A Terrible Place To Raise Yourself

On her right ankle, she has a Nike swoosh cutting through a rainbow basketball. She has a shaved head now, but used to have short hair cropped in the popular fashion of male magazine models. She has a decathlete's body—shaped by years of basketball and softball and volleyball and swimming and a variety of other competitive sports—which is clothed in a baggy polo shirt and long, brown Dickies shorts.

Krystal also wears accessories: a silver ring, watch, bracelet, nine piercings (three in her left ear, four in her right; one under her lower lip and one on her eyebrow), and a plain white baseball cap—all of which evince careful regard and masterful coordination on her part. Although she has the tongue of a construction worker, her voice is soft, like her lips and legs. Her Korean eyes, inherited from her maternal ancestors, are delicate too; and for the totality of her life thus far—19 years, full of sound and fury, of tumult and volatility—they've effused streams of tears that have carried with them her endless suffering.

It's June 17, 2005—just another hot, windy day in the Valley—and she is sitting at her desk in the offices of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, the nonprofit organization which threw her a lifeboat four months ago when she was homeless and hungry, and whose members think that Krystal Campagna's life story is so poignant, and so germane, and so incredible, that her job with them, in essence, is to tell her tale.

In this past month she has told it—in bits and pieces, in fragments and summations—all over Las Vegas; told it to homeless teens looking for someone with whom they can relate, to good and bad politicians, to television cameras, radio hosts, and newspaper reporters looking for a heartrending story.

Here's how it goes:

The night before she slit her wrists, Krystal Campagna had been crying and screaming like a caged puppy. It was all she could do in her circumstance. Her dad had just busted her nose open, kicked her in the ass, and locked her in the cellar. But his abuse was not the only reason she took one brazen needle from her grandmother's sewing kit and tore into her own flesh with 14 gashes the next morning; no—she had suffered her father's inclement and excessive rage before, and while no one ever gets used to iron fists and horse kicks and constant imprisonments in a cellar with one impotent light and an inaccessible window, Krystal was conditioned from the nascent moments of her premature birth to endure anything.

There was more wearing down on her threadbare stamina that morning: her mother was an irredeemable drug addict, preoccupied with crystal methamphetamine since before Krystal was born; her brothers, Anthony and Sam, had just started to sink in the quagmire of drugs themselves; her friends were all but nonexistent, for few veterans of the foster-care system, such as herself, ever craft true, sustainable friendships; and by then she had no doubt that she was a lesbian, but could not be open with her sexuality on account of her dad's intolerance, and the widespread rumors that a young man in her town who had recently been murdered was slain for promulgating his homosexuality.

All of which Krystal had pondered in great anguish during the sleepless hours after her father released her from the cellar on the condition that she quit bellowing.

Also on her mind before she slashed her wrists, however, were her goals.

Ever since her childhood, when the family court of Santa Clara County spun her between living under her father's tyranny, on the living-room floors of unpredictable men with her mother, and in group shelters, Krystal had—if only to keep from drowning in the whirlpool of those formative years—kept her eyes on her goals. She had formulated them at an age too young to remember in exact, but it wasn't until she met, in the seventh grade, an exemplary young teacher who embodied everything she wanted to be that she acquired the language to articulate them: play college basketball, earn a degree, make a career out of helping youth in need, and coach kids in that sport she so loves. Just like Ms. Brownson.

Thus, Krystal says, she had no intentions of actual suicide when she cut herself. She had destinations yet to reach.

"I was just tired, tired of it all—my dad, the abuse, my family, the drugs—and I was tired of the pain," says Krystal.

Utterly depressed, and her faculties not yet matured, Krystal felt defenseless. She took desperate measures to empower herself.

She says: "I tried to drown out the pain my dad caused me with pain I could bring upon myself."

And so she cut her wrists. Fourteen times.

It was the terror-filled fall of 2001, and Krystal was 15 years old, just beginning her sophomore stint at Willow Glen High School, in San Jose, California.

With those 14 cuts, Krystal won herself a 72-hour hold in the psychiatric ward of California's Fremont Hospital

"I saw a lot of real crazy girls in there," she says. Some of them were in straitjackets; others, so sedated on their endless medications that they walked about the fourth floor of the hospital as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool. And the ceaseless sounds some made throwing chairs against walls, or scratching the windows with paper clips, was enough to lead Krystal to a firm conclusion:

I am definitely not one of them, she told herself.

The thought was a dose of reassurance, because up until then Krystal had been feeling like a sailor stranded at sea, in the midst of a storm. And her only source of stability, Daphne Brownson—her teacher, coach and friend since the seventh grade and her life's sole mentor—had just moved 500 miles away, to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Krystal did not dare tell the doctors, in the course of their psychotherapeutic tests, her one and only concern at the time, in fear that it would land her a longer stay.

"All I wanted was to get to Las Vegas," she says.

As soon as she was released from the psychiatric ward, Krystal submitted an appeal through her social worker to move to Las Vegas. The family court judge presiding over her case must have had many honorable reservations toward Krystal's request, because with little foresight as to the young girl's native resolve he set forth several difficult prerequisites for her transplantation. Yet, as he looked at the 13 folders which make up Krystal Campagna's case file—each thick with heartbreaking photos and reports that detail the upbringing of a chronically beaten and abandoned girl—the judge understood that Krystal needed a new beginning; especially if she were to have any chance at reaching the tenable goals she had unloaded on his bench, letter by letter, minutes before.

Krystal went through great pains to meet all the necessary requirements, and with no foreboding as to the travails which awaited her in the city infamous for its transient atmosphere, she departed.

"I wasn't that scared," Krystal says. "Throughout all my life I've learned to prepare myself for anything. I've had to."

She was not given much of a chance from the start. Born on Father's Day to a dissolute mother three months before she was due, Krystal emerged blue, breathless and no bigger than the size of a Coke can. The doctors thought she was dead. They placed her in an incubator in San Jose's Valley Medical Center, the last safeguarded bed she would sleep in for the next 19 years, and were prepared to sign the same date to both her birth and death certificates: June 19, 1986.

Krystal's mother, Michelle Scarsdale, a nomadic woman of four clamorous marriages and countless occupations, whose sole constant in life has been the orgasmic upper known as crystal meth, had been abusing that drug, among others, while she was pregnant with Krystal. Yet, it was not a sick joke on her part, or a decision made under the influence to name her child after the drug that had usurped her willpower at an early age. That credit belonged to Krystal's father, Anthony Campagna. He was a Harley Davidson enthusiast with the stout posture, olive skin and quick temper of American cinema's notorious Italian crime bosses, and he changed the name on his only daughter's birth certificate—from Michelle to Krystal—one week after she was born.

"I don't know how she survived her childhood," says Brownson, who today is a dean of students at Canyon Springs High School. "It's incredible."

That's because, for the first 14 years of her life, Krystal never enjoyed a moment of peace.

Sometimes she lived in her grandmother's house, where her dad (who lived at his mother's place for the first 38 years of his life) would beat her with such vicious force—punching her in the face, kicking her in the ribs, locking her in the cellar for hours on end—that she could not sleep on account of the pain, and more so, the fear of pain. The worst nights, however, were when he threw Krystal out of the house, locking all the doors behind her.

(And thus, sometimes she lived on the couch of a charitable friend, or on the good graces of an affable charity.)

Sometimes she lived with her mother, who never in reality had a permanent place to stay, or much of anything to eat, but struggled to make it from one day to the next on other people's benevolence. After the age of 7, Krystal would not see or speak to her mother again until eight years later, when it was Krystal who was in urgent need of goodwill.

Sometimes she lived in the Santa Clara Children's Shelter, a closed campus built in the fashion of small, pre-modern colleges, with its classrooms, cafeteria, health clinic, single-sex living quarters and spacious gymnasium. The cottages there provided Krystal with a bed to lie in every night, but the truculent atmosphere wouldn't permit her much sleep. The San Jose Mercury News called the shelter, in its investigation of the institute during Krystal's stay there, "a den of daily violence which ... promotes self-destructive behavior ... and an opportunity for the abused to become the abuser." Her only solaces in that world of parentless children were her effectual cottage counselors and the engaging classes she took at the shelter's school.

And sometimes it felt like she lived in courthouses. With more than two dozen hearings in the Santa Clara County Family Court, Krystal came to know the system well—well enough, she says, to understand that it was not going to do anything but perpetuate that atrocity of living situations.

During those abominable years, Krystal had few outlets. Crying was one of them.

"As a child I once built up huge walls, and that wasn't healthy—it became destructive," she says. "Now, I'm sensitive: you yell, I cry."

Another was surfing. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, Krystal would escape San Jose with the complicity of her brothers to Santa Cruz, California, the little coastal town famous for its breathtaking beaches and carefree ambience retained from decades past. There she enjoyed the interminable waves, as well as the notion of security which only the scents and rhythms of the great Pacific can provide.

But above all, she released her stress by bouncing a basketball. At the age of 7, when she says she spent the majority of her days being grounded, or locked out of her grandmother's house by her dad, and thus began to learn the art of optimizing her solitude, Krystal came to discover the therapy of dribbling. She dribbled a basketball, or anything that could be dribbled, with every opportunity she got; just dribbling—dribbling, dribbling, dribbling—at school, in her front yard, or even on her bedroom floor; dribbling the ball with unthinking yet concentrated rhythm—dribbling away the hours, the anguish, the confusion and the frustration she could feel tightening in her stomach.

"It was a way to let off steam," she states. "It's always made me feel like I'm in another world."

And it helped her formulate one of her goals: to be a basketball player. As her habit of dribbling continued, her love for the game of basketball took shape. When she started, she played only against invisible opponents and the toughest competition she could find—herself: practicing her jump shot and ball-handling skills with the persistence of a player whose vision of success is trying every day to be better than she was the last.

The diligence served her well, for during her intermittent stays at the Santa Clara Children's Shelter, Krystal initiated coed basketball games during free time in which she not only held her ground against the aggressive boys, but also schooled some of the more arrogant ones.

Also during those years of bouncing around, Krystal had the good fortune of landing in Ms. Brownson's seventh-grade P.E. class at Willow Glen Middle School, in San Jose, California. Daphne Brownson was a novice teacher, modern and relatable, who shortly before had earned a degree in secondary education from San Jose State University, where she played on the Lady Spartans basketball team. Like the best of teachers, she showed genuine and incorruptible interest in all of her students—offering an ear to their myriad conflicts, a few words of support when beseeched, and, her most effective tutorial device, her daily example. All of which Krystal, a child desperate for a role model, latched onto.

"Right away," Krystal says, unable to conceal her enthusiasm. "I knew she was my hero."

The teacher took a liking to Krystal as well. She perceived her as unique.

"I noticed Krystal because she was a very dedicated person, and she always had a basketball in her hands," the former shooting guard recalls. "Plus, she was an exceptional student who became very helpful in class."

The relationship was an introduction to the pleasures of teaching for Daphne, and a bit of providence for Krystal, who, by studying her teacher's flesh-and-blood biography, learned to pinpoint her own goals.

"I told myself I'm going to play college basketball, like Daphne," Krystal says in her unequivocal manner. "And then I'm going to coach in middle or high school."

Daphne says she was impressed by the young girl's aspirations. But it wasn't just Krystal's goals that caught her attention.

"I thought she was a tomboy," Daphne claims.

She could not have been more accurate. Krystal had indeed been a tomboy—had felt the natural inclination to put on baggy jeans, athletic shoes and a boyish temperament for as long as she could remember. Yet her dad—and for the most part, her immediate society—disapproved. Unable to overcome their stern deprecation, Krystal wore dresses and hair down to her butt with the awkwardness of a basketball player running up and down the court in high heels. According to Daphne, it took a sit-down chat and a precept from her own experience to set Krystal at ease:

Just be yourself, she told her, and that's all that you can do.

It was during that time that Krystal also came to terms with her sexuality. Boys, by and large, comprised her circle of friends, and she looked at them just as that—friends. They were the ones who played sports with her, joked with her, got dirty with her. But it was girls whom she liked.

"I've always liked the connection and intimacy I feel with girls," says Krystal, who has never dated a male. "And, well ... I just really like girls."

Krystal's dad—a surreptitious man who now, still living in California, sends Krystal periodic pictures of himself on his beloved motorcycles, with their license plates punched out, and who refuses to participate in this story—had started to suspect that his daughter was a lesbian. This was unacceptable in his judgment, and he rarely missed a chance to make clear his aversions for having a "dyke" for a daughter.

He was stricken with the paranoia that basketball was convoluting Krystal's sexual orientation; "and so," says Daphne, who coached Krystal in her freshman year on the girls basketball team at Willow Glen High School, "he did everything in his power to stop Krystal from playing."

An example:

Krystal's dad once set fire to her basketball shoes and game jersey—the former belonged to her; the latter, the school. Another time, Krystal says, during a school assembly in which Krystal and her teammates were being recognized for their accomplishments on the court, Krystal's dad caused such a disturbance that administrators had to not only escort him out of the gymnasium but also ban him from school grounds, permanently.

Despite all of her dad's absurd antics, Krystal continued to play.

"It's amazing how dedicated she is to basketball," says Krystal's former girlfriend Mackenzie Cunningham, a straightforward young girl who remains active in Krystal's life.

If nothing else, the basketball court for Krystal was a sanctuary in which she could focus, and a refuge from the storms that loomed outside of those four lines.

Her misery began to pour down on her in torrents by September of 2001—the beginning of her sophomore year . On top of her dad's abuse, and her mom's drug-induced absence, Krystal found herself battling anxiety, bulimia, an ulcer, chronic asthma, instantaneous and unforeseeable seizures, and a self-destructive depression that hit its low point on the day she slit her wrists.

She also began her ephemeral yet disastrous affair with drugs of all sorts: marijuana, speed, ecstasy, mushrooms, steroids and various inhalants. It was an undulating fling whose worst moments were when the substances made her feel like the people she had come to despise most: her parents.

Moreover, Daphne was no longer around. The previous summer she had left San Jose, a city whose real-estate market was reaching astronomical heights in the midst of the great technology boom, and taken up a position teaching high school in Las Vegas, where living expenses were much friendlier to teachers.

Krystal was convinced that, if she were to have any chance of not merely surviving, but reaching the shores of her salvation, she would have to follow her guiding star to Southern Nevada.

And so, at 15 years old and having just returned from her 72-hour stay at the California psychiatric ward, Krystal had no option but to try to meet the judge's requirements when she submitted a request for transplantation to Las Vegas. One was to obtain five authoritative letters testifying to her ability to adapt, and that corroborated her desire to move there. She did this, garnering two letters from her cottage counselors at the Santa Clara Children's Shelter, one from her mental health advocate, one from her lawyer, and one penned in her own hand. Yet the more daunting requirement was finding a legal guardian who would assume responsibility for her in Las Vegas. She knew only Daphne there, and her old teacher already had too many of her own responsibilities to take on the vigilant role. Thus, Krystal did the inconceivable: she called upon her mother to move to Las Vegas with her.

It was a long shot, with odds not even the boldest gamblers in Vegas would risk, for Krystal's mother had been absent from her life for the past seven years. "She had been dating people to survive," Krystal states, "which meant she was doing a lot of bouncing around. She had never been a settled person."

Her mother, Michelle, was an adopted child who, like Krystal, came to know the foster care system well. While young she had given great effort to abstain from the drugs, promiscuity and self-abuse which plagued her assorted environments; and, for the most part, she did.

"But when her brother died of drugs," says Krystal, "she gave up [her resistance], and started using."

Crystal methamphetamine was the gravest of her habits, and just as its grasp on her soul had been so tight that she was unable to give up the drug while pregnant with Krystal, she still cannot turn it down, even to this day—clandestine in Utah, and suffering from leukemia.

Nevertheless, Krystal called her mother and tried to be as concise as possible.

"I told her, 'These are my goals, Mom, and these are my dreams. I have to go to Las Vegas to realize them, and I need you to come with me.'"

To Krystal's surprise, her mom said yes.

And just like that, Krystal was starting a new life in Las Vegas.

Little did she suspect, however, that it would be just as precarious as the one she was leaving behind.

It started out well. Krystal moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Maryland Parkway and Karen Avenue with her mother and her stepfather, and for the first time in a long time, she enjoyed a sense of peace.

However: One week later, without warning, the State of Nevada placed Krystal in a cramped room at the (now defunct) Nevada Homes for Youth campus in Downtown Las Vegas, with hardened girls fresh out of the Caliente Youth Center. It was a joint decision between the Nevada and California foster-care systems, meant to ease Krystal's transition into the new environment. For the next four months, Krystal says, she was surrounded by girls abusing drugs, each other, and oftentimes themselves, with far too few administrators bold enough to stop them. It was her good fortune that the state officials in charge of NVHY permitted Krystal to leave campus grounds and continue with her sophomore year at Valley High School, where Daphne was teaching and coaching various sports, and where Krystal had enrolled as soon as she arrived in Las Vegas. But it was her misfortune that she was the only one at NVHY with such a privilege, for it incited an overt bitterness toward her amongst the other girls.

She endured it only by keeping her eyes focused on school and sports. Each morning started with a long bus ride to Valley High School on county transit. She went to all of her classes and maintained a strong C average. After school she played any position on the softball field Daphne needed occupied by a strong arm and an intense will to win. She then rode the bus back to the NVHY campus (a decrepit building with one kitchen and one formidable bathroom), completed her day's homework and drifted into her sleepless dreams as the incessant winds which ripped through the Valley that spring of 2002 carried in a new day.

"She had matured a lot," says Daphne, who had been shocked by Krystal's unexpected arrival in Vegas. "She was a child trying to raise herself—trying to hold her life together."

She was released from NVHY that summer and returned to her mother's apartment on Maryland and Karen, where she celebrated her 16th birthday with hope that things were getting better.

And she had good reason: Her stepfather, Eric Scarsdale, a volatile alcoholic who shared his wife's penchant for crystal meth, was out of the house on one of his sporadic trips to California for reasons he kept to himself; Krystal's friends, who were growing in not only number but also unity, often came over because Krystal's mom was tolerant of the marijuana and lesbianism that their parents forbade; and Krystal, now safely open with her sexuality, enjoyed a relationship with her girlfriend, Diana, who slept over on most nights.

Furthermore, Krystal was working at the Galleria Mall, getting her feet wet in the pelagic waters of sex, and, also for the first time, experiencing a smooth relationship with her mother, who had seemed to elude crystal meth's ironclad grip, at least for awhile. It was a state of relative calm and smooth sailing.

Then came a storm.

With his many vices, Eric returned just after the summer heat passed, and in a gust of fury swept out Krystal's friends, girlfriend and all the food and drinks from the apartment, save for beer; Krystal's relationship with Diana dissipated, as did the harmony with her mom, who returned to her spiral, drowning in the eddy of crystal meth; at school, Krystal couldn't concentrate in class—wearied from restless nights of her mom and Eric yelling and fighting and doing more and more drugs and telling Metro none of it will happen again, and hungry from not eating in three days; and then her brother Anthony moved in and her mom got him—already a heavy pot smoker—addicted to crystal meth; nights in the apartment passed in sheer chaos; and now, before Krystal knew what was going on, it was 3 o'clock on a windy April night and her mom, having just thrown Krystal into a wall, was coming after her only daughter. Krystal was crying and screaming, with a knife she had retrieved from her bedroom in her hand, unsure what she wanted to do with it. Krystal's mother snatched it, and then stood over her: She was a virago, who, at 5 feet, 8 inches and 130 pounds, had the uncanny ability to grow, like a tsunami, when she got angry. Krystal began crying even louder. Krystal's mom, her head nodding, knife in hand, said to Krystal, "I'll give you something to cry about"; but luckily, at that moment, Metro showed up and put an end to the commotion. The police officers shook their heads slowly, telling Krystal:

"You need to emancipate yourself."

With that, Krystal plunged into the deep seas of homelessness. She bounced from one friend's sofa to another's—a perilous mode of vagrancy called couch-surfing—and in doing so, contracted a variety of illnesses that kept her from school. She missed more days than she made, and so her junior year was but another piece of the tragedy.

Krystal saw that she was not the only shipwrecked youth in the Las Vegas Valley. In fact, statistics from the Clark County Division of Family and Youth Services show there were 3,513 of them in that year of 2003. Yet she did not want to drift into the abyss, as she saw happen to many homeless youths. And so, with her eyes still on her goals, Krystal reconciled with her mother and moved back into her apartment.

And then:

On April 18, Krystal met a new girl named Mackenzie. She was a tall lesbian with a slight figure and oceanic eyes whom everyone called Mickie. Krystal was a cute girl, in need of emotional support; Mickie was riots of fun, with a huge heart and an eternal ear. They hit it off. Mickie moved in during that summer and wasted no time in offering Krystal her critical deduction: "Dude, you're mom's f--kin' crazy." Together the girls tried to survive on a beggar's diet and a busy schedule that kept them away from that intolerable place, where random people came and went, and where, poor and irascible, Eric told Krystal in one ear, "It's your fault—you're the only reason we're all in this shitty town," and in the other, her mom: "You know, nobody really even wants you. You're uncontrollable." But soon the girls caught the contagion of yelling and fighting rampant in the apartment. Krystal and Mickie began to squabble with each other: one cursing, the other crying, and then both girls punching. It got ugly. Both girls say the apartment's infested turmoil was largely responsible for Krystal's constant trips to the emergency room (one month, Mickie had to rush her in on seven occasions, which included treatments for acute headaches and heart irregularities), and the instability of their relationship.

Soon thereafter, Mickie, who had just turned 18, secured an apartment less than a stone's throw away. And in a moment of sheer temerity she approached Krystal's mom and said:

"Krystal is going with me."

Without blinking, Krystal's mom responded, "Whatever. Just don't come back."

They did come back, however, after their six-month lease expired and the landlord denied their request for another, citing late payments on their rent. But not to the ruinous apartment on Maryland and Karen. Krystal's mother, then working at a collection agency, had moved to a three-bedroom house in a desolate neighborhood on Cheyenne Avenue and Cimarron Road with her husband, her son Anthony, and one of her co-workers.

Although it was a new setting, the same crazy atmosphere abounded. According to Mickie, an electrical technician by trade but a young woman of spontaneous vocations at heart, she and Krystal would come home each night to a house crowded with people who did drugs, who came and went, who stole, who cursed and fought throughout the night, who ravaged through the food Mickie would buy specifically for her and Krystal (whose dietary requirements are unique due to her assorted ailments) and who made that living situation an environment fit for neither saints nor sinners, but only those too strung out to know the difference between the two.

Mickie maintained her composure in the traffic of that household, if not for her own sake, then for that of her girlfriend, whom she calls very emotional; but before long, it became too hectic. Mickie says the chaos drove her out, in June of 2004, bringing her eventful relationship with Krystal to an end.

One of the hardest aspects of living in Summerlin with her mom, Krystal says, was being so far away from the Gay and Lesbian Center, on Commercial Center Drive (off of East Sahara Avenue).

For Krystal, the Gay and Lesbian Center—typically known as "The Center"—was an oasis in which she could expend her restless energies in a safe, productive manner or just relax and hang out. The Center is large, with, among other things, a pool table, a room in which artists can exorcise their demons, and a youth group that cultivates robust friendships. There Krystal had found Diana and Mickie, and many other people with whom she could relate and be herself. She also met Bob Bellis there.

A native of Las Vegas with a vocal grudge against social injustice, Bob joined The Center's board of directors in 2000. The organization, deep in monetary and political troubles, was barely breathing. It needed a new executive director. Bob volunteered himself for the position, and despite the many obstacles, he resuscitated The Center to the respectable position it presently holds in the community.

"I remember when Krystal first came to the center," says Bob, a towering man who looks as if he's perpetually returning from the sunny beaches of San Diego with his solid tan and full set of blond hair. "She looked very young and innocent."

And she looked good, say many of her admirers at The Center. The widespread interest Krystal received on account of her cuddlesome eyes and studly charm, coupled with her lifelong famish for positive attention, earned Krystal the reputation of a player. And so, in that rare congregation of youthful lesbians from around the valley, Krystal made many friends and enemies whom she would miss while living in Summerlin.

She missed a lot of school, too. The bus route from her house on Cheyenne and Cimarron to Valley High School was a long one. And so she would often arrive late, or not at all. One of Krystal's teachers pinched her heart with a keen observation: "You're one of the best students ... when you're here." Her grades suffered as a result of her truancy, and before she knew it, she had fallen much too far off track to graduate with her class. Her academic counselors at Valley High said that she would have to repeat her senior year.

No longer having Mickie to lean on, the house in Summerlin became too much for Krystal. With all of those fears that had been born and fostered in San Jose—the violence, the yelling, the aloneness, and the constant premonitions of death—now suffocating her in that house, Krystal was forced to make an urgent decision: stay here, and have a bed to lay my head on; or leave and have none.

But before Krystal could make a choice, her mom made it for her: She kicked Krystal out.

Krystal was homeless once again. From her prior experiences couch-surfing, Krystal knew that if she were going to stay afloat she would have to keep moving toward her goals. Thus, under Las Vegas' infernal summer sun with no place to call home but whichever friend's sofa happened to be available to her, Krystal tried to focus her energy in a positive direction.

Which is not easy, in that homelessness in the Las Vegas Valley is a cruel climate, full of unique hazards.

It's no secret that drug use is virulent in Las Vegas. According to the last annual report card assigned by the Children's Advocacy Alliance, a Henderson-based organization that collects data from a variety of local, state and national resources, methamphetamine use among teens in Las Vegas is the highest in the nation.

The report card also states that Las Vegas owns the highest rate of teen prostitution. In 2003, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, according to their annual reports, arrested 148 girls under the age of 18 for soliciting sex.

Kathleen Boutin, executive director of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, which opened in May of this year on the 4800 block of Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas Valley's first drop-in shelter for homeless youth, says: "With all the drugs and prostitution out there, it's inevitable that kids on the streets are going to be in danger."

And it is probable that those kids will get into trouble, Krystal says, simply because Las Vegas doesn't offer enough positive things for its youth to do. The fear among youth advocates is that wandering teens—restless by nature in most cases—without productive outlets come to suffer the same immured energy and impotent rage as an artist without a medium; a condition which leaves these teens idle, either looking for fun in all the wrong places or accumulating tension on a mass scale.

For herself, Krystal evaded the encroaching drugs and the lure of prostitution by keeping her eyes on her goals, and her feet sloshing in that direction. She stayed in school, and worked ephemeral jobs that didn't offer enough money or hours to deliver her from the streets.

Of course, she also had to elude the villainous desert heat. As of 2002, the Clark County Coroner's office has reported, 13 homeless people have died on account of complications from overexposure to intense heat. Severe dehydration is one of them.

For individuals who happen to be homeless, the treatment they receive from government, and the community in large part, is just as inclement as the weather, says Leroy Pelton, president of Southern Nevada Advocates for Homeless People, the nonprofit watchdog organization founded by Pelton and his tireless friend, Franciscan Brother David Buer.

"We spend more money on police response than facilities—than meeting people's survival needs," says Pelton, who also is a professor in the school of social work at UNLV. "Take a look and you'll see that Las Vegas is lacking in compassion. [Homeless persons] are made to feel unwanted in our community."

The National Coalition for the Homeless came to the same conclusion when they dubbed Las Vegas with the ignominious reputation in 2003 of being the meanest city in America, and then the fourth cruelest in 2004. The Washington-based organization ranks major metropolitan cities each year based upon the city's "anti-homeless laws," the severity with which those laws are enforced, as well as the city's "general political climate."

"Mostly though," says Mickie—having listened to Krystal talk on several occasions about the various dangers which present themselves to homeless teens, such as sexually transmitted diseases and undesired pregnancies—"it's tough to trust people in Las Vegas: There's a lot of deception out there. Plus, it's a terrible place to raise anyone—especially yourself."

According to Boutin, there are more pedophiles in Las Vegas than anywhere else in the nation.

Krystal sought refuge from these perils with her friends. For the next six months she looked to them for not just a sofa and roof, but also the support and security that come with the home life she had never enjoyed.

Yet Krystal says that the people she thought were her friends retreated.

"A lot of her acquaintances weren't there for her," says the girl whom Krystal calls her biggest influence today, Melissa Goodwin, a 19-year-old photographer whose two great loves are people of every kind and the world's endless cultures and subcultures (and thus she's an anthropologist in training). "They viewed her as too needy. But they have no idea what it's like, just as I don't know what it's like to be homeless: trying to feed yourself, protect yourself, raise yourself—they've never had to deal with that."

"A lot of people pitied me," says Krystal, "they wouldn't let me grow."

And further, "Pity is like a drug, but worse," she says, referring to not only its addictive power, but also its sedentary effects.

Krystal claims that during this time of transience, she was hungry, paranoid and neck-deep in her lifelong depression. "But most of all, I was lonely."

Her friends were not the only ones to neglect Krystal in her time of crisis, according to Boutin. She says that homeless youth are, by and large, overlooked by governmental entities.

"[Homeless youth] are not on anybody's radar screens," says Boutin, who at 37 possesses the appearance, energy and brazenness of someone half her age. "I don't know if it's oblivion or apathy—but if I could, I'd look them right in the eye and say:

"It's absolutely reckless not to look at youth."

The problem is, homeless youth—whose more appropriate classification, Boutin expounds, is "unaccompanied minors"—are often clumped with the adult population, even though they share few affinities with their older counterparts.

Standing on survey research and her own hands-on experience, Boutin claims:

The reproaches by which homeless adults are commonly associated—alcoholism, gambling addictions, mental health issues—are scarce among unaccompanied minors, many of whom (80 percent, NPHY found) were pushed into homelessness on account of abuse, either physical or sexual, or oppression. (The Center reports that they see over 80 kids each month who were exiled from their homes on account of their homosexuality; a sign of Las Vegas' abounding conservatism, says Bellis, and derivative of the city's religious beginnings.)

"These are unaccompanied minors—not adults," Boutin says. "They can't take on what homeless adults can."

And unaccompanied minors—who, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population—do not receive the attention from policy makers that homeless adults get. Which, in turn, means government officials set aside little, if any, funding for them.

Boutin says money is the second-biggest issue; raising consciousness that kids like Krystal who have neither a fixed residence nor adequate supervision are suffering, is the first.

"Money will come when the awareness hits," Boutin says.

Paula Haynes-Green, services coordinator for the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission committee on homelessness, which is at the forefront of the Valley's battle against the social crisis, says:

"The committee has a lot of sensitivity toward unaccompanied minors, just as they are concerned with all the subpopulations." And further: "The degree of focus the committee gives them is being worked on now."

Some nights, she just walked. And thought.

With her irreducible possessions, and no place to call home, Krystal would walk against the resistance of the autumnal wind, or under the December rain, accompanied by nobody and nothing—as even the colossal summer bugs had scurried back to their habitations for the season—except her thoughts.

She is an overanalyzer about everything, she confesses; and so when she walked, she thought. Just thinking—thinking, thinking, thinking—all night long. The inexorable and redundant thoughts were like a thousand needles in her eyelids, and for the first time in her life she was walking without direction.

She thought about her father, about the days he used to hit her, and kick her and imprison her in her grandmother's cellar; and about how he begs her now to come home—home, in California—but she can't, won't, because that's not a life she wants to go back to.

She thought about her friends, who were at that moment sleeping with their families, or each other, and about how she feels so disconnected from them, which hurts, a lot, because she needs somebody, something to care for—to keep her mind off herself, if nothing else. And she thought about how deserted she feels, and how her friends said, "It's because you're always so sad," and how she then responded, from the very pit of her stomach, "If you'd been through what I went through, you'd see how hard it is to be happy."

She thought about Daphne, and about how disappointed her hero would be in her if she didn't reach her goals; and about how she is no longer moved by the fear of pain—but instead, by the fear of disappointing the people who believe in her. Like Daphne. She's terrified that she might fail their precious faith, and thus lose them; and then she thought about how nothing is more tragic than losing someone who cares for you, who wants to see you grow, because if there was one thing Krystal had learned by then it was that those people are a scarce minority.

And so she thought, I need to get back on course. Now.

Krystal went to The Center and asked for help in getting her life back on solid ground. They referred her to Kevin Morris, an advocate at Westcare Emergency Shelter in North Las Vegas who immediately went to work on Krystal's case. It was the end of December, 2004—in the midst of the wettest winter on record in Las Vegas—and Morris' objective was to get Krystal going on a new year that would be much better than its antecedent.

In the first week of January he arranged for Krystal to live with a social worker, Jessica Reyes, whose apartment was thick with the smell of cats.

Krystal, with her bare-bones luggage, moved into Reyes' apartment, on Flamingo Road and Tamarus Street. She got back into the daily grind of school, sports, work and socializing.

By the end of January, however, the arrangement at Jessica's place dissolved.

Retaining her rights as guardian and tenant of the apartment, Jessica set forth certain rules, such as being in by 10 o'clock every night. Krystal failed to abide by them. Krystal claims Jessica was capricious; Jessica could not be reached for this story.

In the end, Krystal was once again without a home.

After a brief stay at the house of Melissa Goodwin—Krystal's best friend today and a volunteer coordinator at The Center—Krystal went back to Kevin Morris at Westcare.

This time, they set her up with the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth.

Krystal recalls: "Kevin asked me if I knew Bob Bellis, and I said, 'Of course I know Bob.'"

She had remembered Bob from his days as executive director at The Center, but he had since taken up a position as special projects coordinator with NPHY, where his hard-nosed pedagogy and teddy-bear heart were apt for the parentless kids he would try to reach out to on the streets of Las Vegas.

NPHY—a small outreach organization with an annual budget of $1.3 million, but which in reality is fueled by the inflexible resolve of its founder, Kathleen Boutin ("We are going to eliminate homeless youth")—believed that Krystal, being homeless, destitute, 18, in school, and goal-oriented, met all the requirements of their StepUp program, which provides financial assistance to emancipated youths.

"We thought Krystal was unique because of her drive—to finish school, play basketball, and go on with her life," Bob says. "But she needed a lot of help."

And so they gave it to her. They bought her some food and clothes; they helped her to get her license, and then a car; they assisted her into her own apartment, as well as with the accompanying rent and bills; and in late March, they gave her a job at NPHY that provides her with not only a check, but a chance to get started on one of her goals: helping youths in need.

"Our experience has been that people with real-life experience are more effective in what we try to accomplish than licensed professionals," says Boutin, a Henderson native and a former runaway who spent more than two years in the Nevada state foster-care system.

Bellis, whose parents raised more than 80 foster children and whose brother is homeless, says: "Everyone here [at NPHY] has a story—it helps people relate."

And further: "It's those stories you hear, like Krystal's, that keep you going."

She sits at her desk across from Bob Bellis in their humble office, which is kept cool by NPHY's reliable air conditioner, a godsend on a summer day like this: 100-degree heat, and 40-mph winds.

In her polo shirt and long Dickies shorts, Krystal reclines in her seat with the languid posture of a teenage boy, or of a grandfather who has just told a hearty tale.

And, in fact, she has: Yesterday, June 16, 2005, she stood before the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Commission, a consortium of elected officials from various local governments who gathered at Henderson City Hall to hear Clark County Manager Thom Reilly present the new battle plan for the Valley's attack on homelessness, and told her tale.

In the capacity of her new job, Krystal's objective was to raise awareness of the plight and neglect suffered by the street wanderers camouflaged in the transient streets, the exiled gays and lesbians, the kids fresh out of the foster-care system with no place to go, the couch-surfers—all considered homeless, and all enduring an intolerable condition. And so she told her tale to the politicians, and to the media who had attended the event looking for a story.

She says that tonight, after work, she will go home. And then, as she does every night, she'll pray. She says she'll repeat her canonical prayers—the "Our Father", the "As I lay down," the "Hail Mary"—and then she will ask God's protection: for all the people who are struggling out there, whether it be with the streets, each other, or their own hearts; for her friends, the good and the bad; for her family, toward whom she says she has cast away her anger in the last year and even come to forgive; and for herself, who, despite riding a wave of good fortune, continues to struggle with a depression that keeps her eyes moist with tears and an insecurity that makes her feel very alone.

And then she'll pray for the strength to pursue her goals.