A week had passed since Aria had spent the night in the abandoned doghouse, a slipshod week of learning the ins and outs of life on the streets of Chicago. She had found a mission that allowed vagrants to stay for three nights per month. Having lied to the staff about her age, she was shown to a room that looked roughly like a refugee camp. It was a large gymnasium, converted into a human-scale rat cage. The flooring had been peeled up, exposing the cement floor underneath. It was easier to clean this way. Pipes of different sizes platted the ceiling like a maze overhead. The entire room was covered in bunk beds, with no sheets to cushion the thinness of the mattresses. Standing in the crowd of other women and children who had been ushered in with her, Aria suddenly regretted being there. But being too shy to draw attention to herself by rescinding her decision, she stood still and contained her feelings, listening to two directors who were in charge that night, reading out the rules of the shelter.

One woman read them in English, then the other repeated them in Spanish. They were made to strip to their underwear and hand over their shoes and then clothing. Aria watched one of the mission volunteers take her clothes and backpack over to a metal locker, among a row of hundreds, and lock them in. They were to sleep in underwear. It was a way of ensuring that violence was kept to a minimum. If one of the women tried to kill another one in this place, she could not make a getaway, because her clothes and shoes would be locked up. Each woman was then given a pile of threadbare sheets, which she was expected to make her bed with.

The mission volunteers made Aria nervous. Most of them were homeless themselves. They simply viewed volunteering as a way to better manipulate their way into getting their own needs met. Many of the women staying there made a quick thirty bucks in the daytime by going to a blood plasma donation center nearby. Aria followed a group of them the first day, but did not go inside. The entire experience at the mission had made her feel like an animal at a slaughterhouse. She squirmed at the thought of giving in to that likeness one step further by willingly letting them drain her blood. The other women kept the money they had made there in the pockets of their clothing. On more than one occasion, Aria witnessed one of the volunteers stealing this money out of the pockets when she took the clothes to the lockers before it was time for the lights to go out. Having your possessions stolen, no matter how few possessions you had, seemed to be part of life on the street.