The money was gone, all of it. Whoever had taken it had thrown and scattered whatever contents of the backpack that they didn’t have a use for before abandoning the scene.
Aria gathered her clothes and her journal and the plastic bottles, zipping the body of her backpack around them. She lifted it onto one shoulder and stared down at the base of the snow globe. The bright yellow cartoon-like half moon and the tiny figure of the girl sleeping on top of its bottom curve were now chipped and exposed to the dirt of the floor. She remembered how she used to play in the dirt as a child. Back then the dirt seemed to make this world whole. She remembered how as a child, she used to pretend. Or maybe she didn’t pretend at all and that was what made it all so much more perfect than this. She remembered how many times she had escaped the torture of her world by imagining herself to be cradled inside the safe confines of that snow globe. She had imagined she was the girl that the moon held, come to life. She had imagined the benevolent cradle of that moon underneath her. She imagined the sparkles falling against her face.
That was a game for a child. In just one night, Los Angeles had stripped that innocence and safety from her. Even though it was difficult, Aria left the snow globe behind, an emblem of the life she had walked away from. She left behind not only the comfort it had given her, but also every circumstance that caused her to require that comfort in the first place. It was almost poetic. She walked back toward Taylor before he could reach her. It was a poem that belonged to her alone.
PART TWO
FUGUE CONCERTO
CHAPTER 10
Aria felt the all-too-familiar cinching, the slippery, warm feeling of newly sloughed blood. Having been so preoccupied with surviving day to day, she had forgotten that it had been over a month already since her last period. She looked around for some kind of quick solution, but there wasn’t one.
“I think I just got my period,” she said in an abashed tone. She rushed down an alleyway between buildings and rustled with her shoes, trying to remove them before she bled through the inseam of her camo pants. Being careful not to step on the floor with them, she removed her socks and wadded them into a makeshift pad, and motioned to Taylor who was staring at her, looking concerned. “Can you come stand over here and shield me?” she asked him.
“Do you want me to look away?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Aria replied.
Taylor leaned against the wall of the building, using the bulk of his shape to conceal her, while trying to act like he was just hanging out there in the alleyway. Aria tried to flatten herself against the wall of the building. She unbuttoned and unzipped her pants just far enough to be able to slip the socks between her legs. She felt like a slave to her own body, which had now put more pressure on her, as if everything else was not pressure enough. This was not an aspect of life on the street that she had even considered before today.
They’d decided to abandon their attempts to call Taylor’s friend who had promised to help him if he ever came to LA. She had not picked up a single one of his phone calls. Instead, they took three hours to reach a public park and Aria went straight into the public bathroom. She washed her socks out at one of the sinks as fast as she could, to cover up what she was doing. Her blood blushed deep crimson against the steel shine of the sink.
Aria filled up one of her empty water bottles and squirted a stream of orange hand soap from the dispenser into her hand. Using her elbow to try to latch the door of the bathroom stall closed, she straddled the toilet and used the soap and water from her bottle to wash herself off. Knowing she would bleed through toilet paper, she used it temporarily while trying to dry off her socks under the hand drier. It soon became obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to get them any drier without it taking too much time, seeing as how she had to stop for the other women who needed to dry their hands. So she folded her socks together and put them back in place. She would have to stay there near the bathroom for the rest of the day. Perhaps for the next five days.
While she was cleaning herself up, Taylor resolved to make them some money so Aria could get a packet of sanitary pads. He told her he had a soft spot for women because he’d had a lot of sisters over the years and he’d seen what they had to go through every month. So she spent the majority of the day moving from place to place in the park, watching Taylor passively panhandle next to a crosswalk just outside the park fence with a sign that said “Hungry, Anything Helps.” Aria didn’t know what to do with the kindness. She
