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“I don’t know.”
Dammit. I sounded like a whiny brat.
He was silent, and I wondered if I’d overstepped. We’d been friends for a while now, though it was a bit weird. We didn’t have much in common. Will was an extrovert, talkative, a decade older than me, a veteran, and had been a social worker specializing in the homeless for the last fifteen years, ever since he got out of the military and started working with homeless veterans. I was an introverted computer geek who felt more comfortable talking to people online than I did in person.
He’d always been honest with me, which I appreciated, but mostly, he listened. I needed that after I found my mom living on the streets. Maybe I was being a Pollyanna. I should’ve been content—happy, even—that First Contact was productive and successful, even if I couldn’t save my mom.
Then Will said, “I have a friend I can reach out to. Someone I trust, who knows the system, who might have some ideas on what we can do.”
“I’ll do anything, Will. This can’t continue.”
“I know you’re upset about Bobby. But what is the first thing I told you when you started volunteering?”
I sighed. I didn’t want a pep talk. “They have to want help,” I mumbled.
“That has not changed. This is not going to be solved overnight. It takes weeks for some people, years for others. The important thing is that we keep going back, make contact, be available when they say, ‘I’m ready.’”
“You have, what, a dozen regular volunteers? And the city has how much money?”
He sighed; I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know.
“Be patient. We’re making progress.”
“How many people are going to die while the city builds million-dollar units for a handful of the people living on the streets?”
“Meet me tonight at The Pulse, okay? My treat.”
I didn’t want to go. I pouted, angry, frustrated. Lost.
“Should be my treat,” I said. “I make more money than you.”
He laughed, and I almost smiled. “Five thirty good?”
“Yeah.”
“Chin up. I’ll let you know what I learn.”
“Can you reach out to Bobby’s mom? The police will tell her, but I know how she’s going to feel.”
That she failed her son. That she shouldn’t have kicked him out. That she should have done more. That she should have forced him somehow, someway, into a program that worked. Done something different, said something else, did more, did less, fixed it. That it was all her fault.
It’s what I felt every day. That I failed my mom because I couldn’t help her. If I’d only been stronger. Better. Wiser.
“I’ll talk to her,” Will said.
I looked around, making sure no one was paying attention to my conversation; no one was even looking at me. I was a tall, skinny geek who wore no makeup and dressed as casual as I could get away with in city hall. No jeans allowed, but I didn’t have to dress up. Working in the basement had its advantages.
“I’ll do anything,” I told him again. “The information is there. We both know it. I think—the computer virus I’m working on? I think it was planted. What could be in those files that someone would want to destroy? Maybe there’s something in city hall that will help us.”
“Hold that thought. We’ll talk tonight.”
I could dig in. Will had been hesitant because nothing these nonprofits did was illegal. They received billions of dollars to help the homeless, but so few homeless people were being helped. Not when building temporary housing was astronomically expensive—it should never cost a million dollars a unit. Not when drug treatment centers couldn’t actually stop addicts from using. Not when the mental health facilities were so broken, and few social workers seemed to be trained to convince people that they didn’t want to live on the street.
The money was there. Where there was easy money, there was corruption.
I watched the people around me. Walking quickly, on their way to work. Men in suits and ties, women in tennis shoes and skirts, their pumps in bags over their shoulders. Not a mile away, a twenty-nine-year-old drug addict died because of a system that was set up to fail. Not a mile away, a mother turned her addiction to painkillers into an addiction to fentanyl to the point where she exchanged sex for a few blue pills.
It was time to shine a light in the dark and expose those responsible for prolonging this humanitarian crisis.
