“Do you have work tonight?” I asked. 

“Yeah, I’m closing tonight” replied Ashley.

That is the woman who showed me a glimpse of what I thought my life would be, then it was ripped away all in a matter of 24 hours. I don’t blame her for what happened, but I do blame her for how it all went down. She is the reason I am stuck here, in a foster home, counting down the days until my 18th birthday for different reasons than most teenagers. Most kids my age can’t wait for the day they turn 18 because they have freedom from their parents. All I wanted my whole life was to have parents. This goes back to when I was six years old. At that age kids are playing on playgrounds and just learning how to survive in a school. I was avoiding the fist fights my parents would get into after a night of drinking and losing half the money they bet on a dumb horse.
It all began in October of 2006. That was the year George W. Bush was president, the year the first Step Up movie came out which launched a franchise that no one pays attention to, but for some reason they still make them and nsync member Lance Bass came out as gay. It was a confusing time for fashion, movies and television and it still doesn’t seem like its sorted itself out, actually I think it has gotten worse. I was living in a small apartment with my parents in the Bronx. So I don’t confuse you I will be referring to them as my parents in my explanation of this thing I call my life, but they couldn’t be anymore than strangers I met on the street. I slept on the couch that they got out of a dumpster that looked like it could have been  in the show Gilligan's Island. My parents enjoyed alcohol a lot more than most adults. They had “dinner parties” like every other married couple with children. They would tell me, “Go into mommy and daddy’s room tonight, we are having a dinner party”. I didn’t think much of it because the kids I hung out with at the park said their parents did the same thing. But little did I know the mass amounts of booze, weed and gambling going on in the kitchen was not normal. I would usually sit in their room and watch the tv, if it was working at that time.

I stayed in that apartment until December of that year. I couldn’t take it anymore and that’s when I left. I still don’t really know if I fully understood what it meant for me to leave, but I didn’t really care. Before the age of six I never really understood how bad the situation I was in was. But it made me mature a lot faster than the kids I knew at the park, even though they were the ones going to school. The idea of leaving came to me at the park one day. Most of the kids were getting yelled at by their mothers that it was time to leave. As I sat on the slide I thought to myself that if I just stayed at the park all night, no one would come looking for me. That’s when my escape plan began.

In my head, I was just like the little girl Annie I saw in the play that I snuck into, but to me, that play wasn’t a story. I envisioned myself ending up at a big mansion on the Upper East Side. Little did I know that the girl on stage was saying and singing hours of memorized lines. She went home to a warm house with a hot dinner.
A Friday in December was the day I finally made my move. Once my parents finally went to bed that morning, I went into the kitchen took a swig of what was on the counter and immediately spit it out, my parents always made whiskey look like it tasted like chocolate milk. Then I grabbed the twenty dollars on the counter and headed out the door. I found a spot to sleep three blocks away from my apartment. The first night went fine, I stayed up all night making sure everything was ok. The next morning I woke up and walked to the corner store to get something to eat. I had already spent eighteen of my twenty dollars so I had very little money to spend. I picked up a random bag of chips and a juice out of the fridge and put it on the counter where the cash register was. I already looked like hell from being poorly fed my whole life, but the fact that I stayed up all the night made things worse. The man rang up my items and told me the total.

“Okay little one, that’ll be $3.75.”

I handed him all the change I had because I still didn’t understand how money worked.

“I’m sorry, you seem to be a dollar seventy-five short. Is your Mom or Dad outside? Can you get another dollar from them?”

“No, sir.”

As I stood there staring at him from across the counter I heard a woman interrupt the man.

“Can you go get your…”

“Here ya go, I’ll pay for her.”

I looked up from where I was standing to see the most beautiful woman standing behind me. She was exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. She had long red hair, bright blue eyes, and very fair skin. She payed for my food and walked outside with me. We both sat on the bench that was placed outside the store. She began to ask me questions to make sure I was okay.

“What’s your name?” she questioned me.

“Jane, I’m six,” I responded.

“Where are your parents?”

“At home.”

“Aren’t you too young to be out here alone?”

“Probably, but they don’t care. I left my house yesterday.”

“Where have you been staying?”

“That corner.”

I pointed to the corner a block away as if it was normal for a child to be staying there. She looked at my with a questioning face and then introduced herself. It was clear I was not a normal child and that I was not going to go back home. It was also clear that she was not a normal adult because she never forced me to return to my parents. Instead we went to a diner on the corner of Melrose and 155th. I still remembered how my meal tasted, it was the first fully warm meal I had in years. Night came fast and she had to go to work. She was a bartender at a nearby crappy run-down bar.

“We can’t have you stay on the street again tonight. You better stay at my apartment. I’ll take you there, but then I have to leave for work.”

We both walked the ten blocks to her apartment and talked like we had known each other for years. She set up the couch to be a bed and said I could watch tv. That night she left for work at 5:00 p.m. and didn’t come back until 4:00 a.m.. I heard her walk in the door, but I pretended I was asleep so I wouldn’t bother her. The next morning I woke up to the smell of melted butter. I sat up and saw Ashley was making pancakes. She had a plate ready for me with some strawberries on the side. The time I spent living with Ashley went exactly like that. She would go to the bar at 5:00 p.m. and come home at 4:00 a.m.. I would wake up to a hot breakfast and once we were done eating we did “school”. Ashley would get me books from the library and workbooks from a bookstore. I would work on math and English. Some days Ashley would pretend to be the teacher and then in order to show her I understood the material I would pretend to be the teacher.

We were an odd pair, but it was clear we were both what the other needed in their life. One night, not any ordinary night though, it was St. Patrick’s day actually, Ashley headed out to the bar. Things seemed a little rocky because she broke a plate and then started screaming. This wasn’t something that she ever did. She started screaming about how disgusting men were. I learned later that some guy grabbed her ass on the subway and asked her to come home with him. When she said no, he responded with, “little lady I didn’t ask you, I told you. You don’t disrespect a man like that.”

She immediately got off of the subway and came back to the apartment to change for work. She left that night angry but tried not to show me she was still mad. Ashley got to the bar that night and began to put on her apron when she heard, “Don’t cover yourself up.”.

She turned around to see the subway guy sitting at the counter of the bar. She ignored his comment hoping he was gonna forget about what he said because of how drunk he was. The next couple hours at her work went like every other night. It was quiet and she served the same people every night. People with crazy stories, crazy jobs, crazy lives just like Ashley and I. The only thing different about that night was the subway guy sitting in the corner. He got up from the bar at 6:00 p.m. and sat in the last seat in the back corner of the bar. He stayed there all night, staring. At 4:00 a.m. Ashley began to clean up when she had to begin to tell the man they were closing.

“Sir, we are closing, your gonna have to leave within the next five minutes.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, but you have to. We close at 4:00.”

“I’m not leaving here until you come with me.”

“I’m sorry? What?”

“You heard me. I won’t leave until you come with me.”

“I already told you that wasn’t going to happen.”

He stood up and began to slowly walk over to Ashley. She backed up and began to go behind the bar.

“Your gonna have to leave or I will call the cops.”

“Call the cops all you want, I am one. I’ll just tell them that I came and everything seemed fine.”

As he began to get closer, he stared at Ashley’s lips as he said, “If you don’t walk out that door with me, I’ll make you.”.

“Get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

“Oh, sweetheart I already explained to you I am the cops. You can’t call them. Now get over here.”

He went to grab her arm as she swung at his face. She knocked him out and ran out the door. She called the cops and reported an assault, but continued to run back to what was our apartment. Ashley slammed the door and then fell to her knees crying. I still pretended to be asleep like every other night because there was nothing I could do. I was just a kid. How was I supposed to help her?

That next morning there was a knock on the door.

“Ashley Greene, it’s the police.”

Ashley opened the door to two cops. They came in and questioned Ashley about what had happened the night before. I stayed in the back room until I heard them tell her to come down to the station. I didn’t know what to do so I walked into the kitchen to ask if I should come. When the cops saw me, and then saw the smashed plate, one immediately grabbed me and picked me up. The cops said, “Jane we are going to take you to the station.”.

“Jim call her social worker, this is clearly not a good home for her.”

As he began to walk out the door with me in his arms, Ashley started to scream.

“YOU CAN’T TAKE MY BABY GIRL AWAY FROM ME!”

She ran after the cop and tried to take me out of his arms. The other cop pulled her back and let him walk out with me. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “MAMA DON’T LET THEM TAKE ME!”

That is the first and the last time I ever called someone Mom. A few days later I was placed in a foster home instead of a group home. I’ve been here ever since. I haven’t seen Ashley since the day my only chance at a good life was ripped away from me. As I said I don’t blame her for what happened. She couldn’t control the fact that a sick man thought he was entitled to do whatever he wanted with her. She had to defend herself. But I do blame her for not fighting for me. She didn’t make arrangements to see me or try and get me back. She wasted all that time getting the right papers to let me stay with her in the first place and then threw it away the second someone put up a fight. The reason I am here telling you this story about Ashley is because for my 18th birthday as a present to myself I set out to find her. I wanted to know the true reasons behind her not coming to get me. I then found out that the cops never took her assault claims seriously and the subway man came back for her. The moment they believed her claims was the moment she was laying on the floor dead.