When morning came, Aria cracked the door open wide enough to see that she had awoken before the sun had risen. She wasn’t accustomed to going to sleep so early. While everyone else was still asleep, she forced some of her damp clothes back over the shape of her body and looked around the store for ways to repay the Agarwals’ kindness. But because Neeraj was so careful about the upkeep of his store, Aria could not find much to do. She took the window chalk markers and rewrote the fading letters that spelled “New Year’s Sale On Items” on the front window before organizing the piles of papers and items stacked behind the checkout counter. She wrote a thank-you note to Neeraj and Jarminder and left it there. Then she wrote a letter to Omkar telling him to meet her at the car lot after he got off of school and signed it with a heart. She made her bed and left the letter on it.

Once Aria had collected everything except her wet clothes back into her backpack, she left, holding the bell attached to the door when she opened it so it wouldn’t announce her exit. The air outside was crisp. The irrigation system in the neighbor’s lawn hissed from beneath the thick and newly cut buffalo grass when she passed it. One of the neighbors stopped her minivan with three kids in the back to ask Aria if she wanted a ride to the school bus stop. Aria thanked her, but declined, suddenly feeling insecure about how young she must look in comparison to how she felt and the life she had been living.

As the morning sun touched her with its un-sugared rays, she turned back to look at Omkar’s window. Thinking of this new chapter of her life with him, she thought, “Has your life already spent its shade and has it stained you?” She stopped on the side of the road to write the verse in her journal. She did not know if any love or hope could wash the shadow from a person. But she hoped that maybe Omkar could love her with that ineffable stain she felt because she knew that now, without him, life would always be so much less.

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 31

They were in the deserted doorways, their cardboard boxes erected like monuments to commemorate their anguish. The irony of their lives written in the sign on those boxes reading “this side up.” Their thirst could not be quenched by the water they didn’t have. Their hunger could not be satiated by the food they could not afford to buy.