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.