He took a sip from his water cup and began to whisper to himself in exasperation that he obviously wanted her to see. Though she could not fully hear what he was saying, it seemed he was having a dialogue with himself about the downward spiral caused by his bad luck. It was obvious the ulterior motive for sitting next to her was his need for connection, or at the very least, some mental stimulation.

Feeling guilty for the wall she had erected against him, Aria dialed down her coldness and said, “No I can talk, it’s fine.”

Instantly, his monologue stopped and his enthusiasm returned.

“Do you come here a lot?” she asked.

“Depends,” he said. “Sometimes I’m here every day and sometimes not for a while. But I guess you could call me a regular.” He winked at the staff behind the counter, who took no notice of him.

It was clear to Aria that this Taylor was lonely and that his method of coping with it was to invent an idea of closeness with people, where it didn’t actually exist.

“Shouldn’t you be in school or somethin’?” he asked in his blunt manner, which Aria had already ascertained was not rudeness, but rather the vein of his personality.

“I dropped out,” she said, bracing herself for some kind of judgment that never came.

“Me too,” he exclaimed through a mouthful of breadstick. He shouted it as if delighted to have something in common with someone … anyone at all. Immediately, he opened the door to his world for her. “I got jumped at a group home because I really didn’t follow the rules and really they were just trying to get rid of me.”

Aria felt a surge of contradictory feelings toward Taylor the minute that he said that. On one hand, she felt an immediate commonality and rapport because they had been in the same position. But just as immediately came the familiar ingrained feelings of competition. At the group homes, attention was scarce. For Aria, and most other children who grew up there, the feeling of hearing that someone grew up in group homes was similar to the feeling of opening a restaurant that your life was dependent on and having someone open a restaurant right next door to you on the same street.

But she consciously curtailed the feeling. Aria could read between the lines of what he was saying. She knew how bad it was for LGBT youth in group homes. But she let him continue to avoid telling her the real reason he had been jumped.