One of Society’s Potential Victims Gives Life a Hard Look

Let us say that she was making a statement, one that caught my eye right away. Pouty, sultry, very big hair, outlined red lips. Despite the heat, she was dressed in black, from her elasticized tube top to her diaphanous black pants, which went with the sheer over-blouse, which was left open for effect.

And the effect, on me at least, was sadness.

She was attending a high school class, in body only, it seemed. She was 18 years old, only that’s just in chronological years. She looked as if she had been around.

I stepped into her world on other business, another story, another mind-set, but this young woman sought me out. She wanted to talk.

“Do you have any kids?” she asked me.

Yeah, I have kids. Two girls. She wondered did I have any pictures. Yes, I did.

I showed her the picture that I keep in my wallet and she took it and held it with both her hands. She gazed down at the image, bore down on it really, and then her face softened. Her hard, black look seemed to smudge.

“Beauuutiful girls,” she gushed, and I sensed that this young woman now saw me in a different, more admiring light. Only she made me feel responsible, almost schoolmarmish, old.

“Yeah, well, thanks,” I said. “But remember, I’m a lot older than you are now.”

The young woman just smiled. A moment ago, I had heard her ask a classmate, a freshman, how her baby was. The baby died a few months ago, the younger girl said. He had cystic fibrosis; he was 3 months old.

This mother took a week off from school after her child died. That was when she was in junior high.

Now the young woman holding the photograph of my daughters wanted to know their names, their ages, when the picture was taken, and more. Without asking, she started searching for more pictures, flipping through my credit cards until she hit more gold.

“Oh, how beautiful,” she’d say, again and again.

No, this young woman told me, she didn’t have any children of her own and she wasn’t thinking about having any soon. But, you know, it could happen, she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, you know, like, I don’t like to say ‘never,’ because, you know, things happen,” she said. Then she cocked her head to the side a bit and shrugged her shoulders a notch.

I stared.

“Well, you know, they do. Lots of times people say they aren’t going to do something, but then, you know, something will happen. I mean, you never know how things are going to work out.”

I left that high school classroom with the young woman’s words ricocheting through my mind. They’ve stuck with me because I’ve heard too many other people offering variations on the same theme.

These are lives adrift, where the reins are loose. These are lives that are vulnerable to the elements. Who’s in control? Somebody, or something else.

This is how victims are born.

It is not entirely this simple, of course. There are, always, extenuating circumstances. Some call these excuses, others bad luck. Some say that they’d be a victim too were it not for a lucky break that came their way--a good parent, a teacher, a friend.

And then there are those who have earned the term survivor . They fought for control of their lives, often against staggering odds.

I want to believe that the young woman in the high school class will prove my judgments of her wrong. She’s needy. She grew on me. I like her, even if I dismissed her at first glance.

I’m wondering if she’ll move with her family to Arizona, where she told me her father wanted to take the family to escape the inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up.

I told her she should go. To an outsider, these streets look tough, with little mercy for those who don’t conform.

But she said nah, that she really didn’t want to go. In the neighborhood, you can party all night and nobody calls the cops.

“And, yeah, I guess it’s kind of dangerous, but if you don’t mess with people, they don’t mess with you,” she said.

Her hard black look was coming back.