She found it trivial and unbecoming when girls at school pined over their crushes. Then, at fifteen, she watched “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and was uncomfortably captivated by Angelina Jolie. Her English teacher at the time had the students spend five minutes every day on an exercise called Vomit, in which they wrote down every phrase that occurred to them. “In my fifty-millionth Vomit, I spaced out and wrote, ‘I’m a lesbian and no one knows,’ ” she told me. Throughout the summer of 2009, Samantha researched the logistics of being homeless in New York, reading all the articles she could find online, no matter how outdated. She learned that if she went to a homeless shelter before she was eighteen social workers would be required to contact her family. She wanted nothing to do with her parents, who, she believed, hadn’t taken her complaints of sexual abuse seriously her mother suggested it was a hallucination. Samantha planned to live on the streets for several weeks, until her eighteenth birthday. Then she would begin the rest of her life: getting a job, finding an apartment, and saving for college.
