Aria, Wolf and Taylor had visited a food pantry on their way from the public library back to the car lot. Wolf slid the hooked end of the can-opener blade on his Swiss Army knife across the lid of a jar of baked beans, breaking the metal tediously as he went. His long hair, not tamed into a ponytail like usual, blew in the wind as if it were caught in a water current. Aria stared at the veins that were woven like tree roots just under the surface of his hands. When he managed to open the can enough, he slid his fingers under the razor-sharp edge and forced the lid, still attached, to bend open. He handed the can to Aria, who began to spoon the contents into her mouth with two fingers. It confused her senses to be eating beans cold like this. Taylor had upended a plastic container of applesauce and was patiently trying to drink it so as to avoid getting his hands dirty.

Taylor was in such fabulous spirits that the curve of the overpass might as well have been the curve of a spiral staircase in a palace. Due to his willingness to do anything and everything that would get him closer to his dreams, he had proven himself to be so useful to the acting studio that they had asked him to come four times a week now instead of two. Aria watched him in awe. Here he was, sitting underneath an overpass, no money, no car, no home, eating his only meal of the day, with a smile on his face as if he were a king. She was envious of his buoyancy.

Having lost focus for just a second, Aria felt the acute sting of the lid of the can carving a small split into her knuckle. She winced, sucking in her breath loudly enough for Wolf to hear her. She watched the blood well up and weep down the topside of her fingers. Wolf dropped what he was doing, grabbed a handful of the dirt that had not yet been soaked through by rain and released it softly right over the top of the wound. The cardinal red of her blood mixed with the dust to make a muddy paste on the surface of her hand.

“Just keep it there, it’ll stop the bleeding,” Wolf said, returning to what he’d been doing.

“Thanks,” Aria said, trying hard not to think about whether the dirt he had used was clean or tainted by road filth or some other vagrant’s alcoholic urine.

Their hunger made the effort of talking an expense that none of them seemed willing to afford for the most part, until Taylor grew anxious with the silence. “My class is putting on a play of The Little Prince.”

He was talking to Aria, but Wolf was the one to respond to him. “That’s a good story,” he said.