American Girls (40 page)

I thought about all this while watching the Bro's GoPro footage, which seemed like
Spring Breakers
redux. I caught the girls sometimes looking seductively into the camera, as in porn, where women are often seen looking intensely into the eyes of men when they give them blowjobs. Kim Kardashian does this in her sex tape, when she's giving oral sex to Ray J.

Later, when I saw the Bro by the pool, I asked him what had happened after the camera had turned off. I told him I was a little worried about whether the girls had been able to stay in control of the situation.

“Dude,” he said, giving me a look. “Those bitches were wild. They wanted to make a porno.”

The offices of Youth on Their Own (YOTO), an organization providing support for homeless kids in Tucson, have a closet full of things they need to survive and get along: bottles of water, packaged food, bedrolls, backpacks, blankets, clothing, soap, tampons, sanitary napkins, and school supplies. Many homeless kids go to school, the only stable place they know.

The majority of the kids YOTO serves are girls. And because of the demographics of the area, many are Latina and Native American. Native American girls are disproportionately likely to become homeless and run away, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. The principal reason is the high incidence of domestic violence, sexual assault, and rape on reservations, where there's often no accountability for the perpetrators. According to the Justice Department, one in three Native American women will survive rape or attempted rape, about double the national rate. About 40 percent of Native American women will be victims of domestic violence, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

Sarah Deer, a professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow, and a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, says that Native American girls who are labeled as runaways often are actually the victims of human traffickers. “Fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old girls,” says Deer, “especially when there's a history of drug and alcohol issues, a troubled childhood, they write it off as a runaway, when in fact you find, if you dig deeper, there is predatory behavior and someone targeting these girls and trying to prostitute them. They sell them on Craigslist, on the Internet. The only thing that will happen when the girl comes back is they will say, Oh, she ran away. No one will believe them.”

At YOTO I met an Apache girl, Arlene. She was eighteen, with shiny, thick black hair and caramel-colored eyes, wearing a crop top and jeans. She'd grown up on the reservation of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. The Apaches have lived in eastern Arizona for thousands of years; they fought with a legendary fierceness against the settlers and Spanish and American military forces that came to take their land, until finally they were overcome. Now what's left of their original territory is a place for tourism—fishing, camping, gambling. Tourists hike on their land, have barbecues, and hunt elk.

“We live in the woods,” said Arlene. “We have a trailer, not bigger than this room.” We were sitting in an air-conditioned conference room of about 300 square feet. “Four of us stayed in there—me, my brother, my mom, and my mom's husband. We had no electricity, no running water or gas. We had to go get water from a faucet somewhere. We used a generator whenever we didn't have candles. We used to cook over a fire; we didn't have a stove. We had an outhouse. I didn't like it because if you live in a normal house you can walk down the hall to the bathroom, but we had to put on a jacket, sweats, and walk outside just to go.

“Every time my mom would get drunk her husband would beat her up. He beat her up all the time. He never hit me or my brother. But my brother would get mad and get violent sometimes. When he was sixteen, he killed someone. He's in jail now.

“I started drinking when I was about thirteen. Why I started drinking was because I was mad. In a way I wanted to forget about everything, just give up on everything; in another way, I wanted to get people mad so they could start caring about me. I would drink vodka. There's certain places, certain houses, hot spots,” on the reservation, “where people sell alcohol and drugs. They don't care how old you are, as long as you have the money. I would go to this house all the time; they would give me a fifth of vodka. For money I would sell my stuff, steal from my mom, sell her DVDs. I sold her camera.

“I went to this house one day with my dad—my dad was drunk; he left me there. There was this guy—he used to see me around and say stuff to me, tell me to go meet up with him and party with him. He was like thirty-five. This house—anyone can go in there; people sleep in there; anyone could walk in. It's a place where people party. I was sitting there on the couch outside—and I was really drunk and this guy told me to drink with him. And I was like, Okay. Then he gave me a pill. He said, Take this. I didn't care about anything. So I was like, Okay, whatever. I was so mad, so upset. I wound up waking up in this room—it was, like, little flashes. Where am I? I was laying on this bed. I didn't have any clothes on. I didn't see him anywhere.”

He had raped her.

“It's fine,” she said. Her breath was coming shallow and rapid.

“I told my mom what happened and she was like, Oh, yeah. She didn't say anything—just Oh, yeah. She didn't say anything to help me feel better. She didn't want to listen.”

Native women, says Deer, have learned to “suffer in silence.” “Why report a crime to a system that may re-victimize you, that won't hold anyone accountable?” she says. “The cycle just repeats itself—mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces, go through the same thing down through the generations because these women don't have a legal system to turn to.” (In 2015, a new federal law went into effect which for the first time allows Native American tribes to prosecute some crimes of domestic violence committed by non-Natives in Native country. While the law was a welcome step forward, many feel that it still falls short, with its very limited parameters.)

But Arlene did report her rape to the FBI. “I reported it,” she said, “and they said they would do whatever they can. I've had an FBI agent investigating me ever since I was in the fifth grade. I was in a foster home, and my foster dad used to do stuff to me when I was nine, ten. So did a friend of my mom's. They were letting him stay with us. My mom was passed out. When I told my mom about it, she was really mad. She thought I was lying. I didn't bring it up anymore. My mom wouldn't listen; she thought I was being dramatic. I wasn't. I was just telling her what had happened, how I felt. She said there's nothing you can do about it, so don't even talk about it.

“I was in treatment for alcoholism and trying to kill myself and running away. I've tried to commit suicide ever since I was eleven. I tried to overdose. I used to cut myself. Once or twice I was really serious; the rest of the times I was just really mad and didn't know what to do. I was in treatment for a year. They were working on my cases against my former foster dad and my mom's friend. I went to all the trials. The FBI man and I, we were really close, so when I was in the hospital,” after she was raped by the thirty-five-year-old man, “he came into the hospital. I told him everything that happened with the guy at the party house. I told him I was drunk. He and his partner, they put it in a report, but they said they couldn't really do anything 'cause I was drunk; they said people would say I could be lying, exaggerating. I felt stupid.”

She had moved back into foster care.

After she'd gone, I said to Dane Binder, YOTO's program director, who had sat in on our meeting, that Arlene's experience seemed extraordinarily hard. He said, “It's actually pretty common.”

Later I looked up Arlene on Instagram. She had done many selfies, puckering up for the camera, blowing kisses, showing cleavage, posing in tight skirts. “Hot yo,” “Damn someone looks nice,” male followers commented. I expressed my sadness at seeing these images to a female friend in her thirties. She disagreed. “No matter what she's been through, she wants to own her sexuality,” she said. “This sounds like her trying to figure that out—how to own her sexy.” Was it that? Or was Arlene being abused all over again? I wasn't sure.

“The hos have come out for Halloween!”

The four NYU girls, freshmen, age eighteen, were stumbling through Washington Square Park. They were on their way to a party in someone's apartment. They stopped along the way to take an Instagram picture under the Washington Square Arch.

“We hos! You know we hos!” they said, dancing around.

They posed for their group selfie with their different phones, striking seductive poses. Then they stood in a huddle together, bent over the phones, posting their pictures.

They were dressed as a sexy cat, a sexy devil, a roller derby queen, and a Disney princess.

I asked them if I could talk to them.

“If you can stand some dirty talk!” the devil said, slapping me with her devil tail.

“ 'Cause we dirty hos!” said the princess.

They were already drunk—“We started drinking at four!”—and they said they had forgotten the address of the party. The cat fumbled in her purse, where she said there was a “flyer.” Only she carried a purse—“I'm the designated cell phone carrier!”—because the others didn't want to ruin their costumes with the encumbering look of a bag.

I asked them whether they were wearing their costumes ironically or in earnest. Hadn't “slutty” Halloween costumes become a cliché?

“ ‘In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it,' ” said the sexy devil, quoting
Mean Girls.

The roller derby queen said, “It's fun!” She did a little turn on her Roller Blades.

“Don't slut-shame us!” the princess said.

I said I hoped I wasn't.

“You're slut-shaming by even asking the
question,
” the princess said. “Why can't we dress however we want? What makes one way of dressing slutty and one way
not
?”

“Yeah, what's ‘slutty'?” said the sexy cat.

“This is a SlutWalk!” said the sexy devil, prancing up and down, shaking her hips. A SlutWalk, of course, is a march or protest, as well as a movement, seen since 2011, in which women wear “slutty” clothes in order to protest rape culture, specifically the way it blames rape on a woman's clothing or appearance.

“I'm so proud of you for being a slut and looking hot,” the princess said.

Some other girls teetered by on heels. They were dressed as…sluts?

“Lemme guess,” the princess called. “You're sluts!”

“You know we're big sluts!” said one of the girls.

Everybody laughed.

“Yeah, sluts! Go sluts!” A group of boys dressed in costumes had joined the party.

“Go fluts!” said the one dressed as a vampire, through his plastic vampire teeth.

“Hooray for sluts!” said the one dressed as the Dude from
The Big Lebowski.

“Yeah,” said the girls, less enthusiastically.

“You're my perfect match, sluts,” said another boy. “I'm Tinder.” He pointed to his shirt, on which he had drawn a heart and an X. He wore the Tinder logo on his head, a flame made out of red construction paper. “You wanna swipe right on me?”

“How long did it take you to come up with that?” the sexy devil asked.

“This already sounds like one of my Tinder conversations!” said Tinder Man.

“Why don't you come with us, sluts?” said the Dude. “I know a really slutty party we can take you to where you can get really slutty.”

“Thank you, no,” the sexy devil said. “We have a party to go to already.”

The sexy cat found the flyer in her purse, and the girls hurried out of the park.

“Go sluts! Go sluts!” the boys chanted after them.

Night descended on Tucson and the temperature dropped. Daisy put on her green army jacket, her socks, and a pair of sneakers. Jack woke up. They chatted awhile and decided this was the night they were going to California.

“We're gonna hop out for the West,” Daisy said. “Get on a train and see how far it can take us.”

They made their way to the rail yard, which was enclosed with a chain-link fence. They walked along, looking for a good place to jump over. They were trying to stay out of sight, which was difficult while traveling with two dogs, the lab and the rambunctious pit bull puppy.

There were a couple of trains already stopped in the yard. One of them said
EMP WESTBOUND
on its side. “I wonder if that one's going west,” whispered Jack. “It says
west,
” Daisy said. “I know,” said Jack, “but that don't mean it's going west right
now.
” “Then why's it say it?” Daisy asked. They were bickering, like any couple.

They'd met in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco, they said, about six months before. “First time I saw her,” said Jack, “she had the gay pride flag on her back, so I was just like, whatever,” meaning he thought he didn't have a chance. Then they saw each other again and “got all shwilly,” drunk. Daisy had told me earlier she “liked to hold his hand”; and she said she found it easier traveling with a guy. “That's just how it is,” she said. “If you're with a guy, there's less chance of getting raped.”

Something about the way she said this made me want to ask her again why she ran away. Then she told a story of sexual abuse that had happened in her home when she was fourteen. It was a family member, a man. The police had brought her home. Then she ran away again.

I asked her if she'd ever talked to her mother about it. She said her mother didn't believe her. “For a long time she blocked me on Facebook,” she said. “She wouldn't answer my phone calls, wouldn't answer my texts. So I just left her alone.”

She and Jack waited in the dark until the flashlights of the bulls vanished. Then they got the two dogs over the fence, ran across the yard, and disappeared into the train.