I feel my phone vibrate in my purse and I take it out to see Lander’s name across the screen. He wants to know where I am.

I’m lost.

I type the words carefully and examine the way they glow, adding another faint light to the dark. And then I erase the letters, one by one until the screen is blank.

My mother seemed to age five years between every visit. Her shoulders slumped, her head drooped. Eventually she stopped offering me advice on boys and school and life. We would sit in silence, both of us thinking about how it used to be, our nostalgia breeding bitterness rather than sentimentality.

I look at my cell phone again. Cortlandt Alley, I write. If you can find it you can have me.

So coy, so insincere. As if any man could have me, as if there was a “me” to have.

I get to the end of the first block and am once again confronted with the hustle and bustle of the street lined with whitewashed chain stores that have eaten away at New York like an invasive species. Quickly I make my way through the pretenders and cross the street, slipping back into the alley, into the darkness.

As a teen I moved from party to party, dabbling in vice. I took hits of Molly at raves and then further dulled my addled mind with the monotonous beat of the electronic music. I had sex with pretty boys who had bad tempers. Sometimes they were my age, sometimes older. It didn’t matter. The sex itself wasn’t all that enjoyable, but the destruction was. My teachers and various foster families told me I was falling apart, but I didn’t think so. To say I was falling apart would be to imply that what was happening to me was somehow accidental. As if I had dropped a glass I was trying to polish. My world wasn’t falling apart; I was tearing it apart. I had control. I had found outlets for my anger and my pain.

I knew my mother loved me, and I knew that anything loved by a woman as duplicitous and evil as her couldn’t be worth much.

I knew what I was doing.

The memories surround me as my heels continue to click against the pavement. I pause briefly in front of a rusted loading dock, corrupted by neglect.