The ways of the street

More than 1.5 million teenagers run away in the United States each year. One million more are “throwaways” -- kids who either have been kicked out or abandoned by their parents.

If these numbers don’t shock and appall, the fictionalized teens in “Almost Home,” Jessica Blank’s debut young-adult novel, should do the trick. Their stories are so heartbreakingly raw and gut-wrenching that anyone who reads this book will find it difficult to pass a panhandling teenager ever again without wondering what brought him or her there.

Divided into seven chapters -- and told from each character’s point of view -- “Almost Home” begins with the story of Eeyore. The youngest and newest member of Hollywood’s underage street scene, Eeyore decided it was better to flee her well-to-do Los Angeles home than tell anyone she was being molested by her stepbrother. Next we meet Rusty, a homosexual high school student who took a Greyhound bus from Bakersfield, believing the choir teacher with whom he’d had an affair would eventually meet him, and Squid, who fled a string of abusive foster families for the even less certain streets.

The stories don’t get any brighter as the book goes on. There’s Scabius, a hardened survivalist type who uses sex as a weapon; Laura, a brainy but plain girl whose mother probably hasn’t noticed that she has left home; and Critter, a model-beautiful junkie who made the mistake of falling in love with Tracy, the book’s oddly alluring if “weasel-faced” protagonist.

The meanest and most damaged of the bunch, Tracy is the book’s through line. She’s the one who indoctrinates Eeyore into the ways of the street -- piercing the younger girl’s lip with a safety pin stolen from a drugstore and doused in hydrogen peroxide, dumpster-diving for food, sleeping in alleys. A junkie who turns tricks for heroin or doughnuts, Tracy is the one everyone knows -- and either loves or hates.

There isn’t much action in “Almost Home.” Mostly, the book centers on foulmouthed arguments and finding food. Less often, the activities involve selling sex and drugs, which, in this book for readers ages 13 and up, is handled with tasteful vagueness.

Likewise, there is little dialogue. Much of the storytelling is emotional and internal, as the characters struggle with their fears and family histories as well as their tenuous, desperate friendships with one another.

Gritty, raw, dark and powerful, “Almost Home” is compelling in the same way that the films “Kids” and “Thirteen” are. It’s disturbing to read about children being victimized and engaging in behaviors that are so un-childlike. Whether that makes people put the book down or read it through in one sitting will depend on the strength of their stomachs, but Blank has done a wonderful job getting into the heads of these kids and turning their damaged souls and upside-down thoughts into poetry.

“It’s weird, hearing what I need and knowing that it’s just a lie, like wanting to be touched and having someone hit you. It still feels good even though you bleed,” Critter says after a fight with Tracy.

The same could be said of “Almost Home.” *

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From ‘Almost Home’

In the parking lot, Jenny Kirchner has a plan. She and Julia and the Ashlees are standing halfway to the buses in a cluster; they’re watching the doors when I come out, and I can tell they’ve been waiting. I stalled in the girls’ bathroom for fifteen minutes after last bell, hoping I would miss them. Everyone else is loaded on the bus, doors closed, but they’re still here. The weird thing is no backpacks. They’ve got their hands free and I wonder where their stuff went till I see the JV guys off to the side, laughing in their baggy shirts and shoving each other, the girls’ matching backpacks piled at their feet. It’s the guys’ job to stand near them because the girls all have another job; I know it even though I don’t know what it is.

There’s no other option but to walk right toward them. If I walked back into the building it would mark me for life. It’s one of those face-off things, like West Side Story or some cowboy movie. . . . So I keep going, even though the sweat from my armpits is cutting cold trails all the way down to the waist of my jeans. . . . I figure I’ll just watch the asphalt till they’re done calling me whatever names and then they’ll let me go.