For the first time in weeks, while Taylor napped in his chair, Aria took out her journal and wrote. She wrote about everything that had happened to her in the last few weeks. She cried as she wrote. It was as if her pen had uncorked everything she had been suppressing and the grief could finally get out. Like every day in the hospital, in those hygienic halls looking over the city, the windows kept grief in and held life out.

With a kind of cold devotion, the machines that kept lungs breathing in and out told of people’s inability to see death clearly enough not to fear it or resist it.

Aria could see despair in the minds and movements of the people there, holding each other’s grief tightly. Trying to survive the unknown together. Every trivial thing erased by the emptiness of loss … By the earthquake of a moment of change. She felt at home there, with people who, due to the tragedies that required them to sit in that hospital waiting room, shared her despair.

A few mornings later, they approached the counter to purchase their tickets to Los Angeles.

“Hello, I’m Taylor and this is my sister. We’re going home to see our father in Los Angeles. He’s really sick and in the hospital, our mother is already there with him. We thought he was gonna get better, but he isn’t so the whole family has to be there with him.”

Taylor handed the receptionist a forged minor travel consent form and both of their drivers’ licenses. There was an awkward moment. The woman behind the desk took the paper and the IDs and stared at them for a while, looking up at the two teenagers as if wary of making a mistake that would put her own job on the line.

Aria and Taylor felt the tension build and the insecurity start to pull their perfect plan apart at the seams. Aria was terrified that the police might have given her name to the bus station and that at any moment, she would have to make a run for it.

“At least one parent or guardian is supposed to be here at the counter to sign for an unaccompanied child,” the woman eventually said. “But your sister is seventeen. Children seventeen years of age and older can travel unaccompanied with no restrictions, so she doesn’t need this.”

She placed the unnecessary document to the side of her desk and began to type on the computer in front of her. Her words let them off the hook. Taylor gave Aria a quick smile that expected acknowledgment back for his incredible talent at getting away with things – even if they hadn’t needed the documents.