“Thank you.”

“You have a choice to make now.”

“I do?” Surely nothing pleasant. Hilary had learned that much, and she was always ready to defend herself against the miseries someone else wanted to inflict upon her. She had learned a lot since her first foster home, and her first days in juvie.

“Normally, our wards remain here until they reach eighteen, as you know, but in a case such as yours, when you graduate from high school before that date, you have the option of leaving as an emancipated minor.”

“Which means what?” Hilary gazed at her suspiciously from behind walls of steel. Her brilliant green eyes were her only peepholes.

“It means you're free, Hilary, if you want to be. Or you can stay here until you decide what you want to do after you leave here. Have you given it any thought?” Only four years' worth.

“Some.”

“And?” Talking to her was like pulling teeth but a lot of them were like that, too bruised by life to trust anyone. It was a tragedy, but there was no way to change that. “Want to tell me your plans?”

“Do I have to in order to get out?” like the parole she'd heard so much about. Everyone she knew in juvie had parents in jail, waiting to get out on parole. This was no different. But the caseworker shook her head.

“No, you don't, Hilary. But I'd like to help if I can.”

“I'll be all right.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“New York probably. It's where I'm from. It's what I know.” Although she had been gone from there for more than half her life, it still seemed like home to her. And, of course, there were her sisters….

“It's a big city. Do you have friends there?”

She shook her head. If she did, would she have spent four years in the Jacksonville juvenile hall? It was a stupid question. And at least she still had her ten thousand dollars. That was going to be her salvation. She didn't need friends. All she needed was a job and a place to stay. But one thing was for sure, she wasn't staying here. “I guess I'll be going pretty soon. How soon can I go?” Her eyes lit up for the first time at the prospect of leaving.

“We can have your release papers in order by next week. Soon enough for you?” The caseworker smiled with regret. They had failed dismally with her. It happened that way sometimes, it was rotten luck when it did, but it was hard to say who would survive the system and who wouldn't. She stood up and held out a hand which Hilary shook cautiously. She trusted nothing and no one. “We'll let you know as soon as you can go.”

“Thank you.” She left the room quietly and went to the single room she lived in. She no longer had to sleep in a dorm or share with anyone. She had long-term seniority, and in a few days she'd be leaving. She lay on her bed with a smile and stared up at the ceiling. It was all over, the agony, the pain, the humiliation, the horror of her life for the last eight years. She was going to be on her own now. She lay there smiling as she hadn't in years. And a week later, to the day, she was on a bus, no regrets, no sorrow, no friends to leave behind. Her eyes were cold and hard and green, dreaming of a world she did not know yet. And the past was a nightmare left behind her.





Chapter 9




The bus stopped in Savannah, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore, and took two days to reach New York, as Hilary sat staring soundlessly out the window. Other passengers had said a word or two when they stopped for lunch, or when they stretched at night, two sailors had even tried to pick her up, but she dealt with them in no uncertain terms, and after that, no one came near her. She was a solitary figure as she stepped down from the bus in New York, and in her heart she felt a terrifying trembling. She was home … after nine years … she had left here as a little girl, three days after her father committed suicide, to go to stay with her aunt in Boston. And it had taken all these years to come home, but she had done it.

The juvenile authorities of Florida had given her two hundred and eighty-seven dollars to start her life, and she had the ten thousand from Eileen. The first thing she did was go to a bank on Forty-second Street. The second thing she did was go to a hotel room. She took a room in a small, seedy hotel in the Thirties on the East Side, but her room was simple and spare and no one bothered her when she went in or out. She ate at a coffee shop on the corner, and read the want ads for jobs. She had taken a typing class in high school, but she had no other skills and she had no delusions about what lay ahead. She had to start at the bottom. But she had other plans as well. She wasn't going to stop there. The specters of the women she'd seen in the past nine years had left their mark. She was never going to be like them. She was going to work and go to college at night, and do everything she had to. And one day she was going to be important, she promised herself. One day she was going to be Someone.

On her second day in New York, she went to Alexander's department store on Lexington Avenue and spent five hundred dollars on clothes. It seemed like a terrifying portion of her fortune, but she knew she would have to look right if she was going to get a job. She selected dark colors, simple styles, a few skirts and blouses, and patent leather pumps and a matching bag. She looked like a pretty young girl as she tried her things on in her room downtown, and no one would have suspected the horrors she had endured since her parents died.

She went on her first job interview and was told she was too young, and then three more which required stenography skills she didn't have, and finally a job in an accountant's office where she was interviewed by a bald, obese man, perspiring profusely with a damp handkerchief clutched in one hand.

“You type?” He leered at her, as she sat watching him. She had dealt with worse than that and he didn't frighten her. And she also needed the job. She couldn't go on living forever on her dwindling funds. She had to find work pretty soon, and she would even have been willing to work for him, if he would behave himself. “Steno too?” She shook her head and he didn't seem to care. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” she lied. She had learned that much in the first interview. No one wanted to hire a seventeen-year-old girl. So she lied to them.

“Have you been to secretarial school?” She shook her head again and he shrugged, and then stood up, with a small stack of papers in one hand, and moved around the desk, as though to show them to her, but when he reached her side, he caressed her breast instead, and she was on her feet with lightning speed, the back of her hand across his face before she had thought of it, and they both gasped simultaneously as he stared at her.

“If you touch me again, I'll scream so loud I'll have the police up here,” she warned, her green eyes flashing at him, her whole body tense, her hands trembling as she looked at him. “How dare you do that?” Why did they all do things like that to her? … her uncle Jack … and the girls at the foster home … and the boys at Louise's place … it kept happening to her. She didn't understand that it was because she was beautiful. She thought of it as some kind of punishment, something she must have done as a child that she was being tortured for now. It didn't seem fair that it happened to her all the time, and she backed slowly toward the door, never taking her eyes off his face.

“Look, I'm sorry … no big deal … Miss … what's your name? … come on …” He waddled toward her hurriedly and she slammed the door in his face and ran down the stairs as fast as she could go. She walked all the way back to her hotel after that, feeling dirty and depressed, and wondering if she'd ever find a job.

But she finally did, at an employment agency, as a receptionist. They liked the way she looked, suspected she was younger than she said, but she was intelligent, neat and clean, typed halfway decently and could answer the phone, and that was enough for them. They offered her ninety-five dollars a week and it seemed like a windfall to her. She took the job and went flying back to her hotel to get ready for work the next day. She had her first job! And it would be a quick climb up from there. She didn't know what she wanted to do yet, but she already knew where she wanted to go to school. She'd been reading all the newspaper ads, and she made some calls. She had already applied, and she was waiting to hear from them, and then she'd really be on her way.

Now there was only one thing left to do, and she decided to tackle it that afternoon. After that, she didn't know when she'd have the time, and she didn't want to call him. She wanted to see him personally. Only once. She'd get the information from him and then all she had to do was call … the thought of it made her tremble as she changed her clothes again. She wore a simple navy blue dress, dark stockings, and her patent leather shoes. The dress was short, as was the style, but it was respectable. And she tied her hair in a simple knot that made her look older than she was. She washed her face, dried it on one of the hotel's little rough towels, and went downstairs again. And this time she didn't take a bus. She didn't want to waste time. She took a cab instead, and stood outside looking up when she arrived at Forty-eighth and Park Avenue. It was a glass building trimmed with chrome, and it seemed to stretch all the way to the sky as she looked up at it.

The elevator shuddered as it rose to the thirty-eighth floor, and she held her breath wondering if it would get stuck. She had never been anywhere like this before, not that she remembered anyway … there were other things she did remember, though … a trip with her parents to France on the Liberté … the apartment on Sutton Place … tea at the Plaza with Solange, with little cakes and hot chocolate with tons of whipped cream … and she remembered the night her mother died and the things she and Sam had said….