peeled off the stringy blue wool blanket, the bottom of which was torn as if someone had slashed it with a sharp knife. Instead of the pillow, without a pillowcase, I decided to use my soft backpack. I knew that if I slept, I would have to sleep in my clothes. There were two small windows, one so stuck in place it was probably never closed, which on second thought was a good thing. At least there was some ventilation. The other window opened and closed. Neither had any curtains or blinds, so there was no way to keep out the morning light.

  For a while, I just sat on the bed thinking. It was only natural for me to have some second thoughts and regrets, especially in a place like this, but every time I imagined myself running home to kowtow and plead for forgiveness, I felt sicker. No, I had to endure this, I told myself. I could just hear my father telling me that this was a five-star hotel compared with what soldiers had to endure in boot camp. “Soldier up!” was one of his favorite expressions whenever I complained about anything. Usually, that was just what I did. I soldiered up.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t until nearly four in the morning that the sounds from the street below diminished and I was able to get some sleep. Until then, I could hear people screaming and cursing, car horns sounding, loud laughter, someone breaking bottles, and, occasionally, someone crying just below my window.

  What a contrast this was with my beautiful bedroom at home, with its king-size canopy bed and thick pink rug. Mama was a bit of a fanatic when it came to cleanliness and neatness. Papa had been brought up in military housing, so everything in its place with spit and polish was standard and expected operating procedure. I was confident that despite Papa’s comparisons with a hard army life and meeting the challenge, neither Mama nor he would permit a stray dog to sleep in a place like this room. However, all I could imagine at the moment was Papa hoping that I would end up in just such a room.