Wanda and I come clattering down the stairs of the subway station at 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn. It a little after three o’clock on a winter afternoon and we’ve just gotten out of school. We reach the turnstiles and put in our tokens before descending a second set of stairs, this time to the platform itself. A train has just left the station; the people who have gotten off pass us on the stairs. There will be a wait, maybe a long one, for the next train. But we have time and are not worried.
Wanda and I are on our way to Manhattan for our respective ballet lessons; she attends the Joffrey School on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, while I take class in small studio on West 56th Street. The day is surprisingly mild, and I am hot in my coat—a new, brown shearling with a soft black collar, a gift from my doting grandparents—but I don’t take it off because I don’t want to carry it. I am already lugging a multi-pocketed canvas dance bag that holds not only my schoolbooks, but two pairs of ballet slippers, practice clothes and all the paraphernalia needed to turn my long mass of dark hair into a sleek, tightly coiled bun. There is no train in sight yet so Wanda and I sit down on the platform’s bench and set our bulging bags—hers is as overstuffed as mine—by our feet. A few other people trickle down the stairs to join us but the platform is long and poorly lit; our fellow travelers seem to disperse into the shadows and we remain alone on the bench, deeply engrossed in the things fourteen-year-old budding ballerinas talk about.
This is the second year I have been allowed to take the subway into “the city” (as we Brooklyn girls are wont to call it) by myself and now that I attend class five afternoons a week as well as Saturday morning, I am on the subway a lot. This is a time, the early 1970s, when the city’s fortunes seem imperiled and the subway system reflects the general shabbiness and decline that is everywhere. Stations are dirty and poorly maintained; trains arrive spottily and are subject to frequent breakdowns. There is graffiti on many of the cars, which are old, and in the summer, they are stifling because they are seldom air-conditioned. None of this matters a jot to me. I love the subways, the freedom they offer, their range and scope and speed. The subways make me feel connected—like an animate and pulsating dot on the subway map I am fond of studying—to the vast and wonderful city that has only begun to open itself up for me. I can begin my journey underground in Brooklyn, and emerge into the radiant light of so many new, compelling places: Greenwich Village, where I shop at the Capezio store on MacDougal Street and slurp down an Orange Julius on 8th; Lincoln Center, where for two dollars I can buy student rush tickets to see Balanchine’s three-act wonder, Jewels; the Cloisters, where I walk through a vernal, leafy, park in search of unicorns, which I find, albeit in two-dimensional woven form, hanging on the walls of the fortress-like museum that houses them.
It’s not that I’m unaware of the subway’s problems, or its potential dangers—I have already experienced the shock of feeling a strange man’s erect penis pressing against my hip in a crowded car, the appalled sorrow of seeing the leathery, bare feet and oozing skin rash of a homeless woman as she shuffles along the platform of the 34th Street station—but somehow these things don’t touch me, not really. I am young, I ardently believe in my own talent and promise, and I hold up my trusting, well-intentioned heart as a shield or talisman against all possible harm. I don’t wish to hurt anyone else, I dumbly reason. Why would anyone want to hurt me?
Wanda reaches for her dance bag to pull out snack—a cup of Dannon strawberry yogurt—and pries off the top. She eats it quickly and gets up to deposit the empty container in the overflowing trash basket. Her bag remains on the platform, pushed slightly under the bench. I decide to check my own bag for something to eat—I usually carry a box of raisins or a piece of fruit—and to gain better access to its contents, I pull it to my lap. I have just located an orange buried in its depths when three black girls appear. One is heavyset and wears a bright pink jacket with a big dark stain—ink? Magic marker?—on the arm, another is tiny and elfin, her hair arranged in a series of complicated braids that stand out from her head like exclamation points, the third, light-skinned and slender in an oversized camel coat; when I first lay eyes on her, I think that she looks like a ballet dancer. They are laughing and pushing one another when they first step into view, but now that they see us, a pair of white girls seemingly alone on the platform, they stop, and fall silent. I can sense that something is about to happen, though I cannot tell yet what it is. But I understand that our presence—white, entitled, on our own—is somehow perceived as a kind of challenge.
It is Wanda who makes the first move, back to the bench, to reach for her bag.  The heavy girl in pink gets there first. She seizes the bag and raises it up into the air above her head.
“Give that back,” says Wanda. She sounds tentative, frightened. I don’t blame her. I am frightened too. What do these girls want from us? Our bags? Our money? Or is it something less tangible and more complicated than that?
“Why should I?” the girl asks. She is shaking the bag this way and that. A small wad of tissues falls to the platform, and the tiny girl kicks at it until it has gone over the edge, onto the tracks.
“Because it’s mine.”
“Not any more. Finders keepers, losers weepers,” the girl says. She continues to swing the bag around, and more things tumble out—a comb, a brush, and a packet of bobby pins that scatter like confetti as they land. The girls snicker as Wanda kneels down and tries, unsuccessfully, to gather up her belongings. Something about her frantic, scrabbling gesture galvanizes me out of my fear and paralysis. I stand, clutching my own bag firmly under my arm.
“Stop it or I’m going to tell.” My voice sounds squeaky and ineffectual; still I have to try.   
“Tell?” The big girl swivels around to look at me. “Who you gonna tell?”
“The token clerk,” I say and head for the stairs. I am frightened but angered too and I feel my face heat in righteous indignation. My body, though, is trembling, and I am grateful to wrap my hand around the worn wood of the railing.
“You do that, I’ll throw the bag on the tracks.”
“No, we’ll throw her on the tracks.” This comment is offered by the tiny girl. Her teeth are very even and white; she has small dimple in one cheek.
“Both of you. Both of you—on the tracks,” says the one who looks like a ballerina. Her voice is low, but menacing.
I stop, unsure of what to do next. I want to race upstairs, find an adult who will help us, rescue us. But I am afraid of leaving Wanda alone with these girls. I have no frame of reference with which to understand their malice. Why do they want to taunt us, even hurt us? What could inspire such feelings, such acts?  Although race divides us, isn’t the fact that we are all girls—soon to be women—something that should unite us?  Now something else infects my fear: betrayal. Although I have never seen these girls before in my life, I still feel as if they have betrayed me, betrayed our entire gender. It all feels like too much and without warning, the potent, confusing brew of my emotion erupts in a flood of spontaneous tears. I sit down on the filthy subway platform and sob, sob as if my heart is breaking, which, in a way, it is.
Suddenly, the platform is swarming with people.
“What’s going on here?” says a man with a briefcase and tweed jacket.
“Are you all right?” asks a woman in a dark red suit.
Wanda offers a jumbled, somewhat incoherent version of our plight; I am crying too hard to say anything.
The man with the brief case admonishes the girls. The heavy one and the graceful one look down at their shoes, but the tiny one says, “We were just teasing. We wasn’t gonna hurt them.”  I continue to cry.
“Do you want me to call your parents?” says the woman in red, kindly.
“What about something to drink?” says another woman, this one with gray hair, a large, flowered handbag and thick-soled, orthopedic shoes. “A soda? A cup of tea?” She rummages around in her back and produces a roll of Lifesavers. I take one but instead of putting it in my mouth, I clutch it in my hand, where it quickly grows sticky. I bury it in the pocket of my new coat, where I know it will fester like a small, rank sore but I don’t care.
The subway train comes pounding into the station and we are all momentarily quiet. It slows to a stop and the doors open. All of us—the three girls, Wanda, the two women, the man and myself—get on. The black girls move off to one end of the car, while Wanda and I remain near the adults who have been our saviors.
“Don’t worry. I’ll ride uptown with you,” says the man. “How far are you going?”  Wanda tells him our destinations—she plans to get off at the West 4th Street station, while I continue on to the stop at 7th Avenue and 53rd Street. We find seats and he pulls a newspaper out of his briefcase. Wanda and I do not talk, mostly because I am, to my own dismay still crying, though not as hard now. The train pulls out of the tunnel and out onto the Manhattan Bridge. I love this view—Brooklyn behind us, Manhattan up ahead, the great, gray expanse of water separating the two, and the massive configuration of beams, cables and arches uniting them again. My crying tapers off and I find myself able to look toward the other end of the car, where the three girls are still sitting. I can see them looking back, wary, puzzled glances that dart our way and then retreat.
“Don’t start anything,” Wanda says, aware of my gaze.
But it is too late. One of the girls—the tiny one—gets up from her seat and walks toward me. Weak winter sun comes in from the windows, and she steps into a pool of light. When she is standing right in front of me I reluctantly look up. So does the man seated next to me, but he does not say anything.
“It’s like I told you,” she begins. “We weren’t going to hurt you.”
I want to say I know, it’s okay, but I don’t trust my voice so I just nod.
“So you can stop crying now,” she adds.
That does it. I am off again, awash in a river of tears. All the things I want to say to her—If you didn’t mean to hurt us, then why did you act like you did? Why did you want to frighten us? What do you have against us? We have nothing against you, we’re all girls, together, don’t you see? Sisters under the skin?—are deluged by my tears, washed away. I could see the man beside me frowning, and the girl retreats to where her friends sit waiting. When she reaches them, she begins talking, quickly it seems, and with lot of hand gestures. She looks back at me once more, a look whose intention I cannot grasp—and then not again.
The train descends, leaving behind the glimpses of water, of city, of sky. Wanda gets off at West 4th Street, with a hug and a murmured promise to call me later. My protector is getting off at 42nd Street. He stands clutching the newspaper under his arm and the briefcase in his hand. He looks over to where the girls still sit, clustered in their tight, impervious knot.
“They won’t bother you any more,” he says. “You’ll be all right now.”
“Thank you,” I tell him. “For everything.”  The doors glide open and he is gone.
The car is filled with people now; I cannot see the girls, who are still sitting at its far end. I have only one more stop before I reach my own destination. The man is right—they will not harm me now; I have no reason to be afraid. And I am not. But I am sad, sad in a way I have never been before, but will be, of course, many, many times again.
The train pulls into the station at 7th Avenue and 53rd and I hoist my bag onto my shoulder. I strain for one last glimpse of them—the heavy one in her impossibly pink coat, the tiny one, the ballerina—and for a second I am able to see them, before the doors of the subway open, then close, cutting us off from each other forever.