Omkar asked to take a rest and Aria teased him, toeing him part of the way up the next hill. With the bed of the entire city laid out below them, a group of horses came past them from behind. Aria wanted to touch them, but restrained herself. Instead, she inhaled their fragrance as they passed. They had a unique fragrance. To Aria, nothing in the world smelled as good as horses, but there was no way to describe their scent. They didn’t smell like anything else because a horse smelled like a horse. The tourists they carried clung sloppily to their saddles as they plodded lazily down the trail that they had been down so many times, they could walk it in their sleep. Omkar, who was uncharacteristically pensive on the hike, tried to read the words of an advertisement being flown on a flag behind a prop plane overhead.

“Are you OK?” Aria asked him.

“Yeah, it’s just scary how much money these guys have,” he said, referring to the people who had invested in the advertising method.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Those advertisements cost like six thousand bucks; twelve thousand if you want them to write something in jet streams or whatever across the sky.”

Aria laughed. “What are you, a marketing major now?” Omkar smiled but didn’t answer.

Instead of leading them up to the sign, the trail led them to a gate separating Griffith Park from an upper-class neighborhood. “Let’s just go back,” Aria said, not wanting to hike any further than they already had. Omkar looked around them in search of the perfect place to stop and take a photo. On a hill to their right, he spotted an overlook and coaxed Aria into following him there to a place where the Hollywood sign would be directly behind them. He left Aria standing there and interrupted a jogger who was just about to start his run. The man seemed inconvenienced to be asked to take a picture of them when they could have taken a selfie. Aria watched Omkar whisper to him and hand him his phone before running up to stand beside her. When she posed for the picture, Aria willed the muscles of her face into a tension that she imagined would make her look good in the photo.

“OK, OK, now turn around and look at the sign so he can take one of us looking at it,” Omkar said.

All too aware of the annoyance of the man taking the picture, Aria turned around begrudgingly.

“Now point at it,” he said. Barking orders about how to adjust her body for the picture was just his way of buying time. Eventually, Aria grew fed up with the task of trying to adjust herself perfectly for his liking and turned back around.