Nobody's Girl by Barbara Amaya

Author:Barbara Amaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Animal Media Group, LLC

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

My counselor at the methadone clinic on First Avenue was a woman named Anita. She was in her mid-forties, plain with a chunky build, and about my height. Anita had been a heroin addict herself for many years and knew how to listen. She wasn’t a social worker and it wasn’t her job to rehabilitate me, but she took an interest in me and tried her best as a counselor and as a friend to help me get my life together.

It wasn’t easy. I’d long forgotten what the square life was supposed to be like, and all she had to work with were the bits and pieces that I could dredge up. She somehow managed to get me a social security card and convinced me to start going on job interviews. I agreed to do it because I wanted to please her, but I had no social graces, no education, and no life skills. Sending me on a job interview was like sending a wild animal to work at a bank; something bad was bound to happen.

***

I sat in front of the interviewer’s desk, feeling uncomfortable and out of place in the stiff business suit and tight blue blouse Anita had made me wear. The hard wooden chair I was sitting in dug into my thighs. I kept asking myself just what in the hell I was doing in this stuffy office building on Thirty-Fourth Street.

The man interviewing me wore a blue bow tie and had a big belly that seemed ready to pop out of his starched white shirt. His shiny gray-black hair was parted down the middle, and he wore thick glasses that he stared over, making me even more uncomfortable.

I kept my head down and tried not to fidget.

There were several moments of tense silence as he scanned my hastily scribbled application. Then suddenly my prospective employer blurted out, “So, how much do you want?”

My head jerked up when I heard the familiar words. I might not have known how to go on a job interview, but I understood those words well, or thought I did.

“How much do you have?” I smirked, staring him in the eyes as I leaned closer to his large desk, my blouse straining open.

He blinked nervously and pushed at his glasses with one shaky finger. “Excuse me? I… uh, that is…what salary were you expecting for the position?”

I didn’t get the job that day.

***

In the meantime, Anita had turned her attention to reuniting me with the family whom I had not talked to in almost a decade. It was more her idea than mine; by the time Anita came into my life, all the memories of the people I had left behind seemed like they belonged to another person, and I suppose they did. I was not the same girl I was when I first ran away from home. But I wanted to make Anita happy. I agreed to give her my real name and my last address in Fairfax.

The first

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