she blown it? She must have blown it. “Congratulations, Lauren,” he said, giving her a beautiful smile. “You’ve got yourself a job.”
Johannes insisted on walking her to the subway in the dark. It had begun to rain a little, which only made the humidity worse. “Great. Just what we needed. Our own hater.” Johannes pointed at the wall where the tagger had come back to finish his work. Over the Angelus House insignia of a lone winged knight, the words
Two
LAUREN WAS STANDING on the mostly empty subway platform when she saw the tagger in the Knicks shirt coming her way. She scanned the few people around her—a homeless guy, an old couple having a fight in Chinese, some oblivious hipsters across the tracks on the Manhattan side.
“I have 911 on speed dial,” she said, holding out her phone.
“Yeah? You get reception down here? Who’s your carrier—the
“Warn me about what?” Lauren forced herself to make eye contact.
“You need to stay away from those Angelus House assholes. They are seriously bad news.”
“Says the guy who vandalizes buildings and stalks teenage girls,” Lauren said, trying to put some snark into her voice. She hoped he couldn’t tell how uneasy she was. That was the first rule of survival in New York: a shrug and a
“I’m serious, yo. They go into the projects, and they take people.”
“Yeah. It’s called helping.”
“They’re not helping. They’re
“For what?”
“Something very bad. This guy I know, Isaiah Jones, he told me all about it. He used to roll with them, but he got out. Said they were up to some freaky shit. Now he’s in hiding. Won’t even tell his mom where he’s staying.”
Light filled the tunnel. Lauren could hear the train scuttling closer.
“Don’t take that job, yo. You be sorry.”
“Yeah? Says who?”
“Just a friend.”
The train blasted into the station, sending the trash on the platform swirling around Lauren’s feet. The doors opened and she leapt inside, willing them to close again. The guy stood on the platform, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.
“I got a name for you to remember: Sabrina Rodriquez. She used to be one of theirs. When the cops found her body, there wasn’t a single drop of blood left in it.”
The doors closed with a loud ding-dong that made Lauren jump, and then the train hurtled into the darkness.
Three
ON MONDAY AT two o’clock, Lauren showed up for her first day at Angelus House. The buzzer let her in, and inside, a girl with a purple-blue Mohawk and heavy eyeliner greeted her. She smelled strongly of patchouli and looked to be about Lauren’s age or a little older. She wore a sleeveless sundress, which showed off her many tattoos, including one on her neck of the Angelus House insignia.
The Mohawk girl beamed. “Hey, you must be Lauren. Awesome! Welcome to Angelus House. I’m Alex. God! Isn’t it miserably hot out? We’ve got the AC cranked.”
Alex wore an ankle bracelet heavy with charms that tinkled like bells with every step. “We’re, like, soooo crazy happy you’re here. Seriously? I cannot keep up with the filing and phones and stuff. Don’t get me wrong—it’s all because Angelus House is a successful program, and that is totally cool. But still. There’s only so much we can do without help. Hey Rakim! Come meet Lauren!”
A tall, skinny guy with an old-school fade and oversized black-frame glasses bounded up, his hand out for a shake. “Nice to meet you, Lauren.” He made up a silly song about her name on the spot, rhyming Lauren with Darwin, Sauron, and Kilimanjaro-n, and Lauren found herself hoping that this was the start of something new and good.
They showed her around, introducing her to more smiling teens working on posters or playing ping-pong in the rec room. The first floor had been turned into “sharing” rooms and common areas. The second and third floors housed a dormitory that could take as many as thirty teens at a time. The staff lived on the top floor. On the surface, Angelus House was like every other drug rehab center she’d visited in the past three years. There were the ratty, secondhand couches and chairs grouped around a wall-mounted TV. Here were the requisite inspirational posters sharing space with cheaply framed photos of rehabbed teens doing inspirational activities—a dance-off, arts & crafts day, basketball, quilt-making. Captions had been supplied: “Brian shows us his moves!” “Grace for two, nothing but net!” “Amber and Gabby love DDR night!” “Sing it, Rakim!”
“You know I make that picture look good,” Rakim said with mock seriousness.
Alex punched him in the arm. “Modest much?”
“Looks fun,” Lauren offered. She was never very good at small talk.
They showed her the kitchen area with its chipped cupboards and an old refrigerator marked by a laminated “Newbies” sign. “You’ll need to keep this stocked with healthy foods for the new teens who come in. Juice is great because a lot of the addicts crave sweets. The rest of us can take care of ourselves, so it’s just this one fridge you have to worry about,” Rakim said, showing off the inside of the fridge with its three juice cartons.
“Sorry. I know it’s kinda disgusting in here,” Alex said, making a face. “But once we take over the Navy Yards to do some new building, we’re gonna have, like, crazy amazing new facilities—almost a mini-city.”
“And then we can kiss this shit goodbye,” Rakim said.
“Is Johannes here?” Lauren asked as they made their way down another long corridor turned faintly green by the bad florescent lighting. She’d looked for the golden one on every stop of the tour but hadn’t seen him.
“Usually he does a lot of field work,” Rakim answered. “Going into the projects and out on the streets. He helped save my ass for real.”
“And he is such the hotness,” Alex said, giggling as if she and Lauren were sharing their first girl secret. “Oops, not that way.” She steered Lauren away from a set of stairs leading down into complete darkness.
“What’s down there?”
“Detox,” Alex said, grimacing. “Not pretty. Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to deal with that.”
“Don’t get freaked out if you hear weird noises and shit coming from there. Just turn up the radio and learn to block it out,” Rakim said. “You get used to it after a while.”
Lauren stared down into the darkness. She heard nothing but the asthmatic hum of the overburdened air- conditioning. “What happened to the last girl who worked here—Sabrina?”
Alex looked confused. “We’ve had a Lisa and now we’ve got a Lauren. No Sabrina. Besides, you’re the first assistant we’ve ever had.”
“And not a minute too soon, ’cause I cannot file another thing,” Rakim said, palms up in surrender. “I just remembered: We’ve got kick-ass brownies in one of the sharing rooms. You like brownies?”
Alex offered her arm and Lauren took hold.
“Who doesn’t?” she said.
Lauren worked at Angelus House Monday through Friday from three o’clock until eight. The job was fairly easy, she discovered. As none of the teens were allowed off the grounds and the staff was needed to look after the
