Once upon a time there was a girl named Krystal Campagna, and she went without a real home for the first 18 years of her life. Born with drugs in her blood to a pair of abominable parents, and raised in locked basements, under iron fists and on city streets, she came to learn from an early age conflict in all of its forms: with others, with her environment and above all, with herself.
And then she was found. At the turn of 2005, the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth discovered her in Las Vegas, destitute and anguished. The NPHY provided her food and clothes and shelter, and love, and then gave her the most prodigious gift of all: a forum to tell her tale.
Not just as testimony to encourage other teens who share the plight she had endured for her entire youth, but also as a means of redemption—of redeeming those 18 years of pain and fear and abandonment from futile oblivion.
And so her life's master narrative was told, over and over—one time even in the pages of the Weekly. That was one year ago. Since then, much has changed in Krystal's pinpoint universe, right here in Las Vegas, and much has remained the same.
For one, she has become a woman. That at once becomes clear in her voice, now measured and oaked, like aged wine, and much less acidic than the tone with which she orated her tale last year. Moreover, change shows in her tattoos. When she was a child she thought as a child, and so she got a Nike swoosh cutting through a rainbow basketball inked onto her ankle. But now, with just one cycle of the moon before her 20th birthday, she has three new tattoos: a Wiccan star on her right forearm, symbolizing spirit, air, earth, wind and fire, and protection; on her upper right arm a blue and purple sun with a Gemini symbol in it; and on her upper left arm a heart, with a quote from Edgar Casey that would do her mentor at the NPHY, Kathleen Boutin, proud:
"Even the most fractured heart will respond to love."
Krystal has always been a small and sporty squirrel who happens to like other squirrels, and with that irrevocable homosexuality pulsating through her veins she scavenged Las Vegas for friends and a mate—the type who would accept her for who she is. And now she feels she has that in her new girlfriend, Jen Sump, a tolerant girl a bit older than Krystal who brings to their relationship all those inimitable qualities gained through experience: patience, placidity and perspective. And Jen also brings an artistic vocation for hairstyling, which is pure providence for Krystal, a girl who treats her squirrel's crop as part and parcel of her personality.
Krystal also has a new place to live. Off Tropicana Avenue and Boulder Highway, she rents a room in a house with two friends who are just as busy and on-the-go as she is. Since last summer she has lived in various places—just as she has done all her life—and though they have all been warm, safe and better than sleeping on friends' couches, as she used to do, she has yet to feel the stable, maternal embrace of a home. And so she has set for herself a severe resolution: to make a home out of a house that she owns by the time she reaches her first quarter century of life.
And further, her role at NPHY has evolved. She is a paid staffer, full-time, taking care of so many miscellaneous yet indispensable duties around the office that her boss, Boutin, an inexhaustible activist with a golden heart in her own right, says:
"Sometimes I think that without Krystal here, this whole place would fall apart."
Moreover, Krystal takes classes and training sessions to improve her skills in public speaking and social activism. She travels with Kathleen to participate in conferences on youth homelessness, and meetings meant to talk some sense into public officials who don't prioritize the Valley's homeless youth. All of which—combined with school, as she is now working toward her AA degree at the Community College of Southern Nevada, and her many trips to the dentist, as she is trying to make up for a decade without checkups—ensures her faithful presence at Starbucks, and keeps her too busy to get in trouble.
Yet, despite all the external changes, everything on the inside persists to be the same for Krystal Campagna, a young woman still seeking to discover herself in the aridity of this town. She still engages in daily warfare with stress, though now that enemy takes on various faces, and still cannot elude drama, which pursues her with the steadfastness of her own shadow, and still cannot shake the restlessness of her wanderer's spirit.
She has been unable—and perhaps even unwilling—to come to full reconciliation with her father, who used to abuse her, or her mother, who has been too inundated with drugs to care for Krystal. And so she still seeks counseling, if not for complexities directly related to her parents, then in all certainty those which could have been prevented if circumstances had been different.
And she still knows conflict; endures it, deals with it and strives like anyone else to prevail over it.
When that happens—if that happens—she will finally take rest in her very own home and put the final period to her incredible tale.