Girls Like Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

experienced.
    I meet Aisha at Rikers. One day she rolls up a leg of her sweatpants to show me the crude tattoo of her pimp’s name that he’d hand-carved into her inner thigh as he sat between her legs holding a gun to her head. From Aisha I learn about the systematic violence of pimps, and make the connections to my own experiences. Kimmie, who is stabbed in the vagina by a group of men and left to die in the street, reminds me about the violence of johns.
    Then there’s Katherine, my first successful intervention, which I can’t really take full credit for. Katherine—soft-spoken, with delicate features—and I spend a couple of court-mandated days together and then talk on the phone a few times before she decides to return to her family in Houston. She goes back to school and eventually gets a Realtor’s license. Throughout it all she sends me cards and e-mails thanking me for our brief time together. I post her picture proudly over my desk. Katherine, I believe, comes into my life simply to encourage me that support does make a difference.
    Mostly, though, it is just tough, sad work. I listen and listen to story after story of fatherless girls; motherless daughters; parents lost to the streets; drugs; prison; domestic violence turned murder; sexual abuse by an uncle, a cousin, a neighbor, a teacher; running away; being put in foster care; meeting a man—that was central to every story—meeting a man who made promises, who made them feel safe. After a while, everywhere I look I see pain. Every teenage girl on the subway is a victim, or at least a potential victim. Every man, particularly middle-aged white men, the ones I most closely associated with johns, is a predator. I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I’m overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.
    I cry for hours at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal?
    I don’t have many answers, for myself or for the girls. So I listen and listen, doing my best to learn as much as I can, to make the connections, to be open and honest about my own experiences, to be sincere, to love them and not judge. And while that isn’t much to offer, it becomes the basis for some amazing relationships. I learn to be honest during that first year about what I can’t specifically relate to; while we share many common experiences, I can never claim to have lived someone else’s life. I wasn’t and never will be a thirteen-year-old black girl from Bed-Stuy who is sitting in a juvenile detention center. I have experienced different privileges and supports that sometimes leave me with a sense of survivor’s guilt. Yet still, despite the difference in cultures and even continents, in ethnicities and slang, threatened with guns or threatened with knives, sold in a club or sold on the street, our experiences are consistently more similar than different. The themes are common: the lack of family support; the need for love and attention; the early stages that felt almost good; the pain that kept us trapped; and the long, slow journey back to life, feeling all the while that we’d never quite be normal, that we’d never fit in—a message reiterated through family, through loved ones, through society’s view of us. Over and over it is clear for all of us that our backgrounds had prepared us for this. In one way or another, through abuse, neglect, abandonment, we’d been primed for predatory men, for an industry that would use us up and spit us out.
    Every new encounter provides a new mirror for me to view my own experiences through, and there is a level of selfishness during this period as I hunger to understand more about the