Little Peach (14 page)
Authors: Peggy Kern
I want a pill so bad. I want to feel warm again, to float away and be happy.
I’ll wait for you, here in the bed. I know you’ll come back. And I will tell you. I’ll tell you as much as I can.
I will tell you where to find them—Daddy and Baby and the rest. They’ll be gone, though. The apartment will be empty. He’s smart, my daddy. He knows how to hide us. He knows nobody’s gonna look too hard anyway.
But somewhere out there, in this place called New York, there is a girl. I don’t know her real name, but if you look closely, if you can coax her over, if you bring her a present and wrap it up all nice, maybe she’ll talk to you. And maybe you’ll see the red heart on her chest.
“Baby,” it says. “Devon’s Baby.”
She’s only twelve years old. She doesn’t act scared.
But sometimes, scared is right. I’m scared—now, without the pills. My hands keep shaking, and I can’t turn off my brain. It buzzes in my head, noisy and electric.
I don’t know if I can stand it. It won’t last forever. That’s what you say. But it hurts. It hurts so bad like I don’t even know.
My name’s Michelle Boyton. I grew up in Philadelphia, in a house on North 26th Street. My grandpa raised me. We had food and a TV and blue lights for Christmas.
Maybe someday I’ll go back. I’ll find my house and clean it. I’ll open the windows and let in the light. Chuck will be waiting. I’ll clean him up, too, once I’m old enough.
But for now, I’ll do what you tell me. For now I am here. It’s not enough. But it’s something.
The door opens.
There you are.
You sit by my side and take my hand.
“You’re awake,” you say, and I smile.
I am.
I am awake.
In the United States, the average age of entry into prostitution is thirteen years old. In the New York City area alone, an estimated two thousand young girls are being sold for sex. Like Peach, Baby, and Kat, the vast majority are runaways, often from our poorest communities, who are fleeing sexual abuse at home. Desperate for food, shelter and—above all—a sense of safety and love, these girls make easy prey for those who seek to profit from the sale of their bodies. Unlike a bag of heroin, a girl can be sold again and again—a steady stream of revenue for those who “recruit” them.
While researching this novel, I witnessed the selling of girls in the hotels of Coney Island and East New York, Brooklyn. I spent many hours driving the streets with an NYPD detective, who showed me the intricacies of gang culture and the sex trade. I also spent time
with two women who had been targeted in the same way Peach was. Both had been tattooed by their pimps before the age of fourteen. Both had been given highly addictive narcotics, making them all the more dependent on their captors. And, like the girls in this novel, both believed that this was the best they could hope for. Though
Little Peach
is fiction, it is closely based on the stories these women shared with me.
How can this be happening in a country as wealthy as ours? The answer is complicated, and there is no easy fix. Child protective services are terribly underfunded. Inner-city public schools are overburdened and understaffed—in some cases, without enough money to even have a school nurse or guidance counselor available to help students like Peach. Finally, there is our criminal justice system. The United States now incarcerates more individuals than any other country on the planet, and most of those individuals are poor, nonviolent, and minority. All too often, girls like Peach are treated as criminals rather than victims, and end up in jail for prostitution or drug use once they turn eighteen.
We can, and must, do better. I do not have an easy
solution, but I put my hope in you, dear reader, that you will raise your fists, rattle the cage, and insist that this comes to an end.
For more information on domestic trafficking and what you can do to help, visit the Girls Educational and Mentoring Services website at www.gems-girls.org.
This book would not have been possible without the help of Sergeant Joe Catapano of the NYPD. I am forever thankful for your time, your assistance, and for your kindness to the women we met.
Special thanks are also owed to the mighty Ms. Patty McCormick, Marcia Wernick, Alessandra Balzer, Chris Calhoun, Dr. Jackie Devine, Dr. Beth Kastner, Bob Reeves, the Stony Brook Southampton MFA program, Annette Triquere, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Kathleen Lynch, Katharine Richards, Heatherose Peluso, Bill Holland, Irene Schulman, and Nick Spathis.
I am incredibly grateful to my family—Erin and Chris, Mom, Jill and Abigail—who stand by my side every single day.
Above all, to Miracle and Jen, for trusting me with your stories. I hope I’ve done them justice.
PEGGY KERN
has written two books for the Bluford Series. She lives with her daughter in Massachusetts.
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Cover type illustration © 2015 by Steven Bonner/Jelly London
Cover photograph © 2015 by Sheila Creighton
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
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LITTLE PEACH
. Copyright © 2015 by Peggy Kern. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kern, Peggy.
Little Peach / Peg Kern. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Hospitalized in Brooklyn, New York, fourteen-year-old Michelle recalls being raised in Philadelphia by a loving grandfather and drug-addicted mother before running away and getting lured into prostitution.
ISBN 978-0-06-226695-8
EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN 9780062266972
