FINDING A WAY OUT

GREENSBORO -- Sometimes at night Anita wakes up shivering and calling for her momma, like she did when she was 5 and heard gunshots at the crack house down the street in the Carson Stout public housing community in High Point.

But her momma didn't come, not then and not now. She was a crack addict and a prostitute, and she still is. Anita remembers being terrified for her mother, wondering if the shots were for her, and hating her at the same time.

Anita, now 15, has been haunted by the thought that she might have a child of her own who would wake up in the night calling hopelessly for her.

"I'd never let that happen," she swears, pulling hard on one of her long braids and pounding her fist on the bed where she sits, cross-legged.

But it has almost happened twice. Anita says she had two abortions in less than two years since becoming a prostitute herself.

Anita, which is not her real name, is trying to leave that life behind. She now lives in a home for troubled teenagers operated by Olivia Rowe on North Dudley Street in Greensboro. She was placed there early this year by juvenile court authorities. She's now a freshman at Grimsley. She agreed to be interviewed if her identity is not disclosed.

At one moment, she's just like any other schoolgirl, giggling and popping gum. Just a few inches over 5 feet tall, she still has a trace of childhood pudginess. But ask her about her childhood, and the schoolgirl disappears, overwhelmed by the sad bitterness of an abused and weary woman.

Anita has two brothers and a sister, all younger than she. She doesn't know who her father is. "That still tears me up inside," she says.

Her mother has been a crack addict and a prostitute for as long as Anita can remember. She says she was only 5 when her mother would leave their little apartment at Carson Stout and stay gone for days at a time. Anita cared for her brothers and sister. "I was cooking and washing clothes, and I wasn't even in school yet," she says. "I had to."

Even when her mother was in the neighborhood, she wasn't at home very much. "She'd be down the street smoking crack," Anita says.

Finally, when she was about 8, her grandmother, who also lived at Carson Stout, took them all in, including her mother.

Life was less stressful at her grandmother's for Anita and her brothers and sister, but it still wasn't good. Her mother spent almost all of the family's money on crack, including the money she made as a prostitute. "There wasn't much to eat," Anita says. "And somebody always needed clothes or shoes."

In spite of her home life, Anita made good grades in elementary school and, for a while, anyway, at Ferndale Middle School. Anita remembers wanting to get home as fast as she could on report card day, anxious to show her mother her A's and B's. But her mother was almost never home.

When Anita was about 13, she started running with a much older crowd. Some were in their late teens or even older. She stayed out late at night, and began smoking marijuana. Her grades began to slip.

"I didn't want to go home," she says.

One of her new girlfriends, an 18-year-old, introduced her to Donnell, a man in his 20s.

Anita says she might have been 14. "I told him I was 17," she says.

Donnell sold drugs, and Anita began selling them, too. "Just about every kind of drug," she says, although she insists she took or smoked nothing but pot.

When she was in the eighth grade at Ferndale, and barely 14, Anita started selling herself. She began skipping school for days at a time, finally dropping out entirely. Though she revered her grandmother, and still does, she moved out of her grandmother's home after an argument.

"She didn't like me staying out so late, and my failing grades," she says. "But I wouldn't listen." Anita stayed with relatives and friends, and sometimes with her customers.

She struggles to explain why she turned to prostitution, and why she gravitated toward older men.

"My mother was doing it. I hated her for it, but maybe I wanted to be like her, too," she says. And maybe the attraction for older men had something to do with her not knowing her father. "I don't know. Maybe I was looking for him," she says.

Or maybe, she says, it was for the money. "The older guys meant better support." Anita says she gave some of her money to her grandmother to help support her brothers and sister.

She says her older customers gave her $200 or more a session. One gave her $500. She also got $500 once for stripping at a party of adult men in the basement of a house in Greensboro, she says.

Anita's mother introduced her to one of her better-paying customers, although she wishes today that she had never met the Thomasville businessman.

She and her mother had sex with the man, in the same bed at the same time, she says. "I did it because she asked me to," Anita says, her voice trembling and her brown eyes filling with tears. "I hate that I did it. I'll always hate it."

Anita says the past is almost too painful to talk about. But the present and the future are looking better than they've ever looked.

She's beginning to think that one of the best things that ever happened to her is when police picked her up as a runaway early this year and the juvenile court assigned her to Rowe's REACH program. Rowe, she says, is the parent none of the girls had -- a stern, no-nonsense disciplinarian and a warm and loving nurturer. "All the girls love her," she says.

Anita says she'll never be a prostitute again. "I think too much of myself to do that anymore." She likes Grimsley, and she's doing well there, she says. She wants to be a lawyer.

She thinks her mother would be proud.