Omkar clasped his hands around hers, trapping the bills inside of them. “Just stop now. Do this for me today, OK, please?” he asked.

Aria raised an eyebrow as a hesitant concession to his temporary insanity. He kissed her on the forehead and left the room to collect his things upstairs. Aria put the money in her pocket. Though she wanted to humor him, there was no way she was going to spend that much money on an outfit or on finding a way across the city.

Just ahead of her in the distance, buildings pierced the sky like steel daggers warning off the interfering clouds. In the hallowed halls of the city, people rushed in every direction. The spectral choir of cars on the network of freeways was muted by distance.

Aria was walking northwest in search of the first secondhand clothing store she could find. The street was littered with dollar stores and payday loan shops. A man pushing all of his tattered belongings in a shopping cart crossed the road where there was no crosswalk, without any concern for the cars on the street.

She stepped into a store whose windows were cluttered with manikins that looked like hookers. Each one was poorly fitted with cheap imported shirts or dresses. An Oriental man approached her when she opened the door. “Everything on this side for sale!” he said in broken English.

Aria nodded and walked over to a rack of dresses. She thumbed through the polyester fabric until she found her size in a white sundress, cased in sunflower print. She tried it on in a curtained alcove that the store owner was brave enough to call a dressing room. It was the first time she had worn a dress since she had run away from the Johnsons’. As jaded as she was about the world, the sunflower print made Aria feel the mirth that some people spoke of with regards to life. She liked how its warmth and innocence hugged her frame. Keeping it on, she went to the checkout counter and handed the store attendant the $50 bill. The man marked it with a pen to make sure that it wasn’t fake and, keeping just over $12, he handed Aria back the change.

Aria felt naked without her backpack as she walked down the sidewalk in her sunflower sundress and high-top sneakers, stopping to look at the window display of any store that had one. She had scanned the displays boasted by at least a dozen pawnshops before something she saw in one of them that shot a thrill straight through her. As if by divine orchestration, she recognized the metal tips of a line of tools in a little burlap case that had been unrolled so the customers could see it. Aria ran inside.

“Are those carving tools?” she asked, flustered by the ardor of her own excitement.

“Where?” the man tending the store asked.