Standing beside a telephone booth in the parking lot of a West Street gas station, the scrawny girl with long black hair scans the oncoming headlights and waits for a passing motorist to give her a nod, slow his vehicle and come to a stop around the corner.

Occasionally it's a battered pickup truck driven by a construction worker. Sometimes it's a sleek BMW, a well-dressed lawyer behind the wheel.

Glancing for cops, she strolls over, opens the door and slides her small, bony frame into the front seat. The car disappears into the dark.

A half hour later she's back on the corner, but now there's a crumpled $20-dollar bill stuffed down the front of her blue jeans. If she's lucky she'll negotiate several more transactions just like this one before the sun comes up.

Call her Maggie -- with apologies to the novelist Stephen Crane -- although that's not her real name. At 24, she truly is a girl of the streets and this is her story. A story of hard luck, bad choices and a precarious existence on the streets of Annapolis.

When she thinks about growing up in her quiet middle-class neighborhood outside of Columbia, S.C., the memories seem distant, even dreamlike. Back then she had a loving mother, a comfortable home, regular meals on the dining room table.

Although she barely knew her father, Maggie says her mother, to whom she rarely speaks these days, is best described as a granola-crunching, tofu-eating, "hippie health nut." Growing up vegetarian, Maggie didn't even taste a Coca-Cola until she was 10.

A budding artist who loved to draw and was rarely seen without a camera around her neck, she excelled in school and had a close group of friends.

"Back then things made sense," she said on a recent afternoon on West Street, a soft drawl revealing her southern roots. "My life was just normal. I was like any other kid."

Drugs take over

Maggie's fall from grace begins in high school and reads like any other tired teen narrative popularized by anti-drug campaigns and drilled into the malleable minds of middle schoolers.

This story, however, is true: promising, college-bound girl, passionate and attractive, makes a split-second decision that forever alters the course of her life.

That decision, to try heroin at age 17, is one she's regretted ever since.

It started out slowly. The drugs, she thought, were something she could control. And for a little while she did, shooting up on occasion, at parties with friends, or whenever she needed to relieve stress.

"Whenever you do it, it's like this warm rush in your body," she said on a recent afternoon after snorting heroin in an Exxon station bathroom on West Street, her piercing green eyes now bloodshot and tired. "You can feel all your muscles getting relaxed. It just sucks you in."

After graduating from high school in 1999, Maggie managed to enroll in a local community college where she took several courses, including a photography class so inspirational that those droopy eyes perk up when she recalls it six years later.

With her drug use growing more persistent and demanding, she was forced to drop out after a semester.

Consider it a tipping point. Even now, when recounting her past, all events after her stint in community college are shrouded in a kind of fuzziness.

Lying in a grassy field behind her West Street gas station on a recent afternoon, her tattered sweater a makeshift pillow, she pauses, her eyes squinting as she gazes upward and struggles to recall the past few years. When the memories surface a few seconds later, they sputter out like incongruent pieces of a complex puzzle, as if she's recounting some hazy dream instead of seven years of her own tumultuous reality.

Since she followed her mother to Annapolis two years ago, that reality has been a tortured, homeless existence along inner West Street, a curious downtown corridor where open-air drug markets collide with upscale dining establishments. A place where customers can choose between crack rocks or crab cakes in the same block.

Oblivious to hours, schedules and dates, the only clock that seems to matter to Maggie is the cruel biological one that dictates her overpowering cravings for crack and heroin.

To support her habit she spends as much as $200 a day, sometimes more, all of it financed by sex with strangers.

Most would call her a prostitute, but on the street they say she's "trickin' " or "dating."

All her customers are males, but beyond that they have little in common.

Maggie accommodates both young and old, rich and poor, blacks, whites and Hispanics. Many of her customers are married men with families. Their sob stories of unhappy marriages and sexual dysfunction have a familiar ring.

"Some people feel like they have to give me an explanation for why they're with me," she said. "They say 'I'm not a pervert. I have to do this because my wife won't do it for me.' "

There's the grizzled construction worker who picks her up before his 6 a.m. shift begins, the youngish bartender who stops by after he closes up a popular downtown watering hole or the successful real estate agent who takes her on tours of his multi-million-dollar properties.

And then there's the well-dressed attorney, a suave, elusive figure, who arrives after a late night at the office to smoke crack with her in his BMW sports car as a prelude to sex. It's an unlikely pairing, two figures from opposite ends of the social stratum, bonded by criminality and mutual need. He always tips generously.

Most men who pick up Maggie are seeking oral sex. A smaller group seek intercourse, for which she charges as much as $200. A few are merely seeking a companion to talk to and some ask her to fulfill more exotic desires, like the guy with a foot fetish.

Never, Maggie maintains, does she conduct business without using condoms.

"Of course I hate it," she said, noting that she's forgotten what it's like to have an intimate relationship with someone. "I developed this switch in my brain so that when I go out and do things for money, it's just business. I'm an entrepreneur."

Cemetery bound

But her drug abuse, a powerful steam engine hurtling unchecked down a track, has picked up speed over the past seven years, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down.

Maggie, like the tragic heroine of Stephen Crane's novel, is on a collision course with her own demise.

When she first noticed her pacing West Street last fall, Jennifer Crews-Carey, a corporal with the city police department who keeps close tabs on the city's prostitutes, was struck by how out strangely out of place Maggie seemed.

Unlike the other rough-looking women who ply their trade along the busy corridor, Ms. Crews-Carrey said Maggie's long black hair and flawless complexion made her look like a "China Doll."

Personable, sweet and seemingly educated, Maggie was just as likely to talk about independent film and photography as she was about her life on the street.

"She doesn't seem to belong," Cpl. Crews-Carrey said. "It just seems like she could have done better."

The qualities that separate her from her fellow prostitutes, are the same ones that make her even more vulnerable to the streets, according to the corporal.

In the past six months Maggie's appearance has rapidly deteriorated. Dark circles cover her eyes, her face is narrow and angular and red scabs, most likely the result of heroin, now cover her body.

Cpl. Crews-Carrey doesn't think she has much time left. "The streets are consuming her," she said. "I would be surprised if she lived through the summer."

On a recent warm spring afternoon, Maggie is en route to her favorite spot. She's just scored $20, and after a five-minute detour through Clay Street's open-air drug markets, she has $10 worth of crack-cocaine, a small rock about the size of a pencil eraser, wrapped in a plastic baggie and stuffed down her pocket.

"This isn't me," she says frantically. "I'm a lot smarter than this. I'm just stuck and I really need help."

Passing through the stone gates of St. Anne's Cemetery, she follows a narrow trail over the rolling hills, past blossoming trees and chirping birds, through a dense maze of venerable stones. Her steps, normally quick and hyper-kinetic, slow to an easy stroll. A look of calm, the first in days, crosses her thin, sun-burned face.

Moments later she climbs atop a small grassy knoll that shelters an old stone crypt.

Leaning back against the stone, she pulls a yellowed crack pipe out of her jeans, places the tiny white rock on the front end, lights it and inhales deeply.

"That's my place," she says, pointing to a large tree across the cemetery grounds, its brilliant white blossoms in full bloom. "I like to sit there by myself. It's just really calm and nobody messes with you."

When the sun goes down, she'll find a place to sleep on the hard, cold street or at a house where other addicts live. For a little while though, St. Anne's is a respite, a foreboding home for a vagabond who has given up on the future.

"The last few years, really all I've been doing is surviving," she said between puffs on her crack pipe. "I think I've forgotten how to live. I don't see myself here much longer."