4: Adel: Refusing to be Left Behind

When I first meet Adel at the Youth Center, she’s eighteen, and has been out of school for a year and a half. She’s wearing jeans, a raspberry colored turtleneck, a white nylon winter vest with faux fur around the collar, and fashionable black rimmed glasses with pink accents. Her hair, pulled back into a pony tail, frames a face the rich warm color of café au lait. Unlike Hannah and Iris, who loosen up quickly and become increasingly animated as our conversations progress, Adel has a decidedly no-nonsense demeanor from the beginning to the end of this first interview. I ask many follow-up questions, which she answers politely, but with few details. She’s not unfriendly, but we are strangers at the start, and not a lot more familiar when we’re done. Four months later, when I’ve finished the first draft of her story, I drop it off at her house and arrange a date for a second interview.