She had planned to resign herself to an even more awkward silence sitting next to him after that, but he would not let it happen. “What’s your deal?” he asked. “I mean, why are you here? I’ve never seen you here before.”
Aria shrugged her shoulders, partially because she didn’t know how to answer and partially because she did not want to give herself away. Seeing the shrug, Taylor turned away slightly to take the pressure of his focus off of her. “Oh, I see, you’re not a talker. That’s all I need today.”
He took a sip from his water cup and began to whisper to himself in exasperation that he obviously wanted her to see. Though she could not fully hear what he was saying, it seemed he was having a dialogue with himself about the downward spiral caused by his bad luck. It was obvious the ulterior motive for sitting next to her was his need for connection, or at the very least, some mental stimulation.
Feeling guilty for the wall she had erected against him, Aria dialed down her coldness and said, “No I can talk, it’s fine.”
Instantly, his monologue stopped and his enthusiasm returned.
“Do you come here a lot?” she asked.
“Depends,” he said. “Sometimes I’m here every day and sometimes not for a while. But I guess you could call me a regular.” He winked at the staff behind the counter, who took no notice of him.
It was clear to Aria that this Taylor was lonely and that his method of coping with it was to invent an idea of closeness with people, where it didn’t actually exist.
“Shouldn’t you be in school or somethin’?” he asked in his blunt manner, which Aria had already ascertained was not rudeness, but rather the vein of his personality.
“I dropped out,” she said, bracing herself for some kind of judgment that never came.
“Me too,” he exclaimed through a mouthful of breadstick. He shouted it as if delighted to have something in common with someone … anyone at all. Immediately, he opened the door to his world for her. “I got jumped at a group home because I really didn’t follow the rules and really they were just trying to get rid of me.”
Aria felt a surge of contradictory feelings toward Taylor the minute that he said that. On one hand, she felt an immediate commonality and rapport because they had been in the same position. But just as immediately came the familiar ingrained feelings of competition. At the group homes, attention was scarce. For Aria, and most other children who grew up there, the feeling of hearing that someone grew up in group homes was similar to the feeling of opening a restaurant that your life was dependent on and having someone open a restaurant right next door to you on the same street.
But she consciously curtailed the feeling. Aria could read between the lines of what he was saying. She knew how bad it was for LGBT youth in group homes. But she let him continue to avoid telling her the real reason he had been jumped.
“My mom got breast cancer when me and my sister were really young,” Taylor continued. “She went in for chemotherapy and when she came back, she wasn’t the same mom anymore. She would beat us and scream at us and my dad left her ’cause of it. She’d put us in the crisis stabilization center for thirty days here and there, but pretty soon, they took us away for good because of it and then she died.”
Although it was a story that would have been difficult to tell for most people, growing up in group homes and foster homes made it so that telling the story of the tragedy of your life became something routine. Something you could do with almost no emotion, as if it were just a matter of fact. Something the advocates would add tragic emphasis to when trying to get someone, like a foster parent or a judge or a teacher, to cooperate with their prerogatives.
“I was in over fifteen foster placements. Most of ’em just fostered us so they could get the government checks. They’d kick me out of the house in the morning and tell me not to come back until curfew, so I didn’t get picked up by the cops.”
Taylor continued to eat in a way that suggested he expected someone to take his food away before he was finished. While he ate, he bled himself clean of so many details of his life story that Aria was having trouble processing it all. Eventually, he turned the stage over to Aria, who reluctantly did the same in return, but with less zeal and decorative detail. He prompted it out of her with impolite but endearing questions.
By the time they had finished their food, Taylor had decided they were friends. Just like that, their paths through life were affixed together. When two people don’t have a place to live or a set life to speak of, it doesn’t work the same way it does for everyone else. You don’t pop around for get-togethers and common interests on occasion and gradually get to know one another. Instead, you walk in the same direction rather than going your separate ways. You form a symbiosis until that symbiosis ends, which you have already learned could come at any minute.
Aria was glad of it, despite her reservations. Even though she was intimidated by Taylor’s overly familiar nature, which felt foreign to her, she also felt sheltered by him. She felt softened by his casual way of implying that they had known each other for their whole lives.
Taylor and Aria returned their trays before leaving the shop. They walked north up the street, stopping to look in the windows any time Taylor noticed something exciting inside. Having stayed at the mission
