For a few minutes, Taylor searched through the confusion of his feelings about what Wolf had said, until he recalled the original lesson that Wolf had meant to convey to him about acting. He looked for a part of himself that was as angry, but his search was cut short by a noise coming from across the street. A man, engulfed in multiple layers of clothing, had begun throwing handfuls of mud and rocks at the cars passing by. His sanity had been corrupted into a fight that he was having with the thin air. They watched him lost in the distressed pattern of muttering to himself before screaming an outburst of profanities and flailing his body around as if warding off imaginary attackers.

The presence of the man made all three of them nervous. Aria tried to pay attention to something else, sensing that if this man felt the pressure of her attention on him, she might show up on his radar enough to make him cross the street. He was trapped in an alternate reality, where everything and everyone was just a part of the world that only existed in his own mind. Aria did not want to show up in that reality. She knew that if she did, she would exist there as something other than herself. He would fit her into his story about her, and if that story about her was a bad one, he might become violent toward her.

After a few minutes, a police car rolled up to the curb and two officers stepped out. The man began rocking back and forth. Aria felt her chest begin to ache. It was obvious that the police were trying to help him, even while they were getting him to stop throwing rocks at the cars. But she knew that the man had already fit the two police officers into his reality, the poisoned game of unintentional pretend that was taking place in his own mind. It was a false reality, where everything and everyone was out to get him. They were powerless; there was no way to avoid directly playing into his disordered storyline.

Aria watched as one of the officers managed to convince him that he had come to take him to a safer place. The man rocked his willowy body over to the police car, shouting one more time at the cars on the road before getting into the back seat willingly.

When Aria saw the cop car make a U-turn, she jumped behind Wolf, suddenly afraid that they would see her and Taylor, who looked younger than he was, and try to bust them both for truancy. But instead the car drove right past them. She eyed it until she couldn’t see it any longer and instead began to worry about what might happen to the man.