Amanda Sydik dropped out of high school on the third day of her freshman year. She was 14. This was in Chewelah, a small mining town buried deep in the forests of northern Washington.
Here’s Sydik’s curt summary of that decision, one which would prove to have a lasting effect on her life: “A teacher and I didn’t get along. I looked at her, said a few things, they suspended me, and I never went back.”
Instead, she hung out in town, falling in with a group with a “bad reputation.” Many of them were homeless, living in the local park or camping on the edges of town. They experimented with drugs and chased other illegal thrills, which sometimes earned them a warm bed in the local jail. “They kind of adopted me,” remembers Sydik. “They told me: ‘Come with us.’”
There was young man, Shawn, who floated on the margins of the group. He came to Amanda’s attention early. He was charming, said all the correct things. “He was Mr. Right,” says Sydik. He told her he was 17. Sydik thought: “Three years difference? No big deal.” Later, she would find out he was in his mid-twenties.
A year into their romance, Shawn convinced Sydik to leave Chewelah, and her family, for good. The pair lived in the mountains for a brief period, where Shawn began a systematic, daily pattern of physical abuse that would last the duration of their seven years together. Soon after, they moved to Spokane.
They were homeless during their years in the city, too, sleeping under bridges, in bus stations, in tents in the midst of transient camps. Shawn refused to stay at shelters, because house rules would have prevented him from laying his hands on Sydik. (She once gained about four days reprieve from his violence while convalescing in the hospital after he beat her to a pulp with the heavy end of a metal baseball bat. “He didn’t care that day. He was just swinging.”)
The pair used drugs for most of those years, especially Shawn. Weed mostly, says Sydik, but stronger things too. On more than one occasion, she remembers Shawn — who was not against afflicting psychological torment as well — holding a loaded gun to her head and telling her to swallow pills, which to this day she can’t identify.
They scrounged for food during their Spokane days, and depended on the kindness of strangers. “There was a McDonald’s downtown, and the guy there felt really bad. He could tell the situation. He would make extra burgers and stuff and give us the last of the fries and the last of the burgers at the end of the night.”
On rare occasions, Shawn would allow Sydik to hitchhike back to Chewelah to visit her mother, but he would insist she return on his strict schedule.
Years into their relationship, as the abuse mounted and the urgency of her predicament set in, Sydik would try to forge the occasional escape. But he always caught up. “He followed me all over the state. Every time I left him. … I took off for Seattle at one point. He followed. I still don’t know how he found me in Seattle. I was living on the street — then, one day, there he was. Everywhere I’d go, he’d pop up.”
Sydik’s final emancipation came in the form of a Greyhound bus bound for Topeka. When her misery reached a pitch she could no longer bear, Sydik reached out to her mother for rescue. “It took us being really sneaky,” recalls Sydik. “It took mom” — who was by then living in Osage City, Kan. — “wiring money to the mental health center [in Spokane], so Shawn wouldn’t know I had it. The people there bought the bus ticket, they put me on the bus, and they stayed there until the bus pulled away.”
That was more than 10 years ago. Sydik is nearing 40 now. She has a 10-year-old son, D.J., from a previous relationship. In all, she’s tried her best to move on. “But it took a long time for me to start going out,” says Sydik, who recently moved with her mother and son to a small house on the south end of Humboldt, “and to start doing other things than living in fear of whether he’s going to show up at the door.”
ALL OF THIS is to say that Amanda Sydik is well acquainted with the hard edge of poverty. “I’ve seen the bottom of the bottom,” says Sydik.
So, when a woman standing in line behind Sydik at a local Walmart recently glared at the groceries Sydik was about to purchase with her Vision card and accused the single mother of being “too lazy to work” and of “mooching off the government,” Sydik, if she weren’t so polite, might have told the woman that buying her food with public assistance is actually a step up for the one-time drifter, a move in the right direction.
Instead, recalls Sydik, the stranger’s comments very nearly reduced her to tears.
