It's a Bad Way (1/?)
From this prompt on the angst meme.
Title: It's a Bad Way
(Title from "Roxanne" by The Police.)
Author: telm_393
Pairing, Character(s): Kurt, Glee Club, rest of ensemble, eventual pairings not specified yet (will be tagged as they appear)
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,229
Spoilers: None, 'cause it's AU!
Warnings: Implied rape, drug use, child prostitution--teen prostitution, non-graphic violence, minor character death in the first chapter, a lot of OC death, slash, underage drinking and smoking, explicit language and sexuality
Notes: Not everything legal and such may be accurate, however, I did my best and do not believe this will hinder the story in any way.
***
They meet at a club, she's maybe twenty or twenty-one, he's twenty-four. They don't drink much, but they talk and there's a certain light in their eyes that is gone, completely gone, in less than a year after this encounter. But that's the future, and it doesn't matter.
He tells her his dreams of having a family with a son that plays football and a beautiful wife (hopefully one as lovely as her, he thinks, but doesn't say it aloud). She tells him her reality: how she dropped out of Brown (she doesn't tell him it was because her grades were down too low and she had no passion for the business courses her father, dead by then, had made her take and she just gave up), how she's looking into some art schools and is waiting tables right now but is sure to get out of that life soon enough.
They have sex in a little hotel room, and she blows him in the bathroom and then they move to the bed and he's not thinking right and she's really good at this, and they don't use protection. Petra Meier is beautiful, with long auburn hair and delicate features and it's pretty dark and she's really fucking good at pleasing people.
A month later he gets a call at his clean, well-lit apartment, and when he answers the phone she says two words that he doesn't and also really does want to hear: "I'm pregnant".
He hangs up on her out of shock, and she throws her phone at the wall. She writes an angry note to him just in case he comes looking for her and then she leaves. She will have her baby, and she will have her baby alone.
Two months later he goes to see her, following the address he wrote on a napkin after the one night stand just in case, he feels like shit for hanging up on her like that and he's ready to be a father, to go back to Lima and stake his claim as the sole inheritor of his family's garage, with her.
She's gone.
He's given a note by the landlord.
It says:
I don't need you.
-Petra Meier
He never forgets it, never forgets her and never forgets the baby, and leaves for Lima two days after getting the note. He keeps it with him for the rest of his life and wonders about what could have been.
He wonders what his child's name is.
***
Petra has her kid, a healthy baby boy, eight months after she leaves her old place and finds a new job as a bartender in a seedy little bar just outside the red light district. (Burt is listed as the father on the birth certificate because she's pretty drugged up when it's made up, and she realizes her mistake later on. She never sees Burt again, though, so the news must never have got to him. It's probably a miracle, and she thanks god for it because she really doesn't need that man.
She's got a tiny apartment.
She gets into drugs a few months after she has Kurt, even though she experimented in college. Heroin makes her feel good, and then there's Ecstasy and LSD and all the rest of it. She's high the night she gets a pimp, but she figures the money's good enough. She buys bottles and diapers and hires a babysitter who drinks and smokes around the baby but keeps him safe enough when she's out.
It's a bit of a miracle Kurt makes it out of his first five years alive.
***
He's six when he realizes what mommy does for a living, sitting in his tiny little bedroom that used to be a closet, but it was a big closet because it's big enough for a mattress and not much else, but there's a light bulb on the ceiling that turns on when he pulls a grainy little string, so it's good enough. He looks at magazines his mother has, ones that she buys because she has nothing else to entertain him with. He likes the pretty pictures in Vogue, and he feels kind of proud of himself when he manages to read a whole page to his mother, who is surprised because she can't remember teaching Kurt how to read. He informs her that Jerry down the hall taught him when he was four and five, and he reads okay now.
When his mother has clients over, he sits in his room and looks at old editions of Vogue and when they get really loud, he covers his ears.
***
He doesn't go to school more often than he does in Elementary because usually nobody can drive him, but there aren't many calls from anybody about it. He does end up going to a little school just outside where he lives, where somebody is actually just homeschooling some kids, but he's allowed to join the classes and that keeps Social Services off his mother's case.
He's a fast learner. He's also very, very smart, and that's what his 'teacher' tells him. He tells his mom about it. She doesn't care.
Kurt doesn't think he was ever very special to her.
***
One night a friend of his mother's sneaks into his room when Petra's passed out drunk. His sweaty, larger body covers Kurt and he whispers things like: "I've been waiting so long for this. Ever since I saw you."
It hurts.
Kurt screams.
His mother finds him after her friend leaves.
He cries and cries, and she says: "I'll never let anyone do something like that to you again."
The next time somebody does that to him again, the man pays her.
He's eight.
***
His mother dies when Kurt's ten. She overdoses on heroin, and there's a lot of blood from her struggle to find a vein to inject into.
He finds her soon after it happens.
Kurt takes a look at the body of Petra Meier, lying spread eagle on the floor with a needle next to her and vomits.
He sobs and eventually the lady from across the hall who's a hooker just like his mother was, the one that moved in after Jerry died, comes and sees everything. She grabs him and covers his eyes and physically forces him from his apartment.
She drops him off at the Police station and wishes him well.
The men there call child services, and the first person they can think to send him to after looking up his mother is his aunt.
She lives in San Francisco, and is single and pretty pissed that she's saddled with a kid now. She works as a paralegal, and he knows she hates him, because she hits him a lot and says he's stupid, and when he asks for food she tells him to find something himself, damn it.
Eventually she stops paying attention to him altogether, and he just kind of falls off the radar, which is why he only finds out she's dead three days after she gets killed in an auto accident. He doesn't panic, but instead takes a deep breath and finds some money stashed away, even though it's very little, and takes a backpack full of clothes and a garbage bag full of other things like books and runs away.
That's when the system forgets him completely.
***
He ends up in a place called Tenderloin. It's seedy and there are lots of places that advertise topless women (he shudders at this, because breasts are ew).
Eventually he ends up sitting on a curb, near tears, but he doesn't cry because crying is stupid and has never solved anything anyway.
Somebody comes up next to him. He looks up, a little afraid but not really, because if somebody beats him to death or something, well, there's not much to live for anyway.
It's a woman, a black woman with long curly hair and a thin body. She has big breasts, and is wearing very skimpy clothing. "Hey," she whispers. "Why are you here? This ain't no place for a kid."
He answers in a clear, sharp voice and tries to keep emotion out of it: "I've got nowhere else to go."
She takes a deep breath. "Well, baby, dunno if you gonna be able to find somewhere to go. Homeless, huh? I used to be homeless too."
"You aren't anymore, I assume."
"Nah, I found somebody."
"A pimp?" He asks in a monotone.
Her eyes widen slightly. "Yeah."
Somebody walks up to her, and Kurt looks up again. A very tall black man this time. "Candy, what are you doing?"
"Nothin', talking."
The man looks down at Kurt. "And who are you?"
"Kurt."
"How old are you, Kurt?"
"Eleven."
"You on the streets?"
"Since recently."
"Well, I can get you off the streets. We need someone like you. A kid."
"How?" Kurt looks up and his eyes shine with hope.
"You come with us, and I'll give you work."
"Whattaya mean by work?"
This is where Candy interrupts. Her voice shakes and she knows what she's getting this little boy into. "It ain't honest, sweetie, but at least you won't be dead."
Kurt has never been this desperate, and all things considered, it's an okay deal.
(Three years later, Candy gets shot in the face and dies. Kurt cries for hours.)
***
Where he ends up living is a basement in a little house. There basement has some beds in it, and he finds out that they are where the other...workers live.
There are three women and one men and then, him. They introduce themselves and Candy tells him their stories when they've all either gone to sleep or left to work the streets.
Crystal, the gorgeous blond who made it to Ivy League and then realized she couldn't pay her way through Stanford and gave up on her dream.
Raven, the proud, pretty little former goth who went into stripping right after high school because school wasn't for her and then gravitated over to whoring naturally. That's how she told it, but she told it with a very, very sad look in her eyes.
Ice, a young black man with beautiful features who was doing this for his family, the only one who didn't live at what had been dubbed the whorehouse (though it isn't really a whorehouse, it's just where the whores live). Within the first hour of knowing him, Kurt has the names of his little girl and wife memorized.
Candy, of course, who found herself homeless and then found herself a pimp.
And then Kurt gets added to the strange entourage, the little boy. The baby. He's given a special name so he can have some anonymity. They call him Angel, making a joke of his lost purity. He tells them that purity was a theme in Medieval literature, and white represented it. Red was the color of passion.
Ice looks like his heart is breaking. "How'd you end up here, so smart?"
"I don't know. Situational, I guess. It had to happen." He finds that being smart alienates people where he lives and makes him feel better than them even though so many treat him like trash.
***
He's special, and his pimp (Ray) knows that he can get lots of money for a kid, especially one "as pretty" as Kurt--that's what he says. So he doesn't work the streets like the other prostitutes in Ray's house. People come to him, the pedophiles, and suddenly he finds himself immersed in a dark world, a confusing world, of drugs and alcohol and sex and more sex.
It hurts a bit for the first few times, because he's never gotten quite used to it and didn't have sex that much before this anyways. Then he learns how to use lube and tells the men to wear condoms because he knows about HIV and AIDS and other STD's, and he doesn't want them. It makes him a little cheaper, the protection thing, but Ice tells him to make everybody who has sex with him wear protection, and he listens because the man isn't stupid.
Sometimes he finds himself tied up and that's okay because he's been told to go with any and all kinks people might have as long as they aren't too dangerous.
He starts smoking about a week after he starts working. The first time it makes him cough so hard it throws up, but eventually he sucks it up and realizes it's relaxing.
He starts drinking a year later, when Crystal kills herself and the little light in his eyes has gone out. He's getting older.
Ray slaps him when he doesn't give him all of the money. "I'm giving you a place to live! You wanna be homeless again, huh, kid?"
He doesn't. A lot of the time he doesn't have enough food, though. Or clothes. He loves clothes and is the only one in the house who can sew, and he often fixes tears and such.
He finds supermarkets outside of the district and learns how to steal things from Raven, who is really very good at it.
The first thing he steals is a copy of Vogue, and when he reads it he remembers the way things used to be. He swallows back tears, but doesn't cry.
He drinks a lot, he doesn't do drugs, but the alcohol makes him feel much better and this is how he reconciles with his mother's heroin addiction. It made her feel better and that was why she was so obsessed with it.
When he's fifteen he has paid sex with a woman for the first time, and even though he never did enjoy sex with men--they were so old--he can't even get himself to think that this would be okay if she was maybe ten, twenty years younger. Instead he pretends he's pleasuring a pretty male model from one of his editions of Vogue.
Later, while they smoke just outside their whorehouse, he tells Raven he thinks he might be gay.
"Kid, gay doesn't mean nothing in this world. It ain't anything to be ashamed of. Besides, with that voice you wouldn't have got a lot of luck being straight."
"Don't make fun of my voice, clients love it." He knows his voice has already changed, but instead of becoming deep it simply dipped a little from a childish lilt to a more grown-up sounding octave. He still sounds kind of like a woman. Sometimes he feels ashamed of his high voice, but most of the time he's too busy to care.
"Guess so."
They are the only ones left of the four (five, counting Kurt) prostitutes Ray had when Kurt first broke into the world of whoring. There are maybe six now.
It's pretty amazing, he thinks, taking a drag from his cigarette, that they aren't dead or arrested yet. Crystal and Candy are dead. Ice is the only one who left with what Kurt hopes might be a semi-happy ending--he left after contracting HIV and last they heard of him he said he would be a stay-at-home dad.
"What do you think happened to Ice?"
"Prob'ly still alive, with the right medicine. Being a dad. That was the only job he ever wanted."
"I never met my father."
"Kid, you prob'ly never will."
Kurt scratches the tattoo he got at twelve (which spells RAY in black letters on his ankle as a sign of ownership) and shrugs his shoulders, agreeing.
***
He's sixteen when he's working the streets and a tall man asks him how much he is, lowering his voice to ask: "You underage?"
"Yeah. Extra for that, by the way."
"Yeah, sure, follow me."
Kurt follows the man obediently to a seedy little motel and goes to the first floor with him. "What do you want? Five for a blow, ten for sex."
"Okay. Five, then. What's your name?"
"Angel." He knows some people like making conversation and goes along with it.
"How old are you?"
"Just sixteen. You?"
"Thirty."
"Huh," Kurt drops to his knees and starts expertly undoing the man's belt, but before he can finish the man tells him to stand up. "Change your mind?"
The man burrows into his front pocket and Kurt stiffens. Fuck, he's going to pull a gun on me. But instead of a gun, he pulls out something much worse: a badge. "You're under arrest."
Kurt bolts, quickly opening the door as the cop asks for backup and then grabs him by the shoulders. He tries to jerk away, and then is led outside to the back of a car. He tries to bolt again, but his hands are cuffed in front of him.
"No need to struggle, kiddo, nobody's going to hurt you."
"Let me go!"
Just outside, he sees Raven, her black hair flopping over her face, and he knows exactly who tipped off the Police about him. He bares his teeth at her and mouths bitch. The car drives away.
***
He's stuck in a little cell at the station, glaring angrily at the cop looking at him through the bars.
"What's your name?"
"Angel."
"Your real name."
"That is my real name!"
"Yeah, right. How long have you been a prostitute?"
"Classified."
"By whom?"
"By me!"
"How long?"
"Since I was eleven."
"Mother's name?"
"Not telling you that."
"Come on, what's the worst that could happen?"
"There are lots of bad things that could happen."
"Look, kid..."
"Don't I have the right to a lawyer?"
"We're taking him to CPS, right?" The officer says to another.
"Oh yeah."
What they're really saying is: we're gonna get rid of this one soon, right? God, he's difficult.
Kurt ends up sitting in a social worker's office in Child Protective Services, staring at him.
"Now, let's do this. It's not going to help you to be quiet."
"If I snitch on my pimp, can I leave?"
"No."
"Then I'm not snitching on anyone, for future reference."
"That's fine, right now we're concerned about you."
"Nobody has been concerned about me for a while."
"Well, I am. You have to tell me your name."
"Angel."
"We both know that's not your real name. Tell me now, or I can just put you into a home and trust me, there are kids much bigger than you there that can do some damage."
"Kurt. I'm Kurt."
"Good, last name?"
He finally says it after almost two hours of prompting. "Meier. I'm Kurt...Meier."
***
The people in SIU look him up and find little information except for a transcript of a birth certificate.
Mother: Petra Meier. They look her up. Deceased.
Father: Burt Hummel. They look him up. Recently deceased.
"Hey, look," one cop says to another. "Found the kid's dad."
"A suicide, huh? Sad. Does he have any family?"
"Uh, a wife and her son."
"Maybe he can go with them."
"All the way over in Lima?"
"Well, what else do we have?"
"True."
"Send it over to CPS, our job is done."
***
Kurt finds himself on a plane two days later to the family of the father he never met.
"We aren't quite sure where to place you yet, son," the social worker had said. "But your father's wife is the closest we've got, and she's agreed to take you in."
"You mean...my father's widow."
"Yes, that."
Title: It's a Bad Way
(Title from "Roxanne" by The Police.)
Author: telm_393
Pairing, Character(s): Kurt, Glee Club, rest of ensemble, eventual pairings not specified yet (will be tagged as they appear)
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,229
Spoilers: None, 'cause it's AU!
Warnings: Implied rape, drug use, child prostitution--teen prostitution, non-graphic violence, minor character death in the first chapter, a lot of OC death, slash, underage drinking and smoking, explicit language and sexuality
Notes: Not everything legal and such may be accurate, however, I did my best and do not believe this will hinder the story in any way.
***
They meet at a club, she's maybe twenty or twenty-one, he's twenty-four. They don't drink much, but they talk and there's a certain light in their eyes that is gone, completely gone, in less than a year after this encounter. But that's the future, and it doesn't matter.
He tells her his dreams of having a family with a son that plays football and a beautiful wife (hopefully one as lovely as her, he thinks, but doesn't say it aloud). She tells him her reality: how she dropped out of Brown (she doesn't tell him it was because her grades were down too low and she had no passion for the business courses her father, dead by then, had made her take and she just gave up), how she's looking into some art schools and is waiting tables right now but is sure to get out of that life soon enough.
They have sex in a little hotel room, and she blows him in the bathroom and then they move to the bed and he's not thinking right and she's really good at this, and they don't use protection. Petra Meier is beautiful, with long auburn hair and delicate features and it's pretty dark and she's really fucking good at pleasing people.
A month later he gets a call at his clean, well-lit apartment, and when he answers the phone she says two words that he doesn't and also really does want to hear: "I'm pregnant".
He hangs up on her out of shock, and she throws her phone at the wall. She writes an angry note to him just in case he comes looking for her and then she leaves. She will have her baby, and she will have her baby alone.
Two months later he goes to see her, following the address he wrote on a napkin after the one night stand just in case, he feels like shit for hanging up on her like that and he's ready to be a father, to go back to Lima and stake his claim as the sole inheritor of his family's garage, with her.
She's gone.
He's given a note by the landlord.
It says:
I don't need you.
-Petra Meier
He never forgets it, never forgets her and never forgets the baby, and leaves for Lima two days after getting the note. He keeps it with him for the rest of his life and wonders about what could have been.
He wonders what his child's name is.
***
Petra has her kid, a healthy baby boy, eight months after she leaves her old place and finds a new job as a bartender in a seedy little bar just outside the red light district. (Burt is listed as the father on the birth certificate because she's pretty drugged up when it's made up, and she realizes her mistake later on. She never sees Burt again, though, so the news must never have got to him. It's probably a miracle, and she thanks god for it because she really doesn't need that man.
She's got a tiny apartment.
She gets into drugs a few months after she has Kurt, even though she experimented in college. Heroin makes her feel good, and then there's Ecstasy and LSD and all the rest of it. She's high the night she gets a pimp, but she figures the money's good enough. She buys bottles and diapers and hires a babysitter who drinks and smokes around the baby but keeps him safe enough when she's out.
It's a bit of a miracle Kurt makes it out of his first five years alive.
***
He's six when he realizes what mommy does for a living, sitting in his tiny little bedroom that used to be a closet, but it was a big closet because it's big enough for a mattress and not much else, but there's a light bulb on the ceiling that turns on when he pulls a grainy little string, so it's good enough. He looks at magazines his mother has, ones that she buys because she has nothing else to entertain him with. He likes the pretty pictures in Vogue, and he feels kind of proud of himself when he manages to read a whole page to his mother, who is surprised because she can't remember teaching Kurt how to read. He informs her that Jerry down the hall taught him when he was four and five, and he reads okay now.
When his mother has clients over, he sits in his room and looks at old editions of Vogue and when they get really loud, he covers his ears.
***
He doesn't go to school more often than he does in Elementary because usually nobody can drive him, but there aren't many calls from anybody about it. He does end up going to a little school just outside where he lives, where somebody is actually just homeschooling some kids, but he's allowed to join the classes and that keeps Social Services off his mother's case.
He's a fast learner. He's also very, very smart, and that's what his 'teacher' tells him. He tells his mom about it. She doesn't care.
Kurt doesn't think he was ever very special to her.
***
One night a friend of his mother's sneaks into his room when Petra's passed out drunk. His sweaty, larger body covers Kurt and he whispers things like: "I've been waiting so long for this. Ever since I saw you."
It hurts.
Kurt screams.
His mother finds him after her friend leaves.
He cries and cries, and she says: "I'll never let anyone do something like that to you again."
The next time somebody does that to him again, the man pays her.
He's eight.
***
His mother dies when Kurt's ten. She overdoses on heroin, and there's a lot of blood from her struggle to find a vein to inject into.
He finds her soon after it happens.
Kurt takes a look at the body of Petra Meier, lying spread eagle on the floor with a needle next to her and vomits.
He sobs and eventually the lady from across the hall who's a hooker just like his mother was, the one that moved in after Jerry died, comes and sees everything. She grabs him and covers his eyes and physically forces him from his apartment.
She drops him off at the Police station and wishes him well.
The men there call child services, and the first person they can think to send him to after looking up his mother is his aunt.
She lives in San Francisco, and is single and pretty pissed that she's saddled with a kid now. She works as a paralegal, and he knows she hates him, because she hits him a lot and says he's stupid, and when he asks for food she tells him to find something himself, damn it.
Eventually she stops paying attention to him altogether, and he just kind of falls off the radar, which is why he only finds out she's dead three days after she gets killed in an auto accident. He doesn't panic, but instead takes a deep breath and finds some money stashed away, even though it's very little, and takes a backpack full of clothes and a garbage bag full of other things like books and runs away.
That's when the system forgets him completely.
***
He ends up in a place called Tenderloin. It's seedy and there are lots of places that advertise topless women (he shudders at this, because breasts are ew).
Eventually he ends up sitting on a curb, near tears, but he doesn't cry because crying is stupid and has never solved anything anyway.
Somebody comes up next to him. He looks up, a little afraid but not really, because if somebody beats him to death or something, well, there's not much to live for anyway.
It's a woman, a black woman with long curly hair and a thin body. She has big breasts, and is wearing very skimpy clothing. "Hey," she whispers. "Why are you here? This ain't no place for a kid."
He answers in a clear, sharp voice and tries to keep emotion out of it: "I've got nowhere else to go."
She takes a deep breath. "Well, baby, dunno if you gonna be able to find somewhere to go. Homeless, huh? I used to be homeless too."
"You aren't anymore, I assume."
"Nah, I found somebody."
"A pimp?" He asks in a monotone.
Her eyes widen slightly. "Yeah."
Somebody walks up to her, and Kurt looks up again. A very tall black man this time. "Candy, what are you doing?"
"Nothin', talking."
The man looks down at Kurt. "And who are you?"
"Kurt."
"How old are you, Kurt?"
"Eleven."
"You on the streets?"
"Since recently."
"Well, I can get you off the streets. We need someone like you. A kid."
"How?" Kurt looks up and his eyes shine with hope.
"You come with us, and I'll give you work."
"Whattaya mean by work?"
This is where Candy interrupts. Her voice shakes and she knows what she's getting this little boy into. "It ain't honest, sweetie, but at least you won't be dead."
Kurt has never been this desperate, and all things considered, it's an okay deal.
(Three years later, Candy gets shot in the face and dies. Kurt cries for hours.)
***
Where he ends up living is a basement in a little house. There basement has some beds in it, and he finds out that they are where the other...workers live.
There are three women and one men and then, him. They introduce themselves and Candy tells him their stories when they've all either gone to sleep or left to work the streets.
Crystal, the gorgeous blond who made it to Ivy League and then realized she couldn't pay her way through Stanford and gave up on her dream.
Raven, the proud, pretty little former goth who went into stripping right after high school because school wasn't for her and then gravitated over to whoring naturally. That's how she told it, but she told it with a very, very sad look in her eyes.
Ice, a young black man with beautiful features who was doing this for his family, the only one who didn't live at what had been dubbed the whorehouse (though it isn't really a whorehouse, it's just where the whores live). Within the first hour of knowing him, Kurt has the names of his little girl and wife memorized.
Candy, of course, who found herself homeless and then found herself a pimp.
And then Kurt gets added to the strange entourage, the little boy. The baby. He's given a special name so he can have some anonymity. They call him Angel, making a joke of his lost purity. He tells them that purity was a theme in Medieval literature, and white represented it. Red was the color of passion.
Ice looks like his heart is breaking. "How'd you end up here, so smart?"
"I don't know. Situational, I guess. It had to happen." He finds that being smart alienates people where he lives and makes him feel better than them even though so many treat him like trash.
***
He's special, and his pimp (Ray) knows that he can get lots of money for a kid, especially one "as pretty" as Kurt--that's what he says. So he doesn't work the streets like the other prostitutes in Ray's house. People come to him, the pedophiles, and suddenly he finds himself immersed in a dark world, a confusing world, of drugs and alcohol and sex and more sex.
It hurts a bit for the first few times, because he's never gotten quite used to it and didn't have sex that much before this anyways. Then he learns how to use lube and tells the men to wear condoms because he knows about HIV and AIDS and other STD's, and he doesn't want them. It makes him a little cheaper, the protection thing, but Ice tells him to make everybody who has sex with him wear protection, and he listens because the man isn't stupid.
Sometimes he finds himself tied up and that's okay because he's been told to go with any and all kinks people might have as long as they aren't too dangerous.
He starts smoking about a week after he starts working. The first time it makes him cough so hard it throws up, but eventually he sucks it up and realizes it's relaxing.
He starts drinking a year later, when Crystal kills herself and the little light in his eyes has gone out. He's getting older.
Ray slaps him when he doesn't give him all of the money. "I'm giving you a place to live! You wanna be homeless again, huh, kid?"
He doesn't. A lot of the time he doesn't have enough food, though. Or clothes. He loves clothes and is the only one in the house who can sew, and he often fixes tears and such.
He finds supermarkets outside of the district and learns how to steal things from Raven, who is really very good at it.
The first thing he steals is a copy of Vogue, and when he reads it he remembers the way things used to be. He swallows back tears, but doesn't cry.
He drinks a lot, he doesn't do drugs, but the alcohol makes him feel much better and this is how he reconciles with his mother's heroin addiction. It made her feel better and that was why she was so obsessed with it.
When he's fifteen he has paid sex with a woman for the first time, and even though he never did enjoy sex with men--they were so old--he can't even get himself to think that this would be okay if she was maybe ten, twenty years younger. Instead he pretends he's pleasuring a pretty male model from one of his editions of Vogue.
Later, while they smoke just outside their whorehouse, he tells Raven he thinks he might be gay.
"Kid, gay doesn't mean nothing in this world. It ain't anything to be ashamed of. Besides, with that voice you wouldn't have got a lot of luck being straight."
"Don't make fun of my voice, clients love it." He knows his voice has already changed, but instead of becoming deep it simply dipped a little from a childish lilt to a more grown-up sounding octave. He still sounds kind of like a woman. Sometimes he feels ashamed of his high voice, but most of the time he's too busy to care.
"Guess so."
They are the only ones left of the four (five, counting Kurt) prostitutes Ray had when Kurt first broke into the world of whoring. There are maybe six now.
It's pretty amazing, he thinks, taking a drag from his cigarette, that they aren't dead or arrested yet. Crystal and Candy are dead. Ice is the only one who left with what Kurt hopes might be a semi-happy ending--he left after contracting HIV and last they heard of him he said he would be a stay-at-home dad.
"What do you think happened to Ice?"
"Prob'ly still alive, with the right medicine. Being a dad. That was the only job he ever wanted."
"I never met my father."
"Kid, you prob'ly never will."
Kurt scratches the tattoo he got at twelve (which spells RAY in black letters on his ankle as a sign of ownership) and shrugs his shoulders, agreeing.
***
He's sixteen when he's working the streets and a tall man asks him how much he is, lowering his voice to ask: "You underage?"
"Yeah. Extra for that, by the way."
"Yeah, sure, follow me."
Kurt follows the man obediently to a seedy little motel and goes to the first floor with him. "What do you want? Five for a blow, ten for sex."
"Okay. Five, then. What's your name?"
"Angel." He knows some people like making conversation and goes along with it.
"How old are you?"
"Just sixteen. You?"
"Thirty."
"Huh," Kurt drops to his knees and starts expertly undoing the man's belt, but before he can finish the man tells him to stand up. "Change your mind?"
The man burrows into his front pocket and Kurt stiffens. Fuck, he's going to pull a gun on me. But instead of a gun, he pulls out something much worse: a badge. "You're under arrest."
Kurt bolts, quickly opening the door as the cop asks for backup and then grabs him by the shoulders. He tries to jerk away, and then is led outside to the back of a car. He tries to bolt again, but his hands are cuffed in front of him.
"No need to struggle, kiddo, nobody's going to hurt you."
"Let me go!"
Just outside, he sees Raven, her black hair flopping over her face, and he knows exactly who tipped off the Police about him. He bares his teeth at her and mouths bitch. The car drives away.
***
He's stuck in a little cell at the station, glaring angrily at the cop looking at him through the bars.
"What's your name?"
"Angel."
"Your real name."
"That is my real name!"
"Yeah, right. How long have you been a prostitute?"
"Classified."
"By whom?"
"By me!"
"How long?"
"Since I was eleven."
"Mother's name?"
"Not telling you that."
"Come on, what's the worst that could happen?"
"There are lots of bad things that could happen."
"Look, kid..."
"Don't I have the right to a lawyer?"
"We're taking him to CPS, right?" The officer says to another.
"Oh yeah."
What they're really saying is: we're gonna get rid of this one soon, right? God, he's difficult.
Kurt ends up sitting in a social worker's office in Child Protective Services, staring at him.
"Now, let's do this. It's not going to help you to be quiet."
"If I snitch on my pimp, can I leave?"
"No."
"Then I'm not snitching on anyone, for future reference."
"That's fine, right now we're concerned about you."
"Nobody has been concerned about me for a while."
"Well, I am. You have to tell me your name."
"Angel."
"We both know that's not your real name. Tell me now, or I can just put you into a home and trust me, there are kids much bigger than you there that can do some damage."
"Kurt. I'm Kurt."
"Good, last name?"
He finally says it after almost two hours of prompting. "Meier. I'm Kurt...Meier."
***
The people in SIU look him up and find little information except for a transcript of a birth certificate.
Mother: Petra Meier. They look her up. Deceased.
Father: Burt Hummel. They look him up. Recently deceased.
"Hey, look," one cop says to another. "Found the kid's dad."
"A suicide, huh? Sad. Does he have any family?"
"Uh, a wife and her son."
"Maybe he can go with them."
"All the way over in Lima?"
"Well, what else do we have?"
"True."
"Send it over to CPS, our job is done."
***
Kurt finds himself on a plane two days later to the family of the father he never met.
"We aren't quite sure where to place you yet, son," the social worker had said. "But your father's wife is the closest we've got, and she's agreed to take you in."
"You mean...my father's widow."
"Yes, that."