She wanted them so much to be happy. She wanted the wolf inside Wolf to stop its howling. She wanted Anthony and Luke to each find a woman to love again. She wanted Robert’s kindness repaid. She wanted Mike to hear the childish trumpet of Aston’s voice playing in his own backyard. She wanted to see Taylor’s face on the billboards littering the city. She wanted to see EJ clean and sober. She wanted a man to walk into Ciarra’s life and quiet the bonfire within her that continued to burn up everything and everyone in her life.
Aria wanted to celebrate the luck of her life, but the festival of it could not compete with the sorrow that she felt for all of them. Despite the hope she tried to hold for them, she knew that the odds were stacked against people like her and people like them. She knew that so many of the wishes she had for them were like waves that would never break against the shore.
CHAPTER 32
Though she didn’t want to completely ignore it, Aria hated her birthday. She didn’t want to plan something special to do for herself any more than she wanted someone else to. There was always this pressure to do something fun and to be happy on her birthday when no amount of pressure could change the conditions that made her unhappy year after year.
Omkar would have been upset if he’d known that Aria intentionally hadn’t told him that her birthday was today. He would have been less upset with her than he would have been with himself for not already knowing. Aria had been staying with the Agarwals for a little over a week and helping Omkar with customers in the store during his shifts there. Despite Jarminder’s constant urge to feed her, Aria had not wanted to feel in debt to her generosity, and so she had made an excuse to leave the house every day to preoccupy herself and to take advantage of meal programs around the city.
Aria had been to the church near the store nearly every day for the past week. On this day, she found herself there again, standing in line and waiting for Imani to hand her a sandwich. “Hey girl, how you be today?” Imani asked her before she was done serving the two men standing in front of her.
“Good,” Aria said, not wanting to fully engage in conversation until there was no one in between them. “How are you?” Aria asked her once the men had dispersed to their sitting place on the lawn.
“I’m OK, I’m OK, just doin’ ya know,” she replied.
“You doin’ somethin’ special today?” Imani asked her, expecting that her answer would be no.
“I don’t know,” Aria responded. “Actually, it’s my birthday today so I don’t know yet.”
She didn’t know exactly why she decided to tell Imani and no one else. Probably it was because there was no risk of her trying to do anything about it.
“How old you be?” Imani asked, her long and freshly manicured acrylic nails pressing divots into the plastic wrap around the sandwich that she handed to Aria. Though they were painted bright purple, they reminded Aria more of claws than of nails.
“Eighteen,” Aria replied. Imani’s suspicions that Aria had been underage were confirmed but she made no obvious reaction.
Imani did not share Aria’s relief about the fact that she had reached adulthood. For Aria, it meant that she could get a job and she would no longer be a target for the cops. Imani couldn’t be sure whether Aria was part of the system, but she knew all too well that once kids turned 18, they aged out of the system. Aging out of the system was a nightmare in and of itself. Without a family and without any of the skills to make it on their own, the chances these older kids would graduate from school, much less college, were slim. The chances of them finding good employment were just as slim. It was like kicking a bird out of the nest when it didn’t know how to fly. So many of the kids who aged out of the system just ended up right back where they started … back in the clutches of substance abuse, back in trouble with law enforcement, back in poverty, out on the streets and with no social support. It was a vicious cycle that no one seemed to be able to stop.
“Well, happy birthday, girl,” Imani said. “I swear on my mamma you don’t look a day over fifteen.” Aria smiled. “Let me tell you what you’re not gonna do. What you’re not gonna do is do nothin’ … Lemme see what I got here.”
Imani started looking around, unbothered by the other people waiting in line. She grabbed an extra Rice Crispie treat and handed Aria two instead of one. Then she opened a purple plastic binder and took out a slip of yellow paper from the front pocket. She pointed at an address written on it in white lettering. “This here’s a voucher. If you take this down there tonight, you can at least get a warm meal. I think they got a two-piece chicken meal and I think they even got cake some nights, but whatever the case may be.”
Aria took the slip of paper from her, conscious of the impatience of the people behind her in the line. “Thanks,” Aria said, trying to enhance the gratitude in the word with the look on her face.
“You have yourself a good day now, OK?” Imani said. Aria nodded and walked away from the table. The sky overhead looked like boiling cream. To the west, the
