Free Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum

As I walked in, I saw Nadine coming my way, two girls dogging her heels like she was the Pied Piper. I raised my hand and smiled in greeting, and she stopped short, nearly causing her followers to collide with each other.
    “Juh
neece
. You know your friend Samantha is back in the hospital.”
    “Oh no. What happened?”
    I’d seen Sam the previous Wednesday, her hand recast from the successful surgery the week before. She had been wincing occasionally, making do without much in the way of painkillers, but her spirits had been high. She’d spent most of the night by my side, talking about what she wanted to do after her stint in rehab—maybe she’d become a vet, she said, or a mechanic. When there was a lull in the bead action toward the end of the night, she’d confessed to me that she was scared to go away; scared, after seven years of complete autonomy, to commit the next year of her life to an institution where they’d dictate her every move. But, she told me, she trusted Jodi the drug counselor—for the first time in her life, she was trying to trust an adult for longer than the duration of a drug deal—and Jodi said that rehab was the way to go. So she was going to trust rehab.
    I hadn’t known, at the end of the night, if they’d be moving Sam upstate to rehab that week, if it would be the last time I’d see her. I’d wanted to hug her good-bye, in case, but she’d slipped away as I was leaving.
    The two girls tailing Nadine got distracted and moved on; Nadine moved closer and dropped her voice. “She got an infection, her hand, from the surgery. Bad fever, really sick. She waited a long time to say anything; you know she doesn’t like to show pain. The doctors hope they got to it in time to save the hand.”
    “Oh my god.” I thought of Sam handless, trying to become a vet or a mechanic. “What hospital? Is she nearby?”
    Nadine caught my eye with that all-knowing look of hers, her forehead furrowed with concern. “Well, officially I wouldn’t say anything, but you know, off the record, she’s at St. Victor’s. I’m telling you because it’s the holidays”—here she gave me a warning look, and I nodded,
Right, the holidays, special once-a-year dispensation, not a policy change
—“and I know you’ve been important to her.”
    “Well, I…” I didn’t know what to say. I was important to Sam, trustworthy to Nadine. Nadine, who once almost canned me on the spot in my first six weeks for taking a camera-phone picture of one of the girls, at the girl’s request—
Juh
neece!
What are you doing! You don’t take pictures of the girls, you compromise their security.
“Thanks, Nadine.”
    “Off the record,” she reminded me. Her followers were coming our way to resume their pursuit.
    “Miss Nadine, we got a situation in our room, Miss Nadine!”
    She gave me a droll smile, raised her voice for the girls behind her. “Upstairs, ladies.” One more emphatic look, and she forged on.
    It was all I could do not to declare bead time canceled for the evening and run straight down to St. Victor’s before the end of visiting hours, whenever those might be, but I’d already been spotted—by Ellenette, of course. She waved me over to her table to give me the good news—she was getting her Section 8 housing voucher, her free pass to the projects. “I am gonna be set
up
!” she declared, holding up her palm for me to slap.
    “Congratulations,” I said, trying for enthusiasm. Thinking
Welcome to welfare, Ellenette. Good luck enjoying your shitty, limited life.
    It was an all-right night, I guess; who knew, who cared. All I wanted to do was go see Samantha; everything else felt like a waste of time. So Ellenette would make it to the pj’s with one more pink-and-purple bracelet; St. Croix would make the seventeenth pair of earrings that said ST CROIX on them—would any of it make a difference in their lives? Would it help them get jobs, or find self-esteem, or save them any suffering? I