Girls Like Us Read Online Free PDF

didn’t matter how old they were; they were shunned and mocked as dirty, nasty, hos, whores, hookers, dumb bitches. In this environment, it is jarring to go public for the first time about my own experiences: The looks, the snide comments—particularly from the adults, who are supposed to know better—make me flush with shame and cry at night. It isn’t surprising to me then that the girls go back to the familiar, where they are at least accepted, even if that means being sold and abused. Most of them really didn’t have anywhere else to go. The girls are surprised, and then relieved, when they realize I won’t judge them. In the beginning, simply not judging them and my own story are about all I have to give, and while we develop some good relationships, I know that I have to be able to offer them more.
    The first girl that I really work with one-on-one is Melissa, a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old who towers over me even in her sneakers. Melissa is an angry young woman who is often frustrated by my lack of knowledge about the welfare system, the housing system, the subway system, and anything else even remotely useful. I’m woefully naive in thinking that I just need to be supportive and caring and offer encouraging platitudes, which Melissa often throws back in my face as she struggles to leave her one-year-old daughter’s father, who has also been her pimp since she was fourteen. With Melissa, I negotiate the bureaucratic nightmares that are endemic to every public system and grow angry right along with her that caseworkers look bored with her plight and have no answers for her situation. It is on these long, tedious trips to the clinic, to the welfare office, to the housing offices that we begin to bond, albeit reluctantly on Melissa’s part. While she and I share a common understanding about the general workings of the life, she is frequently impatient, often downright scornful, of my lack of knowledge about street slang—“What’s the track?” “What’s a wife-in-law?”—and the intricate rules of “the game.” “Why do you have to walk in the street and not on the sidewalk?” “Why can’t you look a man in his face?” Melissa becomes my teacher, and I begin to make the connections between the things that I’d experienced and the stories she’s telling me. The area where girls worked on the street is called the track; the girls I tried to recruit to work for my “boyfriend” would’ve been my wives-in-law; the money I had to give my “boyfriend” was my quota; oh, and my boyfriend, yeah, he was actually a pimp. This was probably one of the hardest things for me to verbalize and it would take a while for me to really accept that reality.
    Jennifer, my next tutor, is a moonfaced Latina who would call me at 6 a.m. after a beating. I’d meet her at the train station and let her sleep on my couch. After a night or two, Jennifer would find her way back to her pimp, although eventually she stayed with me three, four nights, then for almost two weeks as I searched desperately for a program out of state that would take her. From Jennifer I learn that leaving the life takes practice, that girls need to try multiple times without having someone give up on them.
    Tiffany, who weighed about eighty pounds, ran up a ridiculous phone bill at our office calling psychic hotlines. Her pimp had cut off half of her hair and it was so badly matted that I had to take her to the hair salon to have her head almost completely shaved. No program would take Tiffany: She didn’t have a drug problem, a prerequisite for most programs that cater to her age. One night she disappeared for a few hours and returned proudly announcing that she’d smoked crack and was now eligible for the drug program, but we had to hurry cos she wasn’t sure how long it would be in her system. From Tiffany I learn how few resources are available to meet the needs of these girls, and how few people understand what they’ve