Key Moments Kizzy Coleman, 18

Kizzy likes metal. She seals chunks of it in plastic baggies and stashes them in her backpack.

A broken zipper, a chain link, an unidentified something she found in an alley.

“Check this out,” she says, eyes aglow, examining them one by one. The solid clinking makes her happy.

So does gravel. Sometimes she sits by the road and sifts it through her fingers, so high on acid she sees sound.

Kizzy Coleman is 18, a part of Spokane’s street scene for several years. She’s a longtime acquaintance of Jody West, but the two can go months without crossing paths. Kizzy catches rides to Portland and Seattle, where panhandling pays better. But she always returns to Spokane.

Here, she stays in an alley or doorway, with friends, or sometimes at her mom’s. In early May, she slept in the cold beneath the Monroe Street Bridge with four others, hoarding candles, toilet paper, charity-house blankets and a puppy named Vengeance.

They teamed up, traded favors. She collected cigarette stubs for a newcomer who missed his smokes. And a 15-year-old boy surrendered his blanket when Kizzy caught a cough that a bottle of Nyquil couldn’t quiet. Spring is rough on a girl with asthma and bronchitis.

The bridge crew met on Monroe, waited until pedestrians were out of sight. Then, one by one, they jumped the concrete barrier and disappeared into the wedge of darkness where bridge meets dirt. Night fires killed the chill but nearly smoked them out.

Every street kid has stories — real or make-believe — which make up their identity in a culture where names, Social Security numbers and e-mail addresses mean little. The campfire stories earn the teller affection, fear, respect or sympathy.

Kizzy, who also goes by Shawna Randall, tells stories of a childhood stained by conflict and drug use. She tried alcohol at age 8. Cigarettes at 10. Pot at 11. Crystal at 13. “The list goes on and on and on,” she says.

When friends suggest she’s frying her brain, she laughs. “I’ve lost my mind, and my marbles are missing.”

Life on the streets isn’t so bad, says Kizzy. Someone buys her a meal, and she stuffs her pockets with ketchup packets — dessert-to-go — and loads her water glass with sugar for a cheap buzz. She takes “bird baths” in convenience store sinks, and when she longs for a bed, she cleans someone’s house in exchange.

Those things she really wants, Kizzy carries in her torn backpack: toothpaste, toothbrush, marijuana leaf necklace, condoms, syringes, fake mistletoe, notebook, 30-minute phone card, Dean Koontz paperback, assorted metal, asthma inhaler, wind-up Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads. “Most of this is all Dumpster score,” she says, proud of her scavenging abilities.

But Kizzy knows not to cling. “Every time you get a life — actual stuff that’s yours — somebody takes it from you.”

Except for the notebook. She does cling to that.

Kizzy turns her feelings into sad, angry, spirited poems — one of them about going to hell in a flaming garbage can. Just like metal, she likes the way her words sound.

“I think of some weird things,” she says. “I don’t know what they mean, but I’ll figure it out someday.”