Jarminder took Aria’s face in her hands and turned it to kiss her cheek. Jarminder had been acting strange the whole morning. Unlike usual, she had woken up before Aria could slip out the door. She had made breakfast already and insisted that Aria join them. Any coldness that had been there before seemed vanquished. On top of it, she had suddenly insisted on giving Aria one of her own saris. Aria, who couldn’t understand the sudden alteration in Jarminder’s mood, humored the sudden sentimentality without letting herself expect it to stay that way.
“You look simply incredible,” Omkar said from the doorway. Seeing Aria in the clothes that the women from his culture traditionally wore made something churn inside him. Maybe it enhanced his sense of ownership. In the Western world, own had become a dirty word when it came to other people, especially women. It meant to have complete power over someone else and to control them. But Omkar understood what many men did not: that to exert power and control over another person was the complete opposite of true ownership. “Own people,” his father had told him so many times when he had not been acting responsibly enough toward them. To Omkar, to love something was to take it as a part of himself. And doing so automatically meant it belonged with him and to him and so it was his to take responsibility for. With this kind of ownership, he could not hurt the person who belonged to him without hurting himself. He could not oppose their best interests without opposing his own. With this true ownership, the best interests of Aria were his primary concern.
Though reluctant to accept the gift that Jarminder had given her, Aria walked downstairs to her room wearing it. She unpinned the fabric and unwove it, folding it back into an untidy square. Dressing back into her common street clothes felt strangely degrading.
Omkar knocked on the door of her room and let himself in. “Hey, can you take a cab and meet me today at Griffith Park when I get off of school, around like 5:30 or six o’clock?” He put $50 down on the bed beside her.
“Jesus Christ, Omkar … I can just take the bus there. You want me to take a cab that costs fifty bucks?” she yelled.
Omkar took the money and placed it in her hands instead. “Look, can you just do it for me today, just this one day, just go along with it? It’s probably going to be rush-hour traffic and so they charge more. If not you can just keep the rest.”
Aria rolled her eyes at him. “OK, are you gonna tell me why I have to drive all the way across the city?” she asked.
“Because I have a party to go to near there. It’s kind of a cocktail party and we can bring a date to it. I want you to come as my date,” Omkar said. Aria furrowed her brow with confusion.
“OK … Well, did it occur to you that I don’t have anything to wear to something like that? Unless you want me to show up in camo pants?” she retorted.
“Good point. Here,” Omkar said, pulling another $50 bill out of his wallet and putting it in her hand as well.
“Seriously, this is ridiculous,” Aria said, trying to give it back to him.
Omkar clasped his hands around hers, trapping the bills inside of them. “Just stop now. Do this for me today, OK, please?” he asked.
Aria raised an eyebrow as a hesitant concession to his temporary insanity. He kissed her on the forehead and left the room to collect his things upstairs. Aria put the money in her pocket. Though she wanted to humor him, there was no way she was going to spend that much money on an outfit or on finding a way across the city.
Just ahead of her in the distance, buildings pierced the sky like steel daggers warning off the interfering clouds. In the hallowed halls of the city, people rushed in every direction. The spectral choir of cars on the network of freeways was muted by distance.
Aria was walking northwest in search of the first secondhand clothing store she could find. The street was littered with dollar stores and payday loan shops. A man pushing all of his tattered belongings in a shopping cart crossed the road where there was no crosswalk, without any concern for the cars on the street.
She stepped into a store whose windows were cluttered with manikins that looked like hookers. Each one was poorly fitted with cheap imported shirts or dresses. An Oriental man approached her when she opened the door. “Everything on this side for sale!” he said in broken English.
Aria nodded and walked over to a rack of dresses. She thumbed through the polyester fabric until she found her size in a white sundress, cased in sunflower print. She tried it on in a curtained alcove that the store owner was brave enough to call a dressing room. It was the first time she had worn a dress since she had run away from the Johnsons’. As jaded as she was about the world, the sunflower print made Aria feel the mirth that some people spoke of with regards to life. She liked how its warmth and innocence hugged her frame. Keeping it on, she went to the checkout counter and handed the store attendant the $50 bill. The man marked it with a pen to make sure that it wasn’t fake and, keeping just over $12, he handed Aria back the change.
Aria felt naked without her backpack as she walked down the sidewalk in her sunflower sundress and high-top sneakers, stopping to look at the window display of any store that had one. She had scanned the displays boasted by at least a dozen pawnshops before something she saw in one of them that shot a thrill straight through her. As
