The Never List

greater one that Child Protective Services managed to forget about this little corner of the world. Apparently the city of New Orleans had chaos enough to deal with elsewhere, and after a brief, perfunctory interview, the social workers had left them alone.
    For years that brother was just about all Tracy had in the way of familial love and affection, and she fended for the two of them with all the fierceness I came to know was in her. Her mother provided little if anything for them. She rarely ate, so consumed was she by the drug, and there was never much food in the house, certainly not enough for both kids. So Tracy had gone out onto the streets of New Orleans to build an entirely different sort of life for them. In any other city, that might not have been possible, but in New Orleans, alternative lifestyles took on a new meaning.
    Over time Tracy ingratiated herself into the world of street performer culture—would-be life dropouts and buskers looking to get discovered, while making their daily bread in service of the touristswho swamped the streets. Tracy and Ben became their orphaned mascots, and they in turn protected the children from the horrors of nightlife in the city.
    Tracy was a clever young girl who learned all the tricks—magic, juggling, acrobatics. She also had a gift for storytelling and charmed tourists and fellow street performers alike with her precocity. The other minstrels built a special dais for her in a back alley of the French Quarter. She would stand and recite poems or tell stories to the gathering crowd. Inevitably, as her audience dispersed, Tracy would overhear the wife in a couple saying they ought to call someone, someone ought to adopt her. Tracy used to dream of that—that some rich tourist would come along, fall in love with her and her brother, and take them away from their pathetic little strain of existence.
    Sometimes they would stay out all night in the Quarter, Ben tucked away in an alley on a pile of dirty old blankets, but never out of her eyesight. She’d watch the drunks scuffle home and the prostitutes she mostly knew by name wandering back from their johns. Eventually the city would go quiet in the hour or so before dawn, and only then would she gather Ben up, sleepy-eyed, and trudge back to their grimy apartment. Their mother never asked any questions.
    Tracy rarely went to school, and after a while the truant officers, just as overwhelmed as Child Protective Services, didn’t even bother her. But she read like a maniac. Autodidact, she would always say, and I’ve never seen a more perfect example. The owner of a used book store on Bourbon Street would slip her books as long as she returned them quickly. She read everything, from Jane Eyre to The Stranger to The Origin of Species , waiting out the long days on the sidewalks of the city, oblivious to the noise and smells around her.
    She and Ben just barely managed to stay alive with the coins they gathered over the course of the day. They supplemented their meager food supply by grabbing scraps of beignets tossed by tourists or stopping in at the transvestite bar around the corner after hours for leftovers. Tracy put up a strong front, seeming to take it all in stride, and even handed over to her mother a share of their money when they had a little extra. That at least kept her quiet and out of their hair.
    When Tracy became a teenager, her crowd morphed into the street kids her own age. The Goth kids. They dressed in black and dyed their hair dark shades of red, purple, or black. They wore chunky jewelry dangling from black strips of leather, bold rings with bloodred fake gemstones, and from their piercings hung silver-plated skeletons or crucifixes. Tracy’s favorite symbol, ironically, was the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of eternal life.
    Some of the kids got into heroin. Tracy wouldn’t touch the stuff, associating it with her mother. She drank a little and got into some trouble, but nothing that would get her locked up where she couldn’t protect Ben.
    By then he had taken up the charge on the performer front. He was a talented acrobat, having befriended one of the Quarter’s old-timers who mentored him. Some days he could collect ten full dollars, and then they’d go into a bar and order a giant plate of fries and two half-pints. Those were the good days.
    Unfortunately, the bars of New Orleans had everything to offer. Straight, gay, transgender. Dancing, leather, S&M. No one carded. In the strange