The summer I turned fourteen we were, my mother and I, living in Corpus Christi, Texas. We rented this little apartment on North Beach in June 1981. Just a few days after we moved in, I met this girl named Gina who lived with some people in a house behind us. I say “people,” because they were into some stuff I had very little knowledge of, in my innocence1. They occasionally had a Jamaican guest who woulde in, stay a few days, then leave. I realized some years later the significance of the Jamaican visitor. I didn’t know much about these people Gina lived with, and didn’t get to know them too well. There were always a lot of adults that hung around, but they usually were in the front part of the house where the music was, and left us to our own entertainment.
Gina lived with these people because, I guess you could say, she was homeless, in a sense, she was about a year and a half younger than me. Very pretty, beautiful smile, pretty blonde hair and big green eyes. But at thirteen, she knew far more about the streets than she should have. She didn’t know who her father was, and her mother was a drunk. She had an older sister who was married to a man in the navy2, and lived in Connecticut. Nobody wanted Gina, except me. I loved her like a sister.
In the beginning, we bristled at each other on the school bus. Gina was a tough kid, and I guess as a defense mechanism, she always put on that tough-kid armor when necessary. After a week or so of school, we started talking. And since she was the only kid in the area my age, we really kind of fell in together. My folks were divorced and barely spoke unless they had to. I’d just moved 600 miles from the only home I’d ever known in Mississippi and I was homesick, and she had no real home. Once we realized we both had wounds to lick, it clicked, and we became i