Page 1 of The Broken Places

CHAPTER ONE

“Cherish”

Episode from podcastThe Fringe

Host of podcast, Jamal Whitaker

“Hello, welcome toThe Fringe. Thanks for being here, Cherish. Very pretty name.”

“Thanks. It’s my real name, not just my street name. That’s what my mom named me, Cherish Joy.”

The interviewer, Jamal, sitting in a chair across from Cherish, smiles. He’s a dark-skinned man with a shaved head who appears to be somewhere between forty and fifty. “Can you tell us a little about yourself?”

The young prostitute with the pale, sallow skin, wearing a pink crop top and jean shorts that barely hit the crease at the top of her thighs, brings her thin legs underneath her on the blue velvet sofa. “Who’s us? You and the mouse in your pocket?”

“For now, just me and my cameraman, Franco, but the show has three and a half million subscribers.”

Cherish repositions herself, sticks her hands between her knees, and then removes them almost as quickly. It’s difficult to tell whether she’s nervous or on something. “I was just jokin’. One of my stepdads used to use that line about the mouse. Can’t remember which one, and I never really knew what it meant anyway. It seemed stupid, but here I am repeating it.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Mice or stepdads?” She lets out a throaty laugh that fades almost immediately. “Sorry. I make dumb jokes when I’m nervous.”

Jamal smiles kindly. “Don’t be nervous. If, at the end of this conversation, you decide you don’t want this interview aired, you have my word no one will ever see it.”

She gives a jerky nod. “Anyway, yeah, there were a lot of stepdads. My mom only actually married two of them, or maybe three, but she made me call the rest of them dad, too, so that’s what I did, and I guess that’s also why they blend together.”

“Did you grow up here in San Francisco?”

“Yeah. Over in the Mission.”

“So, it sounds like your mom had a lot of men in her life while you were growing up. Other than that, what was your childhood like?”

Cherish plays with a long string on the edge of her shorts for a second and then shifts again. “Pretty shitty. I hated school and got in trouble a lot. My mom did drugs, so we never had much food in the house. She tricked, too, when there was no man in the house, and she’d bring me with her sometimes.”

“Bring you with her?” Jamal’s eyebrows rise, but his voice remains calm and almost unaffected in a way that makes it obvious he’s used to hearing stories like Cherish’s. “For what reason?”

Cherish shrugs, and she seems to zone out for a moment before sitting up straighter. “Sometimes I just watched, or I waited in the bathroom. Sometimes I went next.”

“Went next?”

“Yeah, you know, the trick paid to have sex with me too.”

“When did this start?”

“I don’t know. Maybe six.”

“Six years old?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What do you remember thinking about that?”

“It sucked. I didn’t like it.”

“Why do you think your mom let that happen? Even arranged it?”

Cherish’s shoulder jerks, and she wraps her arms around herself as though suddenly cold. “She’d do anything for money, so she could buy her drugs.”

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