The distance between the houses and buildings began to grow larger. The sun had given up on their journey, casting an indigo hue over everything in sight. Omkar watched Aria take a side road. Following her down it, through the haze of the rain, he watched her duck under a broken stretch of chain-link fencing. He saw her walk over to a car in a broken-down car lot and get inside it. Careful to go unnoticed, Omkar waited before exploring further from a distance. He walked a full circle around the car lot. By the time he was done observing the tarps and tents and clutter, he was soaking wet. But Omkar had ascertained enough to understand what was truly happening. He watched Aria and a few of the other people at the encampment until his view was too severely obscured by night.
Omkar dueled with the branches of the trees and bushes in order to get back to a main road without being seen. Instead of immediately calling a cab, he sat down on a curb, letting the hum of the cars pass by him. He had assumed that Aria had stolen the pack of tampons because of some habitual pattern of defiant rule-breaking. He had expected to follow her to some suburban home which belonged to two parents, much like his own, whose rules were strung too tight for her to breathe. So tight that she had to break rules somehow, even if they never knew that she had broken them. But that was not what was happening at all. It was clear to him that she had stolen the tampons because she literally had to.
Omkar didn’t know what to do. He loved her even more now. He was conscious of loving her when the thought of loving her more now crossed his mind. He was in love with this girl, who he knew almost nothing about, a girl he had never officially met. He wanted to go back and rescue her, but take her where? And what if she didn’t like him? What if the way she looked at him was just a strategy to be able to steal what she needed to live?
When Omkar finally did call a cab to go home, he did his best to memorize the route between the car lot and his family’s store. It felt so wrong to leave her there that as he was driving away, every cell in his body revolted. One day the minutes of his boring life had been ticking away and now, he could not fall back in line with those minutes. His mind was possessed with the image of her and all the unanswered questions he had about her.
Totally unaware of her new admirer, Aria smoked a cigarette, hoping that it would alleviate the pain of her cramps. She cracked the door open so as to not submerge them both in smoke and leaned against it.
“You shouldn’t be doin’ that,” Taylor said from the front passenger seat.
At first Aria thought he was referring to the cigarette she was smoking. “Dude, I’m fucked right now, could you just get off my back?” she said.
“No. Fuck it!” Taylor yelled, turning around with tears in his eyes. “She’s not good company and you don’t need her fucking up your life too. You don’t need to go doin’ things with her like that.”
It took Aria a second to realize that he was referring to Ciarra and her one-time attempt at hooking.
Taylor had arrived early and had rifled through her backpack, looking for the pocketknife that Luke had recently given her. Despite the protests of his conscience, he had read her journal, including the entry she had made about having prostituted. It had plagued him for the last few hours. Coming back to the car lot to find her gone had made him assume that it was not a one-time thing and that she was at it again that night.
Unaware that he had read her journal, Aria imagined that Ciarra had said something to him about it.
“Dude, I only went with her one time and it didn’t work out … Why the fuck do you even care?” Aria yelled back, taken completely by surprise by his outrage, especially given that he didn’t bother to consult her about the trajectory of his own life.
“Because you’re better than that. You’re better than her. You don’t need to go doin’ that shit.”
Taylor turned back to face the windshield, his arms crossed to protect his vulnerability. He was quietly crying.
Aria felt judged, but beneath that judgment she could clearly see from his reaction the attachment that he had to her. Feeling loved to that degree made it impossible to defend herself with an attack.
“I only did it once and it didn’t work out. I swear to God I haven’t gone back, it’s too fucked up,” Aria countered.
“You swear to God you aren’t lying to me?” Taylor said, turning around to face her again, scanning her face to determine her sincerity.
Aria said nothing further. She looked him straight in the face. Taylor started to cry again, pulling her head toward him with the crook of his elbow so as to hug her as best as he could, given the awkward position of their bodies relative to one another.
Taylor considered her to be like a little sister and the idea of her falling prey to predators behind his back was more than he could bear. “OK, just promise me,” he said, wiping the tears away from his cheeks.
“I swear to God,” Aria said, trying to wiggle out from under the pressure of his request.
“OK, ’cause I love you,” Taylor said, waiting for her to reassure him in return.
“I do too,” she said. It was not an impressive response, but it was enough for him to turn back around and position himself to go to sleep.
Aria was as uncomfortable with the pressure Taylor put on her to
