by Nicole Maggi
“Anything for a story, right?”
“Oh—right,” I said, forcing a laugh. As if my life didn’t depend on what I found out. Or at least my memories, I thought as Nate led me to the back of the room.
I had known the memory of Nate—of Annabel’s feelings for him and all she knew about him—would not be free. It just seemed completely unfair that I didn’t get to choose what memory I could exchange. Like, why couldn’t she take the memory of the time I peed in my pants in the middle of the Aquarium on a second-grade field trip? Why did it have to be the memory of what was supposedly the best summer of my life?
Off to the side of the kitchen was a quiet corner with two unoccupied armchairs. Nate dropped into one and turned on the banker’s lamp that sat on the end table between the chairs. I tossed my coat over the back of the other chair and sat, pulling my backpack up into my lap.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spied the girl Nate had been talking to. She was watching us from across the room. I nodded toward her. “Who’s your girlfriend?”
Nate followed the line of my gaze and burst out laughing. “Um, Tommy is not my girlfriend.”
“Tommy?” I squinted. Now that I was looking for it, I could see the angular shape of Tommy’s jaw and, yep, an Adam’s apple when she swallowed. My face grew hot. “Uh, my bad.”
Nate winked. “Tommy’s great, but not my type.”
“I knew that.”
“Oh?” Nate raised an eyebrow. “How?”
“I don’t know...you just don’t seem...” I chewed my lip. I had to be careful.
“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” Nate said. “You’d be surprised how many girls on the street are as clean-cut as you. There’s a real misconception out there that trafficked kids are all from bad homes or runaways or drug addicts.” Nate leaned toward me a little. “I’d even wager that at least one of your Hillcoate classmates is being trafficked.”
My mouth went sour. I shook my head. “No way.”
“How would you know?” Nate asked. “You wouldn’t believe the double life some of these girls live. Most of the time when they finally get free, their family had no idea.”
“That’s awful,” I whispered. I wanted to think that if Ella or Toni or one of my other Hillcoate friends was in real trouble, I’d know about it. But would I? Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
But Annabel…Annabel couldn’t have been from a good family or have had close friends. If she had, someone would’ve claimed her. She wouldn’t have been a Jane Doe. “But some of the girls are runaways, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Nate said, “or foster kids. They just don’t have anyone who cares enough to keep them off the streets.”
I tried to imagine what that would be like, to not have a family who cared about me, and failed. The thought was like a foreign country I had never heard of. I pressed my lips together and swallowed hard. From the other side of the room, Tommy laughed again, long and loud. I nodded toward her. “Is Tommy a…prostitute?”
Nate smiled. “Not anymore. She’s been off the street for almost a year now.” He tilted his head to the side. “Her parents kicked her out when she told them she wanted to transition.” At my quizzical look, he added, “From male to female. A lot of parents have a hard time accepting that. So she was on the streets, and a heroin dealer was nice enough to take her in.”
“And get him—sorry, her—hooked,” I finished. “Right?”
“Yeah. But she was lucky. She had friends who pulled her out of the abyss and brought her here.”
I pointed to one of the banners that adorned the walls. A bright rainbow arced the length of it with the words “EMPOWERING LGBTQ” underneath it. “How do they,” I jerked my chin up to indicate the church above us, “like having heathens and sinners hanging out in their basement?”
Nate laughed. “You didn’t read the sign too closely out front, did you? This is a Universalist Unitarian church. They’ll take anyone who walks in the front door. Which is the truly Christian thing to do anyway, right?” He nodded toward my backpack. “Don’t you want to take notes or something?”
“Oh. Yes.” I had actually come prepared. The sight of Nate’s scruffy blond hair and blue eyes had just made me forget to play the part of the journalist. I pulled a pen, a notebook, and a little tape recorder from my bag.
“Do you mind?” I asked, holding up the tape recorder. Nate shrugged. I pressed the record button and set it down on the table in between us. “So did, um, Annabel come here a lot?”
Nate narrowed his eyes at me. “You just want to talk about Annabel?”
“No,” I answered quickly. I flipped to a blank page in my notebook, not looking at him. “I wanted to use her as the, you know, cautionary side of the story. And then maybe we could—I don’t know—use, um, Tommy as the hopeful side.” I chewed on my pen and glanced at him. “What do you think?”
“I guess that makes sense.” One corner of his mouth turned up. I couldn’t stop looking at it. “You’re the writer.”
I snorted and turned it into throat clearing. “Uh, yeah, I guess. So, Annabel. She came here a lot?”
Nate looked down at his lap. “Often enough.”
“But not enough to get her off the streets,” I said softly.
“No,” he said, his voice as hushed as mine. “No, I guess not.”
“Tell me about her.” I tucked my legs up underneath me. “Why was she special?”
Nate leaned his head on the back of the chair, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “She was special because—because—she was infuriating.”
I jumped a little in my chair. “What?”
Nate straightened up and leaned over the arm of his chair toward me. “Ever since the other night, when you told me that she was…” He swallowed. I nodded so that he didn’t have to say the word. “I keep thinking about the last time I saw her. It was in December, right before Christmas. FAIR Girls always has a holiday party here, and all the girls show up. It’s catered,” he explained. “Free food is a powerful attraction.”
“I get that,” I said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let my dad drag me to a boring work party just for the buffet.”
He smiled at me, his eyes crinkled at the edge. I tore my gaze away and focused on a tear in the leather armchair, trying to ignore the warmth that spread through me.
“Anyway,” he went on, “Annabel was there. We were talking, and she got a call. And I knew it was Jules, telling her to go to the cemetery to meet someone, and I just…I got angry with her.” Nate’s voice was hoarse. His head bent so that I couldn’t see his eyes anymore. “I told her she didn’t have to do this anymore, that I—we—would take care of her, get her some place safe. And she just looked at me and said, ‘Nowhere is safe. Not for me.’”
“What did she mean?” I asked. I wanted to reach out and stroke his hair. Instead I clenched my hand into a fist.
“I don’t know exactly. She wasn’t talking about, you know, the world not being safe.” He glanced up at me through his eyelashes. “I think she meant that she wasn’t safe from herself.”
“She wasn’t…” I murmured, thinking of the cold pavement outside 826 Emiline Way.
“Anyway, I followed her,” Nate said. I watched his face as he talked, noticing how he avoided direct eye contact with me. “I followed her out of here and toward the cemetery. And around the corner, there was a homeless woman huddled against a building. She greeted Annabel by name—they obviously knew each other from the area—and Annabel stopped and gave her a whole bag of food she’d gotten from the party.”
“Wow,” I said.
“And her coat.” He met my eyes. “Annabel took off her coat and gave it to this woman. She was wearing this tight little sleeveless minidress, but she stood there in the cold like it was nothing and would not take the coat back even though the woman tried to refuse it. Then sh
e walked off and met her—client—and I never saw her again.”
I shifted in my chair so that I faced away from him and dug the heels of my hands into my eyes. Who was this Annabel? Why did she stay on the streets? What had driven her to jump off that balcony?
“That was the saddest thing about Annabel.” Nate’s voice floated to me. I looked back at him. His blue eyes were clear but faraway. “Everyone who knew her could see how beautiful and brave she was, but she couldn’t see it herself. That’s why she kept going back to Jules. It wasn’t drugs. She was one of the few who never took drugs.” He blinked and only then did I see the whisper of a tear. “It was because she didn’t think she deserved any better.”
I sat very still. Even my insides felt frozen. Pain clenched my heart, a strong, sweet pain that made me want to weep and scream and curl up in a ball. For all the memories I’d gotten of Nate, for all I knew about how she’d felt about him, there were no memories of how he’d felt about her. This was the closest he’d ever come to telling her, and I felt it deep inside me, deep inside her. I drew a shuddering breath. “Um—”
“Yeah. Um.” Nate ran his hands over his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to unload that all on you.”
“That’s okay.” I slid my hands beneath my legs so that Nate wouldn’t see them shaking. “I asked.”
“You didn’t ask for that.” Nate shook his head. A lock of hair fell across his forehead, and he brushed it aside with an angry stroke. “It is really hard to come here day after day and see these girls… You want so bad to help them, but for every one that you help, there are ten more that you’ve failed—ten more that disappear or wash up on the banks of the river or overdose on heroin or…” Nate stopped and let the silence fill in what he’d left unsaid. Or jump off a balcony. He took a big breath and let it out. “But I’ve found that sitting around moaning about how sad it is gets no one anywhere. That’s why I got involved.”
“So, what do you do exactly?” I repositioned the tape recorder to make it look like I was actually doing some reporting. “Do you just come here after school?”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t go to school.”
“You don’t? Did you graduate?” He didn’t look much older than me.
He shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. I dropped out when I was sixteen and got my GED instead.”
“But why?”
“Why?” He pressed his lips together. “I guess because I hated sitting in class every day when I knew it was all bullshit out in the real world.”
“And you just…dropped out? Your parents let you?”
“Please.” Nate rolled his eyes. “My parents didn’t know what end was up back then. I put the paper in front of them and told them to sign and they did.”
“So you just work here now?”
“Nah. I would, but unfortunately saving lives doesn’t pay the rent.” Nate tilted his head toward the door. “I work at the Starbucks a short walk from here. I work mostly mornings so I can come here in the afternoons.”
“Oh.” I toyed with the tape recorder. “That’s…cool.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’ve never known anyone who dropped out of school, have you?”
I tossed my hair back. “I—what makes you say that?”
He laughed. “No offense, Georgie, but you look like a red button on a black coat in this place.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I grabbed my pen and uncapped it with unnecessary violence. The cap went flying straight into the air.
Nate pointed to the pin on my coat’s lapel. “I highly doubt anyone drops out of Hillcoate.”
I gritted my teeth. “So?”
“You know what?” Nate held up his hands. “I shouldn’t be judgmental. It’s not your fault that you were born into privilege.”
I stared at him. Privilege? Was that what he thought of me? My life was not—I scrunched my forehead and thought about my old Victorian house on a leafy street in Brookline, about Hillcoate’s gated drive and spotless hallways, about the trust fund that sat waiting for me in the brick-building bank in Harvard Square. Huh.
“I just…” I said slowly, “I never thought about it before.”
Nate put his hand over mine. My heart jerked a little. His skin was smooth and warm against mine. “There is a whole world outside the walls of your fancy school that they don’t teach you about in there.”
My eyes met his and it was like I was looking at him through a stained glass window. He was so many different colors and shapes. He was the hot guy that Georgie saw and the beautiful person that Annabel had known. And all he saw of me was a spoiled little rich girl. I wanted him to see me differently. I wanted him to think I was beautiful and brave just like she was.
“Well, I’m here,” I said. “Educate me.”
Later, when he walked me out to my cab, I asked him, “You’re here every afternoon?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’ll come back.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t get enough for your article?”
“No.” I searched his face. “I need more.”
We stared at each other for a long moment before he reached around me and opened the car door. “’Til next time then, Georgie.”
As I sat in the cab on the way home—with the same driver I’d had on my first visit to Mattapan—I thought about Ella, how easily she’d dismissed the topic of trafficking as depressing. And it was so much easier to dismiss. Who wanted to think about teenage prostitutes? Especially when they could be your next-door neighbor? But I didn’t want to run away from it. And I couldn’t. Not with Annabel ruling my heart.
I’d only gotten a little more information on her, but whatever she wanted to tell me, I was on the track. I could feel it in the way the Catch shushed through me.
The house smelled like roasting chicken when I walked through the door. This time I didn’t have to worry about being out. I’d told my parents exactly where I was going. Mom had even given me the cab fare. For once, I was grateful for the deadline that kept her hidden away in her office and unable to chauffeur me around town.
I found Grandma in the kitchen, bent over the oven and brushing olive oil onto the half-roasted bird. “Can I help?”
“Oh no, sweetie.” She straightened and laid the brush on the counter. “Not with this anyway. Your mom wants to send out invitations for their Valentine’s Day party, and I cannot for the life of me figure out that stupid Evite site.”
I laughed. “I’ll do it.” I sat at the kitchen table and pulled Mom’s laptop toward me. I stroked the silvery rim with the tip of my finger. Everyone in this house had their own laptop, plus the desk computer up in the office where Mom was locked away. I knew we had a lot, more than most people, but being in that basement at All Saints made me realize how truly blessed we really were.
I pulled up the invitation website and went into Mom’s account to find the invitation for last year’s Valentine’s Day party. It was an annual event in our house. Mom and Dad said having a holiday party just made you compete against everyone else having a holiday party, so they’d searched around for a holiday that everyone celebrated but usually didn’t have parties for. Colt was rooting for Groundhog’s Day, but Mom and Dad had settled on Valentine’s Day. And ten years later, it was a tradition.
I changed the invitation design and copied the guest list from previous years. “Are you sticking around for the party?” I asked Grandma.
“You know, I think I might.” She carried a bowl of sweet potatoes to the counter and started cutting them up. “I’ve been hearing about this party for years and have always been curious.”
“It’s nothing special,” I said and hit Send on the Evite. I looked up. “Actually, you know, it is. The whole neighborhood shows up.”
Grandma dropped a handful of diced potatoes into a pan. “Do you want me to st
ay?”
I smiled at her. “Yeah. Yeah, I think it would be nice.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
“You can help us decorate.” I shut the laptop and stood up. “Colt always goes overboard with the paper hearts.” I kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be upstairs. Call me if you need help.”
Before I left the kitchen, I grabbed a box of trash bags from under the sink. When I got to my bedroom, I flicked on the light and stood in the doorway. My gaze swept over every surface and took in the excess of jewelry I never wore, my overstuffed closet, the shoes spilling out like a pool of black and brown sludge. Shelves full of books I’d already read, trinkets that I’d bought and forgotten about.
I didn’t need any of this. The soft lamplight seemed to glare off the bright pink walls as I pulled piece after piece of clothing off their hangers and stuffed them into the trash bags. By the time I was done with the mountain of shoes, I could actually see the floor of my closet, something I’d never been able to achieve before. I shoved all the costume jewelry I’d worn once into a little velvet bag and flung it in after the shoes.
The books were next. I’d noticed a half-empty bookcase in the corner of the basement at All Saints. My own bookcase overflowed with glossy hardcovers that I’d already devoured and were now just taking up space. Maybe one of these books would keep one girl off the street for an afternoon.
I dumped the unwanted books into a cardboard box I’d found at the back of my closet and was dragging it across the room when the door opened. “Dinner’s—Georgie! What—here, let me help you.” Mom nudged me out of the way. I dropped to the floor and panted as I watched her pull the box into the hallway. My scar seared.
Mom came back into the room. I followed her gaze to my pared-down closet, the clutter-free dresser, and the half-empty bookshelf. Sweat ran down my forehead and my shirt clung to my skin. I pulled the neckline away from my throat and waved it a little to fan myself. Mom raised an eyebrow at me. “It’s a little early for spring cleaning.”
I shrugged and let my breathing slow to normal before answering. “I was just feeling a little claustrophobic in here.”