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.They would, as the song said, try to show her their tattoos.It was almost a reflex for them because instinctively they ached even for Laurel's approval, and they knew cold and hunger intimately.Only when she had been at the shelter close to a year and grown more comfortable with the world of the homeless did she begin to photograph the men, too.Initially, she had avoided that wing because of her experience in Underhill.And, of course, she had seen homeless men on the streets of New York when she'd been a little girl: bedraggled and grimy, malodorous, insane.Screaming or muttering obscenities either at strangers or--and this could be even more unnerving--at no one.But, clearly, she was worrying for naught.The homeless men who wandered through BEDS were frequently among the most gentle people on the planet.Sometimes it was bad luck and (yes) bad choices that had driven them down, not mental illness.And even when they were bipolar or schizophrenic--like Bobbie Crocker--when they were properly medicated often the madness would become manageable.And less frightening.Whenever Laurel looked at the contact sheets that she had made of these men, she was struck either by how broadly they were smiling or how wistful and unthreatening their eyes really were.In the fall of her senior year, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Serena came to the family shelter.Serena told Laurel that things in her life had begun to unravel when she was fifteen.The final straw? Her father, who had been raising her alone and smacking her around since her mother had disappeared when she was five, pounded a sixteen-ounce glass jar of mayonnaise into the side of her face, blackening her eye and giving her a deep purple bruise the size of a softball along her cheek.For the first time in her life, she didn't try to hide the marks with makeup, partly because she couldn't--she would have needed an ice hockey goaltender's mask, not a little powder and blush--and partly because she just couldn't stand being beaten up anymore by her dad and wanted to see what would happen if people knew.She figured that things couldn't possibly get any worse.She was right.But they didn't get better, either, at least not for a very long while.After all, is it worse to have a roof over your head but a father who pummels you weekly, or to move from house to house--a night here, a night there, living often with strangers--before eventually winding up on the street?Serena hadn't been in homeroom that day sixty seconds when her teacher asked to see her, and within an hour her father was arrested and she was in foster care.Unfortunately, there wasn't an emergency placement available, and so she spent most of the next three weeks bunking with the families of different friends.She'd never been much of a student, and soon she gave up completely.Just stopped going to school.Within months, she wasn't exactly off the foster care radar screen, but she was one of five or six dozen system runaways and no one was even sure if she was still in the state.A week after Serena had arrived at the shelter and she and Laurel had grown comfortable with each other, Laurel asked to take her portrait, too.The homeless woman agreed.As Serena talked--continually rolling her black T-shirt up over her small stomach, trying to pull her jeans a bit farther down over her hips, pushing her long amber hair away from her eyes--Laurel photographed her.She would use the images for credit in a photography class, as she did many other pictures of the homeless she took.In addition, she planned to give Serena a set of the prints.The young woman wasn't exactly beautiful: She had been on the street far too long for that.Her face was hollow-cheeked, hard, the bones apparent and sharp, and she was thin to the point of emaciation.But she had eyes the blue of delft china, her nose was pert and small, and her smile was fetching.There was something seductive and wanton and undeniably interesting about the whole package.At the time, Laurel knew enough not to make any of the women or children who passed through the family shelter a personal reclamation project, both because she was still a student herself and because she was a volunteer who really didn't have the slightest idea what she was doing.She had experience, but no formal training as a social worker.Nevertheless, it was almost too tempting not to want to play God with a girl--and that's what she was, it was delusional feminism to call this starving sprite a woman--like Serena.She told herself that she could buy Serena some clothes that didn't make her look like a slut.She could help her find a job.Then an apartment.Isn't that what the BEDS professionals did?It was, of course, never that easy.Even if Laurel had been able to wave a wand and whisk Serena behind the counter of the McDonald's within walking distance on Cherry Street, the girl wouldn't have been paid nearly enough to afford an apartment in Burlington.At least not without subsidies.Or the help of one of the landlords in the city who worked with BEDS.Or, perhaps, a Rotarian father who was wealthy and generous and all too happy to foot her rent, as well as make sure she had extra money for groceries.Three days after Laurel took Serena's pictures, she returned to the shelter with a half-dozen prints that she thought the girl would like.It was a gloriously warm Indian summer afternoon, and she had imagined that she would share the photos with Serena and then walk with her west to the lake.There they'd find a bench by the boathouse with a view of the Adirondacks across the water, and they would discuss life's possibilities.Laurel would tell her about her family since Serena had volunteered so much about hers, and she would try to describe for her a world where normal people had normal relationships
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