“I saw Lindsay everday …”
by Katherine Cooper
I saw Lindsay everyday for a while. She’d always sit, hunched over, beside a stained yellow wall at the L stop at Union Square. She had pale skin, watery green eyes and a spray of freckles across her face.
I didn’t ever hear her ask people for money, or even really see her look up. But she held onto one
of those cardboard signs, generic in its pleading: desperate for cash, homeless and alone, please help. In the midst of their frenzied, hurried commutes, I watched people stop and stare, frozen for a 
moment in their tracks. Two seconds, or maybe three. She was just so young, undoubtedly still a teenager. I think we all stopped, struck by the same thing—this girl, so sad but also salvageable.
I never stopped to talk to her, but sometimes she’d linger in my thoughts throughout the day. So many of the folks I see and work with everyday are hardened veterans of the streets—they’ve been outside for so long that they can’t even pinpoint when or how they got there. But Lindsay, it seemed, was still right in the very thick and heart of that moment.
Maybe it could be a minor blip, just a tiny part of her story. I imagined her having fled from a drunken, abusive father in a cold, Midwestern town. Or maybe she’d been shooting up heroin for years and her mother, weak and exasperated, just couldn’t take it any longer. A couple of Greyhound buses through the night and here she was.
After several days of passing Lindsay during my morning commute, I saw her downtown by my office. She was sitting cross-legged against some big stone building just off Wall Street. My coworker and I crouched down and did our usual spiel. How long had she been staying outside? Did she need any services? Did she want a list of places in the area to shower or get a warm meal? It was the first time we’d made eye contact. She told us—softly and patiently—that no, she didn’t need or want anything. She said she was okay, but she looked so weak. It seemed as though it’d taken so much effort—all her strength—to utter the simplest phrase. I started to walk away but then asked her name.
Lindsay was back by the L train the next day. I had left work sort of late and missed the flurry of rush hour commuters. Her head was down and her hair, thin and blond, hung limply by her face.
“Lindsay?”
She looked up and said hey. I realized I had absolutely nothing to say. I just felt so compelled to call her name—to somehow make use of the information she’d been willing to offer me. We were quiet for a moment and then a guy approached us. He was tan and heavy, his hair fragrant and slicked back. He stared at her and then turned to me.
“Is this for real?” he asked, as though we were watching those men who, covered entirely in gold or silver paint, pose as statues.
“Excuse me?”
“Is this kid for real? Or is she faking?”
I told him no, I didn’t think she was faking. He dropped a five dollar bill by her feet and then headed down toward the track.
On the train back to Brooklyn, he sat down next to me. “You know, it’s impossible to tell, she could’ve been pretending. You never know what someone will do for a sociology degree.”
I said I hoped she was faking, but it seemed unlikely. He told me he could probably help her out a bit, and that he was so rich he basically owned the Giants. He pressed the back of his hands against his cheeks, blotting the sweat that had accumulated on his thick, leathery skin.
I haven’t seen Lindsay since that day. I wonder if maybe, she made it home—if she too felt what the commuters sensed that morning by the train: that tiny flicker of hope.
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