Dear Old Dead(13)

One of the absolute rules of the center was that no one from the refuge program was supposed to cross the bridge to the medical building without permission. Because going into the medical building almost always meant running into either your own old pimp or someone who knew him—the girls got hurt more often than the pimps but the pimps got hurt enough; Julie had been amazed to come out of her drug-induced distraction and discover how much time the people she knew spent bleeding—permission was almost never given except in a medical emergency. Julie rationalized what she was doing now by telling herself that this was a medical emergency. It just wasn’t her medical emergency. Then she asked herself why she still cared. All right, all hell was breaking loose out there. It happened every once in a while. All right, her mother had last been heard of serving as a kind of house mother to the Blood Brothers. That was the kind of thing her mother would do. Julie wasn’t sure her mother would remember she was actually a mother, of the biological kind. Why was it so important to go over to the emergency room and find out if she had been hurt?

Karida only wanted to get out of the west building and see some excitement. She had a look Julie recognized, the look of a girl who doesn’t last long in the refuge program or anywhere else. Karida had had a good scare a month and a half ago. A john had turned violent and broken her arm, and then, when she’d gotten out of the Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room, her pimp had beat her bloody for letting herself get put out of commission. Karida had ended up at the center. When she’d been offered the refuge program, she had taken it. It wasn’t going to last. In the last three months, Julie had seen two dozen girls disappear back onto the streets and only three go on to the next step on the way to regular lives. She was beginning to know the signs.

It was Karida who knew how to get the bridge door unlocked. She had worked it out the very first day she was on the refuge program dormitory corridor. Julie watched with amusement while Karida jiggled and rattled the door knob, muttering under her breath. It was as if Karida were performing a form of voodoo, and the hocus-pocus spell mattered as much as the physical manipulation.

“There we go,” Karida said. “I can’t believe you’ve never done this before.”

“It’s against the rules.”

“So what?”

“So I don’t want to be thrown out of here.”

“They’re not going to throw you out of here. And how long can you stay? Aren’t you getting nuts?”

“Not really.” Julie walked to the center of the bridge and looked first downtown and then up. Uptown she could see spurt-flashes in the dark, what she knew must be gunfire. Julie had been in a few gang wars in her life, but this was something special. “I’m going to take the test of the academy next month,” she said carefully. “Augie says I probably won’t pass it this time, but I can take it as many times as I want, so I might as well get started. Then after I see what I don’t do so—so well on, I can study those things and take the test again.”

“You’ve got to be crazy,” Karida said.

“Why?”

“Because it is crazy. What do you think you’re doing? I’ll bet they’ve never had a single black girl up at that academy.”

“They’ve got Hiram Corder’s daughter.”

“Who’s Hiram Corder?”

“He plays with the New York Giants.”

“I mean black girls like us.”

Julie turned away from the windows and started walking down toward the other end of the bridge. “Augie says the world is a hard place and it’s full of jerks but every once in a while there’s a window of opportunity, and when you find one of those, you should go through it. That’s what I’m trying to do. Go through it.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think is going to happen to you?” Karida insisted. “You think you’re going to turn into some kind of actress or model or what?”

“No. No, nothing like that. That kind of thing would be too much like whoring, you know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

Julie sighed. She didn’t blame Karida, really. She didn’t know what she meant herself, not completely. It was a feeling she had. All those models and actresses, what did they do? They showed their bodies around for money. They had very valuable bodies, so nobody was allowed to touch, but what difference did that make? Didn’t they do exactly the same thing whores did, except in a classier way? Sister Augustine had a picture of herself on the desk in her office, dressed in the long veil and floor-sweeping habit her order had worn in the old days. When Julie dreamed herself into the place she called freedom, that was how she saw herself dressed. Completely covered up. Completely hidden from the world.