Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [122]
David Carter was in his thirties, still good-looking enough that the girls would check him out when he stood onstage to deliver a monologue, or ran lines with us, playing Romeo to our Juliet, Stanley to our Blanche.
He’d gone to New London High, then NYU. He’d been the understudy for the Phantom, and acted in an off-Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. He kept a coffeepot plugged in on his desk—against school rules, probably, but a theater instructor, an actor, could get away with certain eccentricities. In the mornings, he’d pour me a cup—half scalding black coffee, half cream—and I’d hold it gratefully, letting the mug warm my skin. I wasn’t sure if he knew that I hadn’t had breakfast and, most days, I hadn’t had dinner, either, but those cups of milky coffee were the first of many kindnesses.
Being homeless as a teenager wasn’t as hard as it probably was for adults who didn’t have access to a high school. I’d get to school early, ostensibly to use the gym, and I’d shower in the locker room and brush my teeth at the sink. I could wash my clothes at the Laundromat. I was probably eligible for free lunches, had Raine taken the time to apply, but there was always food around the school, if you knew where to look for it: leftover birthday cake in the teachers’ lounge, bags of pretzels that the anorexics-in-training would toss, still mostly full, into the trash bins in the girls’ rooms. I’d pocket apples and bananas and jars of peanut butter at the grocery store, and slip string cheese and packages of crackers and gum into my pockets at the gas station.
The tricky part was finding a safe place to spend the nights. I’d rotate my spots, moving from the parking lot at the high school to the one behind the public library to the one at the Y. Twice, in the middle of the night, once at the high school and once at the end of a dirt road, the cops had pulled up, shining their lights through the Tercel’s windows. It had been a different cop each time, but I’d told them both the same story: that I’d had a fight with my mother.
“Go on home,” said the officer who’d found me the last time. “Whatever they did to you, no matter how mad they are, your folks wouldn’t want you sleeping out here alone. It’s not safe.”
In November, I came to class one day to find a winter coat, brand-new, pink nylon with a pale-pink lining, hanging from the back of my chair. “I bought it for my sister, but she didn’t like it. On sale, so it can’t go back. Can you use it?” David asked. Later, I learned that he didn’t have a sister. He’d seen me shivering in the parking lot wearing both of my sweaters at once, and had guessed, correctly, that I didn’t have a coat.
It took him weeks to earn my trust, weeks of treats and compliments: a waxed paper bag of doughnuts waiting on my chair, a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free pizza from the shop in town tucked into my Ten Monologues book, a sweater that he told me he’d shrunk in the wash. Later, he said that getting me to talk was like coaxing a feral cat in from the cold. Little Cat, he called me, and he told me that he’d loved me the first time he’d seen me, all legs and big eyes, “and those tights you had, remember them? The ones with the hole in the knee.”
He never touched me for all that time, except for a light hand on my wrist or the small of my back when he was directing a scene . . . but, the way he looked at me, I knew there were possibilities. I had just turned eighteen, had only had a few boyfriends, and was still learning my own power, the way boys would follow me with their eyes, the things I could get them to do. Now I was starting to wonder whether a man might be the answer to my problems.
One night at the end of November, when it was getting dark by four-thirty p.m. and the nights were getting cold, I walked to David’s classroom and leaned against the door. I wore a thin white blouse, my ripped black tights, a black Spandex skirt that ended at the tops of my thighs, the Doc Martens I’d convinced Yaya to buy me the year before. He