“My mom got breast cancer when me and my sister were really young,” Taylor continued. “She went in for chemotherapy and when she came back, she wasn’t the same mom anymore. She would beat us and scream at us and my dad left her ’cause of it. She’d put us in the crisis stabilization center for thirty days here and there, but pretty soon, they took us away for good because of it and then she died.”

Although it was a story that would have been difficult to tell for most people, growing up in group homes and foster homes made it so that telling the story of the tragedy of your life became something routine. Something you could do with almost no emotion, as if it were just a matter of fact. Something the advocates would add tragic emphasis to when trying to get someone, like a foster parent or a judge or a teacher, to cooperate with their prerogatives.

“I was in over fifteen foster placements. Most of ’em just fostered us so they could get the government checks. They’d kick me out of the house in the morning and tell me not to come back until curfew, so I didn’t get picked up by the cops.”

Taylor continued to eat in a way that suggested he expected someone to take his food away before he was finished. While he ate, he bled himself clean of so many details of his life story that Aria was having trouble processing it all. Eventually, he turned the stage over to Aria, who reluctantly did the same in return, but with less zeal and decorative detail. He prompted it out of her with impolite but endearing questions.

By the time they had finished their food, Taylor had decided they were friends. Just like that, their paths through life were affixed together. When two people don’t have a place to live or a set life to speak of, it doesn’t work the same way it does for everyone else. You don’t pop around for get-togethers and common interests on occasion and gradually get to know one another. Instead, you walk in the same direction rather than going your separate ways. You form a symbiosis until that symbiosis ends, which you have already learned could come at any minute.

Aria was glad of it, despite her reservations. Even though she was intimidated by Taylor’s overly familiar nature, which felt foreign to her, she also felt sheltered by him. She felt softened by his casual way of implying that they had known each other for their whole lives.