I find myself wishing I had Rob’s switchblade—the one he liked to push up against my face when he didn’t think I was bringing in enough. I just want to cut something. The cop. Myself. I don’t really give a fuck. I just want out.
He crouches down so he’s kind of level with me, lying there scrunched up against the door, and says,
“How bad is it?”
I just look at him like he’s from another planet. How bad is it? Can it get any worse I wonder?
“I ... I’m doing fine,” I tell him.
He nods like we’re discussing the weather. “What’s your name?”
“Jilly,” I say.
“Jilly what?”
“Uh ....”
I think of my parents, who’ve turned their backs on me. I think ofjuvie and foster homes. I look over his shoulder and there’s a pair of billboards on the building behind me. One’s advertising a suntan lotion—you know the one with the dog pulling the kid’s pants down? I’ll bet some old pervert thought that one up. The other’s got the Jolly Green Giant himself selling vegetables. I pull a word from each ad and give it to the cop.
“Jilly Coppercorn.”
“Think you can stand, Jilly?”
I’m thinking, If I could stand, would I be lying here? But I give it a try. He helps me the rest of the way up, supports me when I start to sway.
“So ... so am I busted?” I ask him.
“Have you committed a crime?”
I don’t know where the laugh comes from, but it falls out of my mouth all the same. There’s no humor in it.
“Sure,” I tell him. “I was born.”
He sees my bag still lying on the ground. He picks it up while I lean against the wall and a bunch of my drawings fall out. He looks at them as he stuffs them back in the bag.
“Did you do those?”
I want to sneer at him, ask him why the fuck should he care, but I’ve got nothing left in me. It’s all I can do to stand. So I tell him, yeah, they’re mine.
“They’re very good.”
Right. I’m actually this fucking brilliant artist, slumming just to get material for my art.
“Do you have a place to stay?” he asks.
Whoops, did I read him wrong? Maybe he’s planning to get me home, clean me up, and then put it to me.
“Dilly?” he asks when I don’t answer.
Sure, I want to tell him. I’ve got my pick of the city’s alleyways and doorways. I’m welcome wherever I go. World treats me like a fucking princess. But all I do is shake my head.
“I want to take you to see a friend of mine,” he says.
I wonder how he can stand to touch me. I can’t stand myself. I’m like a walking sewer. And now he wants to bring me to meet a friend?
“Am I busted?” I ask him again.
He shakes his head. I think of where I am, what I got ahead of me, then I just shrug. If I’m not busted, then whatever’s he’s got planned for me’s got to be better. Who knows, maybe his friend’ll front me with a fix to get me through the night.
“Okay,” I tell him. “Whatever.”
“C’mon,” he says.
He puts an arm around my shoulder and steers me off down the street and that’s how I met Lou Fucceri and his girlfriend, the Grasso Street Angel.
Jilly sat on the stoop of Angel’s office on Grasso Street, watching the passersby. She had her sketchpad on her knee, but she hadn’t opened it yet. Instead, she was amusing herself with one of her favorite pastimes: making up stories about the people walking by. The young woman with the child in a stroller, she was a princess in exile, disguising herself as a nanny in a far distant land until she could regain her rightful station in some suitably romantic dukedom in Europe. The old black man with the cane was a physicist studying the effects of Chaos theory in the Grasso Street traffic. The Hispanic girl on her skateboard was actually a mermaid, having exchanged the waves of her ocean for concrete.
She didn’t turn around when she heard the door open behind her. There was a scuffle of sneakers on the stoop, then the sound of the door closing again. After a moment, Annie sat down beside her.
“How’re you doing?” Jilly asked.
“It was weird.”
“Good weird, or bad?” Jilly asked when Annie didn’t go on. “Or just uncomfortable?”
“Good weird, I guess. She played the tape you did for her book. She said you knew, that you’d said it was okay.”
Jilly nodded.
“I couldn’t believe it was you. I mean, I recognized your voice and everything, but you sounded so different.”
“I was just a kid,” Jilly said. “A punky street kid.”
“But look at you now.”
“I’m nothing special,” filly said, suddenly feeling selfconscious. She ran a hand through her hair. “Did Angel tell you about the sponsorship program?”
Annie nodded. “Sort of. She said you’d tell me more.”
“What Angel does is coordinate a relationship between kids that need help and people who want to help. It’s different every time, because everybody’s different. I didn’t meet my sponsor for the longest time; he just put up the money while Angel was my contact. My lifeline, if you want to know the truth. I can’t remember how many times I’d show up at her door and spend the night crying on her shoulder.”
“How did you get, you know, cleaned up?” Annie asked. Her voice was shy.
“The first thing is I went into detox. When I finally got out, my sponsor paid for my room and board at the Chelsea Arms while I went through an accelerated high school program. I told Angel I wanted to go on to college, so he cosigned my student loan and helped me out with my books and supplies and stuff. I was working by that point. I had parttime jobs at a couple of stores and with the Post Office, and then I started waitressing, but that kind of money doesn’t go far—not when you’re carrying a full course load.”
“When did you find out who your sponsor was?”
“When I graduated. He was at the ceremony.”
“Was it weird finally meeting him?”
Jilly laughed. “Yes and no. I’d already known him for years—he was my art history professor. We got along really well and he used to let me use the sunroom at the back of his house for a studio. Angel and Lou had shown him some of that bad art I’d been doing when I was still on the street and that’s why he sponsored me—because he thought I had a lot of talent, he told me later. But he didn’t want me to know it was him putting up the money because he thought it might affect our relationship at Butler U.”
She shook her head. “He said he
“It’s sort of like a fairy tale, isn’t it?” Annie said.
“I guess it is. I never thought of it that way.”
“And it really works, doesn’t it?”
“If you want it to,” Jilly said. “I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s ups and downs—lots more downs at the start.”
“How many kids make it?”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with statistics,” Jilly said. “You can only look at it on a person to person basis. But Angel’s been doing this for a long, long time. You can trust her to do her best for you.
