Meredith looked at the address on the sheet of notebook paper in her hand as she climbed the steps out of the subway station. She wasn't familiar with this neighborhood- indeed, with most of Manhattan. While she had arrived in New York almost a month ago, an avalanche of things to do had fallen on her at once: registration for classes at NYU, her formal introduction to various professors, trying to find an advisor with space for an extra athlete, her first meeting with Coach Williams and her future teammates, a couple of hearings with the NCAA to have her transfer penalty revoked, house-hunting until a dorm room came open for the semester, plus a surprise Queer Eye visit from the offensive line of the Violet Pride. She patted the freshly-cut ends of her dark brown hair, still unused to the lack of weight on her shoulders; for the first time, she didn't feel weighed down so that she could not hold her head up high.

The first time she had met with her coach, the session had turned into a complete breakdown as she had flashbacks to her beatings at the HOPE camp. The tears had stunned her, but even as she had stuttered out an apology to Coach Williams, the stocky older woman had scribbled down the address and handed it to her, saying that she didn't need to be sorry for what other people had done to her. "You're not the first HOPE camp veteran I've had come into this program, and sadly, I don't think you'll be the last. If even half the stories I've heard about what goes on there are true, it's the twisted bastards who came up with the idea that should be doomed to hell, and anyone who forced someone like you into a camp should follow them!" The coach had been particularly furious when Meredith had admitted to being enrolled by her mother, and Meredith hadn't been able to understand why until a few days later. An older teammate had explained that Coach Williams had two teenage children, including a daughter, and was sickened at the idea that any parent could do that to their own child.

She squinted as the sun hit her full-on, futilely trying to blink the excess light out of her eyes. The exit from the station was on an island in the middle of Broadway, a vantage point from which she could discern which direction and which side of the street she needed to be on. A quick glance north granted her the vision of a giant rainbow flag snapping back and forth in the brisk autumn wind, but as curious as she was about that, it lay in the opposite direction from the address Coach Williams had given her. She crossed Broadway just before the light changed to green, feeling a brief stab of pride in that bit of rebellion, and started checking the businesses south of 72nd Street.

The numbers crept downward until Meredith found herself in front of a brick-faced store with a dark yellow awning. The trays of cookies and brownies in the window made her mouth water, and the scents wafting out of the store told her that the goods were fresh-baked. But as she looked up at the cursive that named the bakery, her knees knocked together and her heart started pounding. 'Vera Hope', it was called, and just the sight of the second word was enough to bring back memories of the near-destruction of her spirit, of the denial and the belittling and the agony of discovering just how little of herself she had really known, of Zelda Shane mocking her and Chrissie's descent into the abyss that had almost claimed her as well. She could hear Zelda's harsh rasp of a voice again and again in her ears, its Southern drawl doing nothing to soften the effects. "Mary Clark! Bow to the Lord! Mary Clark! Bow to the Lord! Mary Clark! Bow to the Lord!"

With a high-pitched shriek of despair, Meredith sank to her knees, tears rolling down her face. She had been so sure that she had left Knoxville behind, but it was not to be. She had gained her physical freedom, but her mind was lost, trapped in a hell of Tennesseean devising.

"By the Lady! Bernice, get a brownie off the tray! Maryam, help me get her inside! She's having flashbacks to her camp days; someone kiss her and tell her it's going to be okay! Can you see me? Can you hear me?"

Meredith nodded weakly. A pair of soft lips brushed against her cheek, even as strong arms carried her into the store. Someone put a brownie into her hand, and she put it into her mouth without thinking too hard about it. Whether it was the chocolate or the touch of marijuana in the recipe, she soon found her head clearing enough to apologize, but the tall black woman who had carried her waved off the stuttered words. "You've got NYU gear- you know Jean?"

"Jean?"

"Jean Williams, the coach. She gave you the address of this place without telling you the name, right? She just told you this was a place where you really needed to be, yeah? I think I'm going to have to have words with her. You just came out of a HOPE camp, didn't you?"

"Last month. They let me out last month. Barely." Meredith's mouth had gone dry, a surprise considering the way she had been staring at the baked goods in the window. Seeing that, or more likely hearing it in the sandpapery rasp of Meredith's whisper, one of the young women sitting at the table next to Meredith's brought her a bottle of apple juice and ignored her attempts to pay for it.

"Your first time here?" a slender, brown-skinned woman asked. "Claro, you wouldn't have gone loca if you knew. I remember my first time, I didn't want to believe I could read the name, and when I did- ¡ay de Dios, the screaming I put up! En serio, the Disciples wanted to use me as a siege weapon, and La Señora de la Noche thought I'd be magnifico at crowd distractions."

"Stop it, Izzy, you're confusing her. She's just out of a HOPE camp and the Channel 1 world, she's not going to understand Spanish. Meredith, right?" Meredith started at the sound of her name and looked wildly around to find who had spoken. Her eyes fell on a brawny young woman, about her own age, whose short chestnut hair was streaked with purple and white. Her NYU letterman's jacket gave away her affiliation, and once Meredith thought about it, the other woman seemed familiar; if nothing else, the hair was memorable. "I don't know if you remember my name. I'm Shannon Fox, the starting center until and unless Coach has a brain fart. I know what you're going through. I came out of Gold Coast in Oakland. My high school coach sent me there when I was fifteen. Someone get this girl another brownie, I think she needs it. Don't worry about weight gain, Coach always makes sure the freshmen and new transfers work it off."

Meredith accepted the gift gratefully. "You understand, then."

"We all do," Shannon told her.

"I established this place as a meeting ground for those who went through HOPE camps. I saw the effects they had on even the strongest of people, and it hurt so much that I had to help." The tall black woman spoke a little louder than was needful, and for the first time, Meredith noticed the slight slurring of her words. "Not every customer here is a camp veteran, but it is the central meeting place for support and understanding. I'm open 24-6, closed Saturday so I can go to temple and sleep. There's always someone around, so stop in at any time- first few months, you don't have to pay, and you never have to pay full price."

"Wow," Meredith said, her mind reeling at the idea of being able to talk about her experience with people who understood, who had been there, who had seen the sins committed in the name of piety and righteousness. "I... I... thank you. Thank you so much."

But the black woman had already slipped behind the counter and had her back turned to Meredith and the rest of the group. Immersed in her preparation of a batch of chocolate chip cookies, she didn't seem to hear Meredith's words.

"You still look a little shaken up," Shannon said. "You want some company going back downtown? The shape you're in, you might cross on the green and get smashed by a cabby. Someone's got to take care of you. Coach would have my head otherwise."

As the months passed, the train ride to the Upper West Side became a weekly ritual, a way to prepare herself for the arduous and sometimes confusing classes she had to cope with. More and more often, Shannon found excuses to join her, and as time went on she minded the center's presence less and less.

The memories faded from immediacy, but if she tried with specific intent to bring something up, she would get more than she bargained for. So instead she listened to the others tell their stories and got to know them better.

Shannon, her teammate, played the role of the light-hearted, easygoing California girl to the hilt, but the patrons of Vera Hope knew about the mistreatment she had received at Gold Coast. Her green eyes often welled over with tears when she talked about her family; more than anyone else, she missed her kinfolk, the brother and sisters she had left behind, the parents she was convinced still loved her despite her unchangable sexuality. She channeled that grief into savagery on the court, and West Coast road trips were her best chance to shine. She and Meredith reached an understanding over the Christmas break, to much applause.

Barbara O'Leary was in her mid-forties, her flaming red hair fading to sandy brown with age, her blue eyes sparkling with endless mischief. A self-proclaimed bad Catholic girl from Philadelphia, she had been committed to Sweetland Hills for the sake of her job. Her wisecracking sense of humor and steadfast stubbornness reminded Meredith of what Chrissie had been like before the television finally got to her. She had been around long enough that she sometimes ran the shop during odd hours.

Maryam Lieber was Barbara's significant other, an olive-skinned Jewish woman with the same quick tongue as Barbara. They had met at Sweetland Hills, and Maryam's faith had been the other half of the equation that kept them from becoming inverses. Her given name had originally been spelled Miriam, but like Meredith, the camp supervisors had tried to rename her Mary. When she came to New York, she had researched various spellings and chosen the one she felt to be closest to the Hebrew transliteration. She had been the one to extend Meredith an invitation to her and Barbara's wedding- "Of course the perfect place for an Irish Catholic and a Jewess to have their lesbian wedding is a mosque with an imam and a priest of the Lady presiding!"

Izzy- Isabel Solis- had come from the Sunrise camp in Miami, and had overcome the double obstacle of having both her culture and her sexuality assaulted. The pain in her dark brown eyes- so overwhelming for someone only a few years older than Meredith- kept anyone from directly meeting her gaze, although it was rare that she would even dare to look someone in the eye. She slipped so often into Spanish that Meredith added the intensive intro course to her intersession schedule. Of all of them, she was the angriest, but she was also in the forefront of those who would reassure and protect a new arrival.

Bernice Carver was the self-appointed 'stone butch bad-ass bitch' of the group. A coffee-shaded black woman with close-cropped nappy hair and a pronounced country drawl, she had been an inmate at Holy Trinity near Durham, and from her Meredith learned that Zelda had been gentle with her white charges. The Southerner walked with a slight limp from damage done during her three years at Holy Trinity, and as bad-ass as she tried to be, she still flinched at loud noises. She also warned the rest of the group about the intensification of Channel 1's messages and their reprecussions on minority communities.

And then there was the proprietor of Vera Hope, whose name Meredith had never managed to learn, even after months of regular patronage. Once, she had called the sweet-faced black woman Miss Hope, thinking that it was her name, and gotten laughed at for her troubles. "I didn't name this place after myself. I'm not an egotist like that. This place is meant to represent real hope, not the kind of hope those damned camps claim to give you, and I wanted the name to reflect that." She had fallen silent, and nothing Meredith said could get her to speak again, much less to reveal her name. She was a mystery even to those who had been around her the longest.

There was the spot on the wall, the one where the paint looked just a little fresher than the rest of the cream-colored store, shaped like a rectangle. Something had hung there once upon a time, a picture frame of some sort, or maybe a small poster. Bernice pushed the proprietor every so often to tell them what it had been, but she would never say, and she would turn her back on them to indicate that the conversation was over.

That was another thing that surprised Meredith, as it did anyone who was new to Vera Hope. The tall black woman with the incandescent smile and the endless stream of treats was profoundly deaf, only able to make out the most blaring noises and the most loudly screamed words and phrases. She was an excellent lip-reader, and she would teach ASL to anyone who asked, but she refused to do anything more than that. "Barbara and Maryam know that if I buy a hearing aid, it would be my first step towards a Channel 4 life, because they'd have a way to get a hold of me. I won't do that. I'm fine the way I am."

She never said where she was from, and her voice contained no hints of regional dialect, no shifted vowel sounds or dropped consonants that would pin her to one area of the country. She used Southern idiom, Northeastern slang, and Midwestern terminology with equal frequency. The only hint she ever dropped was that she had been on the same flight to New York as Jean Williams and her family. Meredith sometimes wondered if that was meant to be more useful than it was to them, but Coach Williams clammed up whenever Meredith or Shannon brought it up.

"Young'un haulin' ass up Broadway!" Bernice called out one Sunday, causing everyone to look up and make preparations. Barbara pulled out some chairs, Maryam pushed the juice to the forefront of the cooler, and their den mother unwrapped her special brownies.

The fair-skinned blonde, who had ameliorated the effect of her hated hair color with a severe crop and blue dye, flipped out, as they had expected. Meredith helped carry her in, staggered by the excess weight the woman was carrying. The other veterans of the HOPE camps scattered across the country settled down around the woman, giving her enough space to recover from her breakdown, but coming close enough to provide unconscious reassurance. They were ready for any reaction.

Her reaction was the opposite of Meredith's; as soon as she knew that they were all sympathetic, she started talking and could not be stopped. Her name was Leeann Cobbs, and she had been a waitress in a small town in Ohio. Her next door neighbor had seen women coming in and out of her apartment, put two and two together, and sent her away. "Took them a while to find space, but they dumped me in Bullseye eventually."

"Columbus, right? That was the nearest one to me, too. My mom wanted to send me there, but I didn't want to waste my eligibility, so she agreed to let me go to Knoxville." The surge of empathy and comfort Meredith felt aorund someone from her former home took her by surprise; she hadn't remembered until Leeann spoke just how loud New York was compared to the rest of the country, how close to a Southern drawl the Ohio accent could sound.

"I can't imagine you in Tennessee orange," Shannon laughed to Meredith before the focus shifted back to Leeann. As the older, more settled members of the group fussed over Leeann, Meredith watched their hostess with unwavering eyes. She saw the older woman flinch visibly when she mentioned the Knoxville camp, and pale to a sickly grayish color at Shannon's casual joke about the baby blue and burnt orange of the Lady Vols. She also saw the older woman gesture to her that they should step away from the main group and talk alone.

As soon as they had separated, the tall black woman put a hand on Meredith's shoulder and said, "I'm sorry. You have no idea how sorry and ashamed I am. It was the camp at Knoxville that made me decide to pour every cent I had into making this a place to heal. Someone had to do penance for the evils done to you, and it was clear that no one else even thought of it."

"Penance? But what did you have to do with the Hill?"

The grief on the black woman's gentle face almost made Meredith try to take back her question, but before she could, she got an answer. "That space on the wall? The one you're all always asking about? Once, I kept something there that I was very proud of. That something was my diploma from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville."

"You went through there too?"

"Before Richardson. For years, I tried to believe the camp and the school weren't connected. This used to be just a bakery, not a cause. Then I had someone come in and panic at the sight of the school's crest on the diploma. When she came out of it, she told me what happened there and who was involved. I threw up for a good ten minutes after that, and that's when this became Vera Hope. I can't save my school, but I can try to remind people that not all of us are demented."

"Then thanks. You've been a godsend. Don't blame yourself for what others choose to do." Meredith hugged the older woman briefly before going over to Leeann and engaging her in Ohioan gossip.

The lady of Vera Hope watched her wards with maternal pride, but there was a tinge of grief there as well. None of them had any idea how much her reputation had been traded on to build St. Peter's on the Rock and encourage people to 'further their spiritual growth' there. None of them knew what she had given up in order to find sanctuary in New York. She was the only one of them who had not been through the horrors and tortures of a HOPE camp, but she understood better than any of them the changes that had taken place to make that mockingly named program possible. She had seen from the outside the toll that it had taken on people she had once called friends. That was why she fought so hard to protect the refugees, in honor of the people she had known in the past, in honor of the principles she had been taught at that school, in defiance of the message of hatred preached there now. As long as there was breath in her body and sanity in her mind, she would counter HOPE with hope.