Aria felt ambivalent about Christmas. For her, and so many of the other people in her position, there were two sides to the story of Christmas in their lives. In one way, Aria could feel what might have been. She could see herself as a child in a different kind of home. It was as if she were looking through a window onto that life she never had. The glass was partially frosted. Inside she could see her younger self with her mother, Lucy, looking healthy, with a responsible and gentle man who took care of them by her side. She could see a younger sister or brother there too. The family dog was wearing a Christmas sweater. They were reading The Night Before Christmas on the couch in front of a giant Christmas tree. Every ornament on the tree was glamorized by the creamy glow of the Christmas lights. She had memorized every one of them. She had felt the nostalgia of taking each ornament out of its wrapping with this imaginary family each year. She could taste the thickness of hot cocoa against the roof of her mouth.
Every smell associated with Christmas contained a story of its own, a thousand years of festivity. Aria loved those smells. She loved the idea that the notes of each Christmas carol had the potential to restore those positive memories and those feelings of love and belonging to full bloom. She loved the look on the children’s faces, overwhelmed with the magic of presents appearing in their stockings. She loved the way that people seemed to be stricken with a sudden sense of kindness during Christmas. Instead of fighting their way through the crowd, people were smiling and making way for each other. They were wishing each other a happy holiday. Aria imagined she would love the tradition of Christmas if that tradition had been anything good.
But the other side of the story of Christmas in Aria’s life was the reality: that Christmas wasn’t good. It was watching her mother draw a Christmas tree on a paper with crayons because it was all she could afford to do. It was the time of the year that Lucy was most aware she couldn’t give her daughter the life she wanted to give her. It was watching her mother struggle to buy or steal her one toy each year. It was playing with that toy by herself, watching Lucy drown away that feeling of shortcoming with a needle. It was the fuckedup way the foster parents or staff at the group homes tried to make them enjoy a holiday designed specifically to celebrate the very thing that all of them had lost.
Aria knew that the man who was pretending to be Santa most likely had the stain of alcohol on his breath. She knew that the shops were just looking to Christmas for one more way to tease the money out of people’s purses. She knew she had no home to go home to. And because of all this, Aria wished that Christmas didn’t exist. The interminable build-up to Christmas was like never-ending foreplay leading up to an experience that she could never have. The outward hatred she showed for Christmas was her way of hiding the painful fact that, like everyone, she wanted to love Christmas, but couldn’t because of the reality of her unlucky life.
It had been nearly five months since Aria had come to Los Angeles. Though she had found a sort of base camp in the car lot and with the people who lived there, it had been a breadth of hardship. In that time, Aria had learned the true value of a dollar. She had learned how to disappear into the tapestry of the city. She had learned so much the hard way, like where not to walk at night and where not to walk during the day. Her life had been a surfeit of near misses. Finding programs for people in her position that posed too much of a risk for her to try to join.
Taylor hadn’t had it much better. He had taken a handful of temp jobs and lived off of the dollars he made until he had none left, but it was never enough to rent a place. He had attended a few publicly advertised cattle calls for actors, but had never gotten a part. He had slept with more than a few men, but it never amounted to anything more than a booty call. Some days he went out on behalf of both of them with a cardboard sign to solicit charity. It made Aria feel guilty when he did it, but she was still 17. She couldn’t take the risk of getting caught.
Luke and Palin, forever nomadic, had been off to a dozen festivals. Occasionally he brought back a gutter punk or two that he had met there. They would park themselves at the car lot for a day or two before leaving on the boxcar of some train, headed to whatever places anarchists go. Though her almost patriotic devotion was to Luke, Palin had grown close to Aria. Scratches now scuffed up the side of the broken-down Land Cruiser from Palin trying to coerce her to come out and play.
Aria’s hair had grown longer. She had bitten her nails down as far as she could chew them. As far as food went, some days she was luckier than others. The unpredictability of sustenance made it difficult for her to concentrate sometimes. She welcomed the mental fogginess because it made her stop thinking about her life. Her gums were sore. With the lifeblood stripped from her immune system, it seemed like she had fallen sick at least seven times in the past months. She was so skinny that people might have been expected to guess the truth about her situation. But because her youth would not give her body the permission to decay, people simply assumed that she
