As they walked, Aria listened to Luke, and studied him carefully. Unshaven and unwashed, he hid his blatant irresponsibility beneath a head of sandy red dreadlocks that fell just below his shoulder blades. It was not that she disagreed with his opinion on things. In fact, she agreed with pretty much everything he said. It was just what he had decided to do with that opinion – that was where they parted company.
She could not work out whether she liked him or hated him because of the mixed message of his entire state of being. She felt guilty for the resistance that she felt toward him because he was being so incredibly friendly. In fact, when she thought about it, the friendliness he exhibited was advocacy. This made her feel simultaneously supported and looked down upon. It became clear to her that he saw people like her as the underdogs in society. And he had joined them with the same forced philanthropy and imposed-but-false equality as the whites who had joined the Black Panther movement in the 1960s.
She hated feeling pitied. She hated it when the surface of things did not match what was underneath. It was clear that Luke’s sense of equality with everyone else on the street was just a surface veneer and that under it, he saw himself as their hero – and maybe their savior.
Aria followed just behind Taylor and Luke, next to Palin. She watched them talk and agree with one another about the plethora of conspiracy theories that had caused Luke to abandon his mainstream life. She could feel the rapport building between them. Taylor was thrilled to have someone to talk to. It was obvious to Aria, watching them talk, that she had deprived him of his need for verbal stimulation with her tendency to be silent. In Luke he had found someone in the world even more apt to dominate a conversation than himself.
Though dirty and full of holes, every item he was wearing from top to bottom and every item in his possession, from his North Face backpack to his outdoor-enthusiast hiking boots, was of the highest quality. At one point, when they stopped to take a rest, he folded his legs in such a way as to perfectly expose the label on the waistband of his pants. Aria laughed out loud when she saw the capital letters Georgio Armani.
Taylor and Luke stopped to see why she had laughed but she passed it off by saying “It’s nothing” and let them resume their conversation. By now, Aria had him all figured out. Luke was a rich kid who couldn’t do right by his daddy. Their high standards and workaholic tendencies had driven him to want to find some connection that couldn’t be found in his tennis matches or piano lessons. He obviously failed to conform to what his father wanted. So he got fed up with it one day and threw it all away. Aria felt no sympathy for him at all. To her, it was blasphemy for him to believe he even knew what suffering was. She could not shake the feeling of irritation she had toward him. She was glad that both he and Taylor seemed oblivious to it.
After a couple of hours, they had reached a part of the city that seemed to bleed into the arid nature that surrounded it. Luke showed them where to sneak through the chain-link fence and scrub trees surrounding what appeared to be an abandoned auto shop. Through the dark, Aria could just make out that the red and yellow stripes across its exterior had faded from neglect. Peering through the inky fog of night that had settled across the city, she could see that the large lot around the shop was cluttered with broken-down cars, many of which were missing wheels, hoods or other parts. Having not been washed in years, they looked like they had been salvaged from a natural disaster. Interspersed between the cars were a few tents and the occasional blue tarp, covering collections of clutter underneath them. There was no one to be seen apart from a boot belonging to one of the camp’s inhabitants that was sticking out from underneath a blanket.
Careful to be quiet, they followed Luke to his tent. Like everything else that he possessed, the tent looked like something only a rich kid would have. Aria asked Luke if there was anywhere to use the bathroom. He pointed to the left and told her, “We mostly just find a place in the woods.” She left the boys to walk to the perimeter of the property and climbed over the fence into the scrub sage and stunted oak trees surrounding the lot. Making sure that there was no one around to catch her, she peed in the tall grass before climbing back over the fence to find Luke and Taylor again.
Luke guaranteed them, even though they never asked, that tomorrow he would help them to find a place there to establish their own camp if they wanted. But that night he invited them to stay with him. Aria watched him hurry to push everything in his tent over to one side to make room for them. His lengthy conversation with Taylor had not ceased, it simply buzzed through exaggerated whispers. Even though Aria had slept almost the entire day, she was still so tired that when she lay down on the other side of Taylor, who was thrilled to be sandwiched between her and Luke and Palin, the airy sound of their voices quickly lulled her to sleep.
Aria was glad to be taken under someone’s
