The molded plastic seats were spilling over with teens wearing baggy jeans and sporting purple mohawks and surly looks, not unlike the typical high school classroom from my youth. I was reminded of how my step-mother looked at me aghast when I, as a middle school student in the early eighties, between the preppie and punk rock stages of my fashion exploration, begged to wear her bell bottoms and fringed leather coat that she had saved from her high school days. Now, as I looked around the lobby of the shelter and saw the pink streaked hair, black boots, and army surplus messenger bags with anarchist flags pinned to the flaps, I finally understood her horror. It wasn’t that she didn’t approve of the fashion choices I’d made or even that she was surprised that those things were back in fashion … it was that they were back in fashion so soon. It was the realization of the progression of time, despite the fact that she had not actually given permission for time to move at all.
I asked the young volunteer behind the small reception desk for the contact person at the job center. She sent me down a nearby stairwell to a small room in the basement with eight older model computers around the perimeter and two utilitarian tables, one round, one long and rectangular, in the center of the room and more chairs than a room of its size really needed. Other than the copious amount of furniture and ancient technology, the room was spare with gray linoleum floors, white walls and two bulletin boards laden with small pieces of pinned up paper advertising job openings and educational resources. A handful of the colorful teens were scattered around the room and the job center staff introduced me as the financial expert who was there to answer questions.
A young girl of about seventeen, with a fuchsia streak in her shoulder length blonde hair glanced up from the computer where she was stationed, raised her eyes to the level of my shoulder and almost immediately looked at the floor and then back to the computer in front of her. Another teen, sitting at the center table and reading a book, met my gaze directly and evenly, with an air of expectation and suspicion that I would eventually come to know as the subtler expression of irrepressible hope squashed only slightly by the distrust bred from the experience of living on the streets. As time goes on, and homeless teens become homeless adults, I’m told that distrust takes precedence and the hope almost disappears, but these kids hadn’t yet reached that point.
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