“Are those carving tools?” she asked, flustered by the ardor of her own excitement.
“Where?” the man tending the store asked.
“Over here,” she said, leading him toward the display in the window.
“Um, I don’t know, let me check,” he said, taking the tools in his hands to show them to the other man behind the counter.
Aria’s heart fluttered, seeing the man’s head nodding up and down. “Yep, they’re carving tools. They didn’t come in with a sharpener, though,” he said, walking back toward the window to put them back in the display.
“No … I’d like to buy them!” Aria said.
“OK, then come over this way,” the man said, reversing course toward the checkout counter. “That’ll be ninety-five dollars,” the man said.
Aria’s stomach sank. “I only have like eighty-eight dollars,” she said.
“I could sell ’em for ninety?”
Aria’s stomach sank even further but her sense of urgency trumped her shyness. “Dude, seriously, you don’t understand, I really only have eighty-eight dollars and I have to get these.”
The man ran his fingers over the blades, deliberating. The other man in the store came over to where they were standing. “She’s got eighty-eight for ’em,” the first man said. The second man looked at Aria, cracking a smile most likely because of the amusement he got from how out of place it was for a girl wearing a little sundress to walk into a pawnshop and buy a wood-carving set. “OK, let her have ’em,” he said.
Aria placed every dollar and cent she had with her on the counter. The man slid the coins back toward her, taking only the bills before rolling the case back around the little tool set and putting it into a used plastic grocery-store bag. When he handed it to her, Aria looked at the clock on the wall. Trying to make it to the car lot before going to Griffith Park was cutting it close, but she had to do it.
Robert had found a tent again. When Aria peered inside it, he was napping, but the pressure of her presence startled him awake. Besides Darren, who held up a drunken peace sign when he saw her, everyone else at the lot had gone somewhere else for the day.
Aria kneeled down to place the rolled plastic bag on the floor next to Robert. “Hey, I gotta run, but I got something for you. I’m putting it right here,” she said. Robert twisted to look. “You don’t have to look at it now, just open it whenever.” She stood up to leave again.
Robert watched her shadow bounce across the outside of the tent as she ran off. She was already long gone by the time he managed to sit himself up and look inside the bag. When he unrolled the burlap case, an overwhelmed smile spread across his face. He thumbed the grain of the wood handles, whose previous owner had loved them glossless. He rolled them back up and hugged them close to his chest, lying back down again, like a child with a stuffed toy. Though Aria had disappeared before he could thank her, he closed his eyes and imagined her hearing him thank her anyway.
By the time that Aria made it to Griffith Park, she was out of breath and 20 minutes late. Omkar’s car was parked on the side of the street and he was leaning against it. When he saw Aria jogging toward him with the plastic bag containing the clothes she had been wearing before she bought the dress, he bounded toward her. “Did he drop you off outside the park?” he asked, assuming that Aria had followed his directions and taken a cab there.
“Um, yeah,” Aria said, needing an excuse for why all the money he had given her was spent. It was an excuse that she couldn’t use if she told him the actual truth, which was that she had walked and hitchhiked there. He took the plastic bag from her, tossed it into the back of his car and locked it.
“Is this place nearby?” Aria asked, surprised that he hadn’t opened the door for her to get in so they could drive to the party.
“Um, yeah, but they moved the party to later so I thought we could take a little hike up to the Hollywood sign maybe?” he asked.
“OK, yeah,” Aria said, willing, though less than enthusiastic at the prospect of more exercise than she had already had that day. Omkar took her hand in his and led her toward a trail that carved a swath into the dry hillsides.
The trail snaked on for ages. To their left, the white letters of the Hollywood sign promised to be just up ahead, only to tease them by always staying just a little bit farther. Some of the tourists who had set off at the same time as Omkar and Aria (determined to reach the same destination) turned back around, making fun of themselves for how out of shape they were.
Omkar asked to take a rest and Aria teased him, toeing him part of the way up the next hill. With the bed of the entire city laid out below them, a group of horses came past them from behind. Aria wanted to touch them, but restrained herself. Instead, she inhaled their fragrance as they passed. They had a unique fragrance. To Aria, nothing in the world smelled as good as horses, but there was no way to describe their scent. They didn’t smell like anything else because a horse smelled like a horse. The tourists they carried clung sloppily to their saddles as they plodded lazily down the trail that they had been down so many times, they could walk it in their sleep. Omkar, who was uncharacteristically pensive on the hike, tried to read the words of an advertisement being
