At juvenile hall, they put her in solitary, because all she did was mope and wouldn't answer anyone's questions. It took them two weeks to decide she wasn't sick. She was rail thin, and weak from refusing to get up, but they thought that once she was put in with the other kids she might cheer up again. Her “illness” was labeled “teenage psychosis.”
She was assigned work in the laundry room, and put in a dorm with fifteen girls, and at night she heard the same moans and screams that she had learned from Maida. But this time no one bothered her, no one talked to her, no one touched her. And a month later they put her in another foster home with three other girls. The woman in charge was pleasant this time, not warm but polite, religious in a serious, joyless way, and talked frequently of a God who would punish them if they did not embrace Him. They tried hard to break through her shell, and they knew she was a bright girl but eventually her icy silences discouraged them. She was able to reach out to no one. And after two months they sent her back to juvenile hall and “exchanged” her for another girl, a friendly eleven-year-old who chatted and smiled and did all the things Hilary wouldn't.
Hilary went back to juvenile hall for good this time, and made no friends there. She went to school, did her work, and read everything she could lay her hands on. She had figured one thing out. She was going to get out, and get an education, and the harder she worked, the more she knew it would be her only salvation. She poured herself into her school work, and graduated at seventeen with honors, and the day afterward her caseworker called her into her office.
“Congratulations, Hilary, we heard how well you did.” But no one had been there. No one had ever been there for Hilary, not in nine years, and now she knew there was never going to be. That was her destiny, and she accepted that. Except if she could find Megan and Alexandra … but even that hope was dim now. She still had the ten thousand dollars, hidden in the lining of her suitcase, but her hope of finding them now was slim … unless she went to Arthur … but would they even remember her? Alexandra would be thirteen, and Megan only nine … to them, she would be a stranger. All she had left really was herself. She knew that now, as she looked at the caseworker without any trace of emotion.
“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.