No matter how many times she managed to find a place to wash them, her clothes seemed to be eternally soused by the fumes of sports cars that passed her by. Aria had never cared about fashion. But she found herself missing the feeling of wearing something just because it looked good. It was asking for trouble to be on the streets and wear something for any reason other than that it was practical.
With no phone or calendar, and LA having no real seasons to demonstrate the passing of time, the days blurred into one another. If society was a rat race, most of its members were stuck in the wheel. The people on the street believed themselves to be free from that rat cage, but the stasis in which they lived was just another kind of rat cage. Their marginal existence was the wheel of surviving day to day. Never getting ahead, every day starting over at zero. Aria had the feeling that if she got off the street and came back to these same places, she would see the same people doing the same things in one year, five years, 20 years … assuming that they hadn’t died first. If you weren’t insane before living out here, the living here would make you insane. It would kill you, but not quickly and not painlessly. It would wear you down at the edges before scooping out your core.
Last-minute shoppers swarmed through the corridors of the mall: frenzied people quickly bouncing from store to store with bags in their hands. The buttery smell of toasted almonds, coated in cinnamon sugar, was laced through the air. Aria wove her way through the crowd to get outside the building behind the food court. She waited until no one was passing by and grabbed the first thing that her hands could reach out of the dumpster. It was a styrofoam takeaway box with a divvy of partially eaten lo mein noodles. Instead of standing there, she took them to a corner of the bustling parking lot and ate them with her hands. Whoever had finished the first portion of the noodles had drowned them in soy and sriracha hot sauce. It made her mouth and stomach burn, but she ate them anyway before heading back to the car lot.
Luke woke them up in the morning by knocking his elbow against the glass. In his hands, he was precariously holding two paper cups full of instant hot cocoa. He had taken the packets and cups from a bank office three days before with Christmas morning in mind. Like almost everyone else, Luke had nowhere to go this Christmas. But in typical fashion, he had taken it upon himself to prevent them all from sinking into sorrow.
Taylor opened the door and took the cups from him. “Merry Christmas. It’s cocoa,” Luke announced. “I’ll be back in a second.”
Taylor handed one of the cups to Aria. It was so hot that the film of wax on the outside of the cup began to come loose on her hands. They watched Luke go back into his tent and carry little cups to every person in the car lot, except for Ciarra, Aston and Mike, who had been gone for two days to visit a relative somewhere in Hemet, California. When he got around to Anthony’s tarp, Anthony refused to respond. He was not asleep; he simply didn’t move. He stayed where he was, lying on his stomach, staring off into a chasm of depression that only he could see. Luke placed the cup of cocoa in front of his face, where it stood the least chance of being knocked over but where he would be forced to see it.
Luke came back to the Land Cruiser with his own cup of cocoa and Palin in tow. They both got into the back seat with Aria, forcing her to slide over to one side. “Mmmm, a subtle note of cherry, maybe some oak and definitely some chocolate undertones,” he said, jokingly sipping his cocoa as if impersonating a wine sommelier.
They laughed out loud. The joke was all the more funny because the cocoa he had managed to make them on his little camping stove was anything but gourmet. The saccharin sweetness of synthetic chocolate was enough to give them all a headache. But it lifted their spirits anyway. “So, what the fuck should we do today?” Taylor asked them with a tone that denoted defeat.
“Ah, dude, today’s the best day to go downtown. People give out mad loot, man,” Luke responded.
“What do you mean?” Taylor asked.
“It’s Christmas, the only day people actually give a shit,” Luke responded with a pandering smile.
As it turned out, Luke was right. He, Taylor, Aria and Palin sat under the façade of a building on a street close to the three biggest missions in the city. Aria was glad that being in California meant there would be no snow for Christmas this year. It wasn’t that she hated snow; quite the opposite. But it didn’t feel quite like Christmas without snow, and so the holiday didn’t hurt as much as it might have otherwise. Christmas lights didn’t look or feel the same without the backdrop of powdery white.
The streets were crowded with people like themselves, looking to take advantage of the habitual alms that they could expect to receive on Christmas Day. In a slow and virtuous swarm, families and couples passed by in their brand new Range Rovers, Ford Fusions, Porsches, Teslas and Toyota Priuses. Every so often, one of the cars would stop and open the trunk to gather an allotment of whatever they had decided to hand out to the homeless that year. They would walk the items over to whichever recipients they had singled out and hand them down to them with righteous smiles on their faces.
Aria felt uncomfortable in her own skin. The entire display made her lose even more faith in humanity. It was her poverty that
