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 was anorexic.

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.