She felt disgusting. Disgusting for stealing and disgusting because she had not found a way to shower in too many days to count. At first she wandered into the bathroom to see if there was any way to wash herself there, but the constant influx of passengers made her decide against it. She stood in the hallway where the bathrooms were located, trying the few different doors that were there in the short spaces of solitude between customers entering the bathrooms. The first door turned up nothing but a storeroom full of boxes of unopened products. But the second turned out to be a utility closet. In the brief moment it took to glance inside, she saw that there was a sink there. Aria closed the door to pretend again that she was up to nothing long enough for a man who was headed for the bathroom to disappear inside. Then she opened the door again, snuck inside and locked the door behind her.

The cement floor was stained brown from years of heavy use. All around her, in some form of organized chaos, were cleaning products and tools, a collection of brooms, two ladders, a rolled-up hose and empty buckets thrown on top of one another. The yellow handle of a mop projected from the deep porcelain washbasin affixed to the wall. Rust stains had tainted its original color. Aria had collected three empty water bottles in her time since running away from the Johnsons. She had been using them for everything from gathering water in drinking fountains to filling them with hot tap water to keep her warm at night, to placing them on the ledges of windowsills to catch the light in a way that comforted her. She found it almost farcical that something she’d never thought twice about would be one of the things she now treasured the most.

Looking down to confirm that there was a drain in the center of the floor, she pulled the bottles from her backpack and began to fill each with water from the faucet. Still afraid to be discovered, she rushed to strip naked and place her clothes up on a high shelf, out of reach of any potential water spray. The water, not intended for the human skin, was freezing. As fast as she could, refilling the bottles again and again, she soaked herself with it. Tiny goosebumps began to rise up to meet the water.

Aria briefly looked for soap with which to clean herself, but only discovered a jug of solvent cleaner, intended for cleaning floors. She considered whether or not it would be dangerous for her skin, but decided to take the risk. She soaped herself vigorously, including the length of her hair, which she stuck under the faucet of the sink. She hoped that the force of the water would do a better job of washing the suds out than the trickle from the water bottles would.