I tripped over the Whore Box. Looking down and seeing it there, at my feet, was quite a shock. I wondered if I should call the police, or the bomb squad. I had lived in New York City on September 11th, and was well indoctrinated, “if you see something, say something,” though I never did. A few weeks after the attacks, at the height of the anthrax scare, I found a small piece of paper on the sidewalk, folded up like a child’s fortuneteller. It was covered in strange symbols, and its folds were lined with white powder. I took it back to my apartment, cut a fat line of the powder, and sniffed. Nothing happened. I kept what was left in a drawer in my kitchen until I showed it to my sister, thinking she would marvel in its esoteric weirdness with me. Instead, she grabbed it from my hands and flushed it down the toilet.

This time was no different, though I put my lighter in my pocket and didn’t light my cigarette, as a precautionary measure. The Whore Box was a Sketchers shoe box, the company’s logo obfuscated with black marker, as if whoever had left it behind was afraid of an accusation of copyright infringement. I found the box on the porch of the women’s halfway house where I worked weekends. No one had rung the bell, and I found it only because I had gone outside to smoke. There was no name on the box, no indication to whom it was directed. Just the five scarlet letters, scrawled out in red lipstick across the box’s top: W-H-O-R-E.

This was not much of a clue, as everyone at the house was a whore. I was a whore, my boss was a whore, my boss’ boss was a whore. Most women don’t end up at a state-financed halfway house for the treatment of drug addiction without having been a whore at one time or another. Whore is the burden of women who do desperate things for drugs. When it’s used by someone to whom it’s been applied, in acknowledgement of another to whom it’s been applied, it can show affection, and function as a term of endearment. The stigma works like a unifier, and the melioration of the word is an attempt to rob it of its power. Out on the porch, on the Sketchers box top, it was clearly whore in the more traditional sense: crude, shameful, meant to degrade.

Lifting the lid on the box, I was confronted with the evidence locker of a broken relationship. A medium-sized teddy bear with a red bow tie told of a trip to a carnival, and two balloons popped, not three. I poked the cheap bear’s belly, and could feel the lima-bean beads inside. A half-emptied bottle of men’s cologne did not make the box quarters fragrant. Had it been emptied, then refilled with piss? What looked to have been correspondence, written on yellow-lined paper, had been ripped to tiny, minuscule pieces. A disfigured red lipstick in the same shade as the WHORE on the box’s lid rolled around loosely; at first glance, because of its cylindrical shape, I thought it might be a bullet.

Under a pair of knotted underwear that strangled the pieces of a decimated cell phone, I found a laminated Mass card, and then I knew for whom the box had been left. I recognized the name and face of the woman on the card. She was the grandmother of a client of the halfway house named Autumn.

Autumn had come through the halfway house once before, a year earlier. She was a twenty-two-year-old heroin and crack addict whose unhealthy habits had yet to rob her of her good looks and youthful air. The love and support of her grandmother had also helped to keep her face smooth. Some women go to jail, have sex with strangers in the backseats of cars, and lose something much more real and affecting than their dignity. They lose their ability to laugh at themselves, and at the world. The ones who can still laugh afterward, who don’t go hard forever, nine times out of ten, are the ones who remain somebody’s beloved daughter, sister, mother, wife, little girl. If the family can hang in there, she will stand that much more of a chance.

The first time Autumn had come through the halfway house, she’d been the ideal client. She’d come from jail, and had been cooperative and low maintenance, focused on getting a job and her own apartment. Then one day, she went outside to smoke a cigarette and disappeared. New London was her old stomping ground and provided plenty of temptations. Did she just give in? No one knew, but it was a common scenario. Each week, clients of the halfway house simply went to the bodega and didn’t come back. The New London Police were familiar with Autumn, and weren’t concerned. On top of the drug charge that had landed her in the halfway house in the first place, they’d also arrested her before for prostitution. But Autumn’s grandmother was concerned, and launched a crusade.

She was doing so well. I’d never seen her more focused in my life. She was turning over a new leaf. It was a boyfriend who got her on all the drugs when she was just a teenager. She didn’t have the easiest time growing up, you know. She came to live with me after her mother went off the deep end. I raised her as my own. She’d done a year of college for nursing. Why does the New London Police Department not care about my granddaughter? Please, if you have Autumn, let her go. If you can hear me, Autumn, Grammy loves you.

When the police just rolled their eyes, Autumn’s grandmother went to the media. This sweet old woman, desperate with worry and sick with breast cancer, they put her on TV, and wrote about her concern for her granddaughter in the local papers. Searches for Autumn were organized. Based on a tip, a lake a few towns away was dredged. A matted length of brown hair extension was found. Her grandmother said she thought it was Autumn’s. What did it mean?

Nothing, the women who had lived with Autumn at the halfway house said. It meant fucking nothing. It meant some dumb bitch went swimming, and lost her weave. The media coverage of Autumn’s disappearance made some of the women angry. They didn’t believe any harm had befallen Autumn; outside of any harm that she was most likely doing to herself. She’d told a few of her housemates that she could not stop thinking about smoking crack. She was probably holed up in some apartment somewhere, geeked out of her mind. She’d resurface eventually, they said, adding resentfully that if it had been any of them who were missing, no one would have cared. And they were probably right. Autumn had her grandmother, both naïve and determined, and with her ivory skin and full set of bright, white teeth, at least physically, she was the idealized at- risk woman: pretty and young. Unlike many of the women at the halfway house, Autumn’s years of hard living hadn’t caught up with her yet.

Two months after Autumn disappeared, she did resurface, in jail. She’d been picked up again for prostitution. Because she was still on probation for the drug case that had brought her to the halfway house, the additional charge meant she was returning to jail. She did less than a year at the women’s prison, and was released back to the halfway house. While she was in jail, her grandmother succumbed to breast cancer. It was her Mass card inside the Whore Box.

“He’s a fucking freak!” Autumn said. She was seated across from me in a swivel chair in the staff office, the Whore Box open in her lap. It was late on Saturday afternoon. On the weekends, not much was expected from the clients of the house, and I’d woken her up for the first time that day.

“Who?” I asked. “Who left this for you?”

“Trevor.”

She held the broken cell phone in her hand and attempted to unknot the underwear wrapped around it. “I can’t believe he stole my fucking underwear!”

“Who’s Trevor?”

“That older guy who’s always picking me up. He helped me bring in all those grocery bags last weekend; you met him. Tall guy, pornstache?”

It had been a quick encounter, one of many I had on the weekends when the clients’ friends and families came to visit. I had probably assumed the man was Autumn’s uncle, or some other relative, if I’d thought about it at all. A few of the women continued their paid sexual relationships while living at the house. If their friends and family couldn’t provide for them, how else were they going to get money for the things they needed until they found work? The halfway house provided food and shelter, and basics, like tampons and shaving razors. Used clothing was donated by various non-profit agencies in the area, but everything else, the women had to provide for themselves. This meant they needed money fast.

“What is he so angry about?”

“Who knows. He was my grandmother’s friend. He saw the stuff on the news when she was looking for me and called her, offering to help. When I was arrested, he started putting money on my commissary and writing me letters. I don’t know. He seemed all right. He took me shopping, and out to eat. He bought me the phone.” She held up the broken remnants. “I can’t believe he took my underwear! And my bear!”

“There was nothing more between you two?”

“No! He’s like sixty! Not that that’s stopped me before. I gave him the number of the payphone here after I got out of jail, and he starting calling, talking about what a great woman my grandmother was, and how helping me was a way for him to honor her memory. He offered to do things for me, so I let him. I must have left the phone in his car last night. I’ve been sleeping all day, so I didn’t notice. I bet he went through my text messages! I met a guy at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting on Thursday night. Really cute Hispanic guy named Hector. He’s living at the men’s halfway house on Mercer Street. It’s funny though, Trevor calling me a whore. He told my grandmother that was the reason he wanted to help her find me. Because people act like women like me are disposable.”

“If you weren’t having sex with him, how did he get your underwear?”

“Like I said, I let him do things for me. Last weekend, he offered to do my laundry. It was after Sunday night curfew, and I couldn’t leave the house, so I just passed him my laundry basket through the door. He must have taken them then.”

“I’m wondering if I should call the police.”

“No! Please don’t! That last thing I want is any more contact with the police. I’m infamous around here. When I see policemen on the street, they laugh at me. Back from the dead, a cop said to me the other day. I’m not afraid of Trevor. I’d rather not have him in my life anymore. He was saying weird things to me.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Things intended to make me feel bad, but make him look good. Things like,” Autumn affected the tone of a man giving a serious speech, “People know all about you around here, Autumn, and are going to judge you for your past, but I never will. No man will have the guts to date you, he may fuck you, but he’ll never bring you home to his mom…”

“Autumn, Trevor is an asshole. Don’t ever put up with anyone who talks to you like that.”

“I needed him. But what he was saying is also true, I know that. Any guy who Googles my name isn’t just going to find a Facebook page. He’s going to find links to newspaper articles. I loved my grandmother. I feel horrible about what I put her through. I should have just called her. All it would have taken was one phone call. But I didn’t, and this is what happened. It’s out there for anyone to find. I’m missing prostitute Autumn Fields, the hooker who came back from the dead.”

“In this community, we all have crazy backstories, Autumn.”

“In this community. In the A.A/ N.A/ jail/ social service community. What happens when I want to go outside this community? Every employer nowadays does a web search. My name is hippy-dippy enough as it is, but there are also pictures of me.”

“You haven’t even been back here a month yet. Give it a little while. It’s asked that you make a decent effort to find a job by your third month here. Who knows what opportunities will present themselves to you by then.”

“Um-hum.”

“I’m going to write an incident report. Do you want to keep any of this?”

“Just the Mass card,” Autumn glanced down at the picture of her grandmother on the card before putting it into the pocket of her sweatshirt.

“Here’s the X CD I said I’d burn for you,” I said reaching into a drawer on the side of my desk. “Sorry it took me so long.”

Her first time coming through the halfway house, Autumn had heard me listening to the band X in the office. “I haven’t heard Exene’s voice in so long!” she’d said. I’d offered to burn the CD for her then, but had kept forgetting, and then she’d disappeared. Autumn and I liked a lot of the same music, namely punk bands from the 1970s and 80s, which we were both too young to have ever seen in their original incarnations.

“Thank you!” she said, opening the plastic cover and looking at the album artwork I’d photocopied. She leaned over to give me a hug. “I can’t believe I slept this late. The Seroquel they have me on is really kicking my ass. I’m going to go take a shower and take my time getting ready for the N.A meeting.”

A.A and N.A meetings, especially the ones on the weekends, were treated like social events by the clients. Most of the women went, putting time and effort into their appearances, doing their hair, and giving their outfits careful consideration. I’d done it too, when I’d come through the house as a client, four years before.

Autumn got up from the chair, and moved towards the office doorway, stepping through the threshold that connected it with the house’s dining room. A few clients sat at the dinner table, playing cards.

“I’m surprised Hector hasn’t called,” she said in their direction.

“I was just looking for you,” an older woman named Rose replied. “A man called for you like five minutes ago. I tried to take a message, but he didn’t want to leave one.”

The payphone was a constant bone of contention amongst the clients. If you answered it, there was an understanding that you were willing to put in the effort to find the person the call was for, often times a major undertaking, as the house had three floors, a front and backyard, and a basement. I glanced over to the payphone in the hallway. A woman stood talking on it, with two other women lingering impatiently nearby.

“I won’t be able to survive here without a phone,” Autumn said.

“You can use the phone in the office,” I offered quietly, hoping that the other clients wouldn’t hear, and accuse me of favoritism. I did a quick check of the med drawer and the filing cabinet that contained all of the client paperwork. Both were locked, so I left the office, giving Autumn privacy to make her call.

I had let Autumn use the phone because of what had happened with Trevor. But I might have been guilty of showing her favoritism. It was hard for me not to. She reminded me of me.

A few hours later, I was sitting at my desk eating dinner when Rose approached the open office door.

“That girl’s sketchy. You know that, right?” she said, standing in the doorway.

“Who? Autumn?”

“Yeah. She’s never here. She’s always out running around. You know what she did to her grandmother, right? You know her grandmother died?”

“Yes. She had breast cancer.”

“The stress of having that girl for family didn’t help. Hector, that guy she’s after, he has a girlfriend. Autumn needs to watch herself.”

“Does Autumn know that he has a girlfriend? Did you tell her?”

“No. It’s not my place. She shouldn’t be getting involved with guys from the Mercer Street halfway house, anyway. It’s obvious what they want. They’re not even here for 30 days.”

This was true, though I suspected Rose was twisting the truth to be self-serving. The men’s halfway house on Mercer Street was only a three-week program, while our halfway house was a much longer one. The women could sometimes stay for more than a year; it was up to the state of Connecticut to decide. Ironically, the quicker a woman found a job, the sooner the state mandated it would no longer pay for her care, the ideology being that she was now in a position to support herself. The fact that most of these jobs were barely minimum wage didn’t play into the state’s equation.

“Well, I don’t think she’s a mind reader, Rose.”

“Can I use the computer really fast? Just for a minute. I’m waiting for Grace and Sarah to finish getting dressed, then we’re going to the N.A meeting.”

I got up from the desk and went into the living room to type in the password that unlocked the web browser. It was on a timer, and would clock out after fifteen minutes unless the password was re-entered.

As I cleaned off my dinner plate in the kitchen sink, I heard the printer come to life in the other room. Soon afterward, the back door slammed shut as Rose, Grace and Sarah left for the meeting.

A few minutes later, Autumn came down the stairs. She was wearing a short black skirt and a fitted t-shirt with Debbie Harry’s face on the front, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. The weekend before, she had pierced her nose in the 2nd floor bathroom, forcing a small stud through a hole that had closed while she was in prison. She now adorned the hole in her nostril with a small hoop. There is a luminescent glow often attributed to a person’s first few weeks clean, and Autumn had it. She looked vibrant and healthy, though her glow was probably the result of her first few weeks out in the fresh air, as she’d actually gotten clean in prison.

“Okay, I’m off,” she said, leaning over to sign her name and the time into the client sign in/sign out book. “Wish me luck.”

“If you see him, stay away from him, Autumn. Don’t even give him the chance to apologize to you.”

“Not with Trevor, silly. He went to meetings with me a few times, but I don’t think he’d show up on his own. I’m not worried about Trevor. I meant wish me luck with Hector.”

“I think you should ask Rose about him. I think she knows him. I wish they would have waited for you, so you wouldn’t have to walk over to the meeting alone.”

“I’ll be fine. Rose knows Hector? She was there when I met him and didn’t say anything. I think she has some kind of problem with me today,” Autumn raised her arms up to her shoulders in a resigned gesture that implied, Well, what can you do? “Whores!” she said, then gave me a quick wink and went out the door.

The woman who I split the weekend shifts with was on vacation, so I had agreed to work from 8 a.m. Saturday morning until 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon. Eight of those 32 hours could be spent sleeping along with the rest of the house, and more than 20 of them could be spent reading, or watching television with the women if I chose to, so it was hardly laborious. I had light paperwork to do, but most of the time I felt like a glorified babysitter. I’d sometimes tell people when they asked me about my job that I’d been hired as a guarantee that 911 would be called, if ever their services were needed. The truth was, I was hired because I was considered a success story, a former client who was still clean several years after leaving the house. Every member of the staff was. If Autumn stayed clean, once she left the house, she could apply for a job, too. The pay wasn’t great, but there were places where she could work where her past wouldn’t be seen as a disqualifier. But she was right; all of those places were within “the community.”

At 9:30 p.m., I was sitting at my desk flipping through a gossip magazine when Grace flew through the door.

“Something happened at the meeting,” she said. Some clients seemed to put a bounty on being the first to report dramas, both real and imagined, to the staff. It appeared Grace had been running. “People were passing around a paper about Autumn. She started crying, and left.”

“Did you go after her?”

“I don’t know her that well. Somebody said they saw her get into a car,” Grace studied me for a moment. “Rose did it. That Trevor guy said he’d pay her to print something out, and pass it around the meeting. Is it true that Autumn killed her grandmother?”

“Are you serious? If Autumn killed her grandmother, she’d be in jail. Her grandmother died of breast cancer.”

Grace tugged on the sleeve of her sweater, like a child.

“If she doesn’t come back, do you think I’ll be able to keep this? This is Autumn’s sweater. I really like it. I got so many compliments on it at the meeting tonight. If she doesn’t come back, do you think I’ll be able to keep it?”

My first thought was to call my boss, but I was hesitant, as she hated to be called on the weekends. I didn’t blame her. She worked Monday through Friday, and deserved to have her weekends drama-free, to decompress. It would have been premature to call her anyway. Both Rose and Autumn had until midnight to return to the house without consequence.

The browsing history on the computer showed that Rose had been looking at an article from a local newspaper. It contained a black and white picture of teenage-looking Autumn, smiling, in a button down shirt, in what looked to be a yearbook photo. The headline of the article read, “LOCAL WOMAN SEEKS INFORMATION ON MISSING GRANDDAUGHTER.” The boldface below the picture of Autumn identified her as “MISSING PROSTITUTE AUTUMN FIELDS.”

Over the years that I worked at the halfway house, I’d become close with a handful of clients, and a few of them had become friends I stayed in contact with, and saw, after they left the house. It was hard to maintain a professional relationship, the things we discussed while watching television or eating meals lent themselves to camaraderie: prostitution, jail, abuse, disease. Topics not easily broached with the inexperienced, free of judgment.

I wasn’t particularly close with Autumn, but I could relate to her.

I had first gone into rehab when I was seventeen years old, and for years, had the distinction of being the youngest person in my various treatment programs. While I was considered too old (the first time I’d gone into treatment, by only a month) for the programs offered to juveniles, I was too young to understand the challenges many of the women faced. I had no children lost to the black hole of DCF, no husband who I loved but desperately needed to separate from. I always had visitors who brought me clothes and cigarettes. I was blessed to still have my youth and my family, but these blessings alienated me from many of the women. My family was hardly rich, but they might as well have been, by virtue of so many of the women being so deprived. Care was a currency, and in care, just by the nature of my having it, I was wealthy.

One visiting day, while I was a client of the halfway house, a big, burly woman who I lived with named Daphne sat down next to my mother while I was in the bathroom and demanded that she give her twenty dollars. Later, when my mother told me this had happened, she said she hadn’t felt intimidated by Daphne. She said she had given her half the amount, ten dollars, not because she’d felt that she to, but because she’d felt bad. She’d noticed Daphne on other visiting days, sitting in the living room, watching TV, all alone. Worried my mother would now be considered a mark, we never stayed at the house again when she came to visit. I had women I considered friends take money, clothes, and other objects of value from my room. Often times, in treatment, as in jail or on the streets, there is an inverse hierarchy to the haves and have-nots, and the haves are on the bottom. In the sorority of sickness, the premium is often on the suffering, because that’s all you have to compete with. Through your tales of woe and despair, you make your bones. How can a person expect to change when their self-worth and identity is so tied up in how wrong things have gone for them?

Sitting in the office, I looked into the garbage can, at the innards of the Whore Box inside of it. Without thinking, I took the stuffed bear from box, picked up a pen from my desk, and started stabbing it again and again. A mix of brown beans and gauzy cotton spilled out onto the desktop. I assumed that Rose would be out until curfew, spending her payoff on real cigarettes instead of rollies, and a nice meal, after so many months of the halfway house’s food stamp fare.

I was wrong. A few minutes later, she came through the backdoor defiantly.

“I’m sure Grace told you what happened,” she said, coming directly into the office. “I don’t care that she was upset. I don’t give a shit. I’m sick of these bitches who have everything, and treat everyone else like shit.”

“How did Autumn treat you like shit, Rose? What did she do to you?”

“How do you know what she did or didn’t do? You aren’t here during the week. You don’t know. She’s in and out of here everyday, acting like this place is a fucking hotel. She never has to wait in line for the payphone. Never has to dig through a garbage bag of donations for something to wear. Tonight’s the first time she’s had to walk to a meeting since she’s been here. She thinks she’s a fucking princess.”

“You’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous. I’m doing her a favor. She thinks she’s a princess, but she’s just a whore, like the rest of us.”

“Don’t try to mask what you’ve done, humiliating a person for money, as something righteous.”

“Oh please. Everyone here has prostitution in their histories, and women talk about it at meetings all the time. So what, even her whoring’s special? So, what’s the consequence? Am I on restriction? If I am, it’s worth it.”

“If Autumn doesn’t come back tonight, that’s on you.”

“No, that’s on her. If she doesn’t come back, it’s because of the guilt she feels for killing her grandmother.”

“You need to stop with that.”

“No. I know people who were in jail with that girl and saw the letters she’d get from her grandmother, when that old woman was in the hospital dying. After what she did to that woman, she still wrote to her! Still sent her money. If she’s really off drugs, that guilt is going to be catching up with her real fucking quick. If she doesn’t come back tonight, it will be because of that, not because I printed out some article. People at meetings don’t care anyway.”

“You knew she was sensitive about it.”

“Whatever. You just like her, that’s why you care. I see you in here talking. You’re just another person who makes things easy for her. I’m toughening her up. She needs some suffering. She’s spoiled.”

“So tell me Rose, what has suffering ever done for you?”

Besides being younger than everyone else, and still having people in my life willing to visit me and bring me money and cigarettes, I had another strike against me when it came to making friends when I was in treatment: I was considered a freak. I had brightly dyed hair, and piercings. I dressed in a manner people considered to be funny, and listened to loud, screechy music. At one treatment center, I had my roommate request to have her room switched. She told the head counselor at the facility that I made her feel uncomfortable, that my presence in our room was an affront to her religious sensibilities, the implication being that I was some kind of Satanist. Rehab for me was always an end of the road motel. When I was desperate enough, and out of options, I’d agree to go — but most of the time, once I started to feel better, I’d decide that I wasn’t that desperate and leave.

I met Sam at the treatment center where my roommate asked to have, and got, her room switched. Between groups, the patients at the facility would sit outside on a picnic bench, smoking cigarettes, laughing and gossiping together. I’d usually sit a little bit removed from the group, under a tree nearby, reading or listening to music on my Walkman. In spite of the alienation I felt from the other patients there, I was doing well. It was my third time in treatment, and the longest I’d ever stayed. I didn’t know if I wanted to stay clean forever, but my mind had started to clear, and I felt optimistic about the future, or at least I was starting to think about having one. There was a commercial that was popular on TV at the time: over scenes of darkening despair, a disembodied voice said, “Nobody says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’ ” After snorting heroin for the first time off the floor of a Subway sandwich shop bathroom, my friend Chelsea and I had started talking back to the TV whenever the commercial came on, that we did. But my plans had begun to change. Getting high no longer just felt good. My mother had kicked me out of the house, and I had started to get dope sick. Chelsea had overdosed, and was in treatment at a different facility. I decided that I was going to stick the 28 days out. I was still only 18 years old. Maybe I’d try doing something conventional, like what other people my age were doing. Maybe I’d go to college. It wasn’t like my original plan of becoming a junkie was going to go anywhere.

Sam introduced himself to me one day after morning mediation. He was funny, and though no one else at the facility had given me a chance to prove it, I was funny, too. He was 50 years old. Born and raised in New Haven. He’d been a Black Panther, something I found infinitely fascinating and asked him question after question about. When crack-cocaine came along in the 1980s, it derailed his life. When he asked me about my plans for the future, I told him I was thinking about going to college, and maybe doing something with writing, and he didn’t laugh at me. Instead, he showed me poems that he’d written in prison, and we became an unlikely twosome: the punk rock junkie and the ex-Black Power crackhead. He stuck up for me to the other patients, and I began to feel more welcome, not so much of an outcast.

Sam was always flirtatious with me, but it felt harmless. We would talk about music, and the worlds we ran around in outside of treatment. He would ask me questions about my hair, and my clothes, some of which were short, revealing, and tight.

One day, we were talking about my piercings. At the time, I had my nose pierced, but I also had my nipple pierced, and my clitoris. When Sam asked me about the piercing in my nose, I told him about the other two piercings that he couldn’t see. Maybe it was naïve of me. All I know is I didn’t think about it twice. He was my friend, and I wasn’t ashamed of having the piercings. Why wouldn’t I be honest with a friend, if I wasn’t ashamed?

He wouldn’t let it go though. He made sexual comments about my piercings over and over again throughout the day. I tried to brush off and deflect his comments, but they didn’t stop.

That night, after the N.A meeting, as we walked back to our rooms, Sam said that he was going to sneak out of his room that night, and sneak into my room. He said he was going to flick my piercings with his teeth.

I panicked. I had demurred to all of his come-ons, tried to change the subject, but nothing had worked. I was afraid that he was really going to sneak out, and somehow get past the staff. But in case he was only joking, I didn’t want him to get into any trouble. There was a young technician at the facility who I had a slight rapport with. He worked at night, and sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I would get up and he and I would talk. What I was trying to accomplish seemed reasonable to me at the time. I thought I’d come up with a way for Sam and I to stay friends, to keep him out of trouble and out of my room. I told the technician the truth, minus the sexual harassment I’d put up with from Sam all day. I told him about telling Sam about my piercings, and what Sam had said about sneaking out, but stressed to him that I was sure that Sam was only joking. My plan was to downplay the threat I felt, but say enough to put the idea into the tech’s mind to keep an eye on my room.

The night came and went without a hitch. No Sam in the moonlight, no sounds of disturbance in the hallway outside my door, or window.

The next morning, as we all filed into the group room for morning mediation, the vibe from the staff was off. The staff members sitting in the front of the room who led the mediation seemed distracted and tense. Sam came in with the other men, and smiled at me, just like any other day, so I knew that he and I were fine. Whatever had happened, it had nothing to do with us.

The head counselor of the facility, an older, buttoned-up looking woman, the same person who had granted my roommate’s room switching request, came in and sat down.

“It’s been brought to my attention that some of you have been coupling off, and encouraging inappropriate behaviors. Fraternization is one thing. We don’t condone it, but we realize that sometimes, in intense environments like this, men and women will become close. Come-ons and sexual enticements are something else entirely. I don’t know where the idea would come from that it would ever be appropriate to talk with anyone of the opposite sex about intimate parts of your body…”

I looked over at Sam. His eyes looked like they were about to fall from his head. I could tell by the look on his face that what she was saying hadn’t come from him. It could only have been the male tech’s interpretation of what I had said to him the night before. He’d thought I’d been coming on to Sam, and by coming to him to talk about Sam, he’d thought I’d been coming on to him.

The counselor had been talking about me, and turned to face me. But it didn’t matter what she was saying. I’d been doing well. I’d lasted the longest I had, in any facility, ever. I had actually been thinking about doing things differently this time. She would give me all the reason I never knew I needed not to try. Humiliating me, in front of people who, for the most part, didn’t like me anyway. Painting me as some kind of freak show seductress. I packed my bags in my mind as she went on.

All these years later, I don’t blame the counselor, or the technician. I don’t blame Sam. I could have sucked it up. I could have tried to defend my way of thinking. Ultimately, it was my choice to leave. What I do know is that it would take me 10 more years to get back to that place where I’d been up until that moment, up until that moment I’d been put into the whore box, willing to try.

As Rose turned and left the office without answering my question, I had a feeling Autumn would do the same thing.

The phone rang at five of midnight.

“Autumn,” I said. “Come back. Everyone’s in bed. If you’re late, no one will know. I won’t tell anyone, and I won’t put you on restriction.”

“I’d never let you do that. It wasn’t just what happened at the meeting. Coming from jail, that’s so hard. I just need a little bit of time to fuck around.”

“But you’re going to go back to jail.”

“Maybe not. I’m with my mom in Middletown. She’s doing really well and knows a lot of people in the program around here. She thinks she might be able to hook me up with someone who can help me with the court.”

“You’re not with Trevor?”

“No! Fuck him! New London is too small. I know everyone there, and everyone knows me. It never would have worked. I know Rose is talking a lot of shit about me right now. Some of it’s true.”

“I want you to make good decisions, Autumn. I don’t want you to waste all the time that I did. I don’t want you to get hard, and mean.”

“Tell the rest of the staff that I’m sorry. You guys have all been so nice to me. I’ll be down sometime during the week to get my stuff. Shit! I meant to grab it before the meeting. You didn’t empty out the garbage can in the office yet, did you? The bear in Trevor’s box, it’s mine, from when I was a little girl. My grandmother gave it to me. I’d spilled coffee on it, and was going to wash it. Trevor must have taken it from my laundry basket when he took my underwear…”

I looked down at the bear in the garbage can, its guts hanging out everywhere.

“I’m so sorry, Autumn. I already emptied it into the dumpster outside. You know how the garbage truck comes on Saturday nights…I think I can hear them outside…”

Fiona Helmsley is a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry. Her writing can be found in various anthologies like Ladyland and Air in the Paragraph Line and online at websites like Jezebel, Junk Lit, The Fix, Thought Catalog and The Rumpus. Her book of essays, stories, and poems, My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers is forthcoming in 2015.