Chapter 12
Mia
Things were different this time. The reading voice… didn’t read.
Instead, the voice just talked.
It was nice. Almost like having a conversation.
I couldn’t remember the last time someone talked to me.
There were so many unpleasant things I could recall with perfect clarity, but something as mundane as simple conversation eluded me.
I clung to the words, soaking them in like I’d been lost in the desert, and they were rainwater running over my skin.
The reading voice—or perhaps, I should now call it the conversation voice? —could have told me anything and I would have been equally as interested. However, learning that this voice that brought me comfort was a detective came as a shock.
How could he be a detective?
That was basically like a cop, right?
I’d had experience with cops before, but they were far from comforting.
It started soon after I escaped from clutches of Camp Green Hill and found myself living on the streets. No home. No job. No plans for the future other than survival.
But I did have a friend.
Eli.
Eli was a young man about my age, though he’d already been living in Camp Green Hill for several years by that point. If I hadn’t met him by chance shortly after arriving there, I probably wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few weeks.
Eli was kind, despite living such a hard life.
He took pity on me and tried to stop the camp’s punishments on me, often taking on those punishments himself in an effort to protect me.
Whenever they wanted to take one of us down for treatment, he would tell them to take him.
If he could save me from some of the pain and trauma, that was what he was going to do.
He was like a brother to me, had been almost right from the moment we first met.
The same happened once we were on the streets. Together we were introduced to soup kitchens, discovered which bakeries threw out their leftover product at the end of the day, and most importantly, we shared a tent.
Being homeless meant not having a home, but people still need shelter, and tents were the next best thing.
A whole tent city had sprung up in an abandoned factory on the edge of town.
It was almost reassuring to know that I wasn’t the only one to end up in such a low position.
Many people were just as bad off as I was, but we still managed to make our own semblance of a community.
We had safety in numbers, and by sharing warmth and food we could eke out an existence among our self-made city.
It was a form of survival, but no one would ever call it comfortable.
My body seemed to hurt all the time. From the cold that had soaked into my bones, the hard ground that bit at my joints and left bruises under my skin, and the hunger that never quite went away.
I was always tired, even on good days. Some mornings, as I watched my breath turn to fog in the air, I barely had the strength to shake the frost from my tent and crawl out into the world to face another day.
Being tired, cold, and hungry was terrible, but I’d experienced all these things before.
They were nothing new. What did take me by surprise was how inhuman I felt.
As much as I hated Camp Green Hill, they did at least provide us with plenty of supplies for bathing and hygiene.
I never realized how much I took it for granted until I no longer had access to soap or running water and found myself dreaming of a shower.
A film of dirt and stale sweat constantly clung to my skin, like I was some grimy creature that had crawled out of the muck.
Every time I moved, I could feel the way my unwashed clothes stuck to me.
It was a constant reminder I could never escape.
Under those conditions it came as no surprise that the people living in the tent city took advantage of any escape they could.
Even if it was only temporary. Most found their escape in the bottom of a bottle or the puff of a joint, but some turned to harder stuff.
Cocaine. Heroine. Cocktails of over-the-counter meds that no one could actually pronounce.
Drugs like this were as common as candy on a schoolyard.
My own drug of choice ended up being prescription painkillers.
At least, at first. I didn’t like anything that got me too high.
The few times I tried mind altering drugs, I just ended up going on a bad trip and falling into a hallucination of Camp Green Hill that was so real I legitimately thought I was back within their clutches again.
So, no, those types of drugs weren’t for me.
I wasn’t looking for euphoria. I just wanted to make the pain stop for a while, and prescription painkillers did the trick.
With a high enough dose, I could forget every ache and pain and didn’t even feel the hunger anymore.
But drugs required money. Survival in general required money, and without a job there were only three ways to get it.
Begging on the side of the road.
Stealing.
Or selling the one thing I had left. Myself.
Well, my attempts at begging never turned up much.
I no longer dressed exclusively in women’s clothing, mostly because I couldn’t afford to be picky when it came to clothing.
Men’s clothing. Women’s clothing. So long as it was warm and it fit, then it made no difference.
I wore it just the same. Pretty soon, every item of clothing would be just as ripped and dirty as all the others, so there was hardly any difference between men and women’s clothing anyway.
Yet, despite the fact that I looked no different than any other homeless person, pedestrians still avoided me anyway.
Maybe this was what Camp Green Hill had been talking about all along.
Maybe there really was something inherently “wrong” about me that needed to be corrected, and the people passing by could sense that wrongness.
Whatever the reason, it meant that my cup was always pathetically empty after a day spent begging by the side of the road. If I wanted to survive, and keep feeding my newfound drug addiction, I’d have to resort to other means.
Stealing was out of the picture. I tried only once.
It wasn’t even anything serious. Just a candy bar from a convenience store.
Something that probably got stolen all the time.
If people who already had a home and plenty to eat could get away with stealing a candy bar and not be irrevocably condemned for it, then surely, I could do the same when it was a matter of survival.
Yet, I couldn’t even bring myself to set foot inside the store.
I froze on the threshold, already panicking over what I intended to do, until the store owner noticed me and chased me off.
That one brief moment was the beginning and end of my criminal career.
Which only left me one option. Selling myself for money.
In this, others in the tent city came in handy again.
There were a few who had better luck with begging, so they didn’t turn tricks regularly, but they were still familiar with the trade of flesh.
They showed me which corners and back alleys were the safest for picking up clients, and how to make a quick escape if a john started getting dangerous.
Most importantly, they coached me on how to mentally prepare myself.
They said that the first few times would be the hardest, but eventually it would get easier.
They were right.
The first few times were tough. So tough, I nearly threw myself off a bridge after the first time.
Probably would have if Eli hadn’t literally pulled me back from the ledge.
After that, the next few times weren’t much better, but eventually, just like the other sex workers had promised, it got easier.
What they hadn’t explained was that “getting easier” was the worst part. Now I had to live with myself knowing I was the kind of person who could sell themselves for money without batting an eye, and that hurt more than anything.
They say that opposites attract. Well, I don’t know who came up with that saying, but they certainly never consulted me.
My experience was quite the opposite. The inherent “wrongness” in me that Camp Green Hill had been determined to snuff out, which had driven even my own father away, seemed to attract the most unsavory characters.
No matter how hard I tried to follow the other’s guidance and keep myself safe, the worst people always managed to sniff me out.
Like bloodhounds on the trail of a wounded fox, I always ended up within the teeth of trouble, eventually.
It was only through sheer dumb luck, and Eli coming to my rescue a few times, that I managed to survive my years on the streets.
The worst of them was a man named Tony Smith.
He was a cop. I never found out specifically what he did on the force, or what unit he worked for, but he had enough influence that any complaint against him would disappear.
The man made it a habit of harassing the homeless residents of the tent city whenever he was bored or needed to make a few quick arrests to meet quota at the end of the month.
Most people knew to avoid him, but I, as usual, was unlucky. He caught me working the corner one night, but rather than arrest me, he made me a deal. If I let him do whatever he wanted to me, then he’d supply me with the money and drugs I needed.
I knew it was a bad deal even as I accepted, but what else could I say?
The man was a brute. Servicing him would be hell, but he also had the power to make my life hell if I said no. If hell awaited me either way, then I may as well get something out of it.