Sitting on the desk, as if part of a cosmic joke being set up in her favor, was the basket, still filled with money. Waiting for the pastor to allocate it to its proper place, it was just sitting there. Aria ran toward it and grabbed money out of it by the handful. She stuffed all but a few of the bills into her backpack as fast as she could, not bothering to count it, terror-stricken that someone might catch her in the act.

She waited a few seconds for the right moment to exit, and while she was waiting she caught sight of a picture of the pastor’s family, neatly displayed in a frame on the bookshelf by his desk. In the picture, his wife and two kids were all wearing white T-shirts. It was a close-up taken at a park. They were smiling and posed as if to suggest that it was placed there to set an example to the other members of the church. As contrived as it was, before Aria exited, she felt that all-too-familiar punch of envy, the bait of a belonging that would never be hers.

Aria left the building in a collected manner that would have suggested to no one what she had done. She made her way into the waiting room of a hospital – Taylor had given her the idea that it was the perfect place for someone underage to go unnoticed by the police. Placing her backpack on her lap, she was able to disguise her actions in smoothing out and counting the money that she had just stolen. From what she could tell, it amounted to $519.

She felt torn. On the one hand, she felt guilty to have unintentionally taken so much more than she thought she had taken. On the other hand, it provided unfathomable relief. She entertained the idea of all of the things she could do with it, replacing the basic luxuries she had gone without. But then she remembered that she could not afford to just spend it. She didn’t know what the future held and liked the security of knowing that she could use it as a kind of secret safety net.

Taylor had gone off to find food for both of them. When he arrived at the hospital, he was carrying a container of Chinese takeout, full to the brim with white rice. Rice was dead cheap. You could fill your belly with it to offset the hunger and buy yourself some time to find better food. Aria didn’t tell him that she had stolen money. She hadn’t even told him that she didn’t have any in the first place. No matter how close they were to each other, they both knew that in a state of desperation, relational ties meant next to nothing.