When Taylor had tried to explain himself, the judge had barked, “I’m not buying it today,” and had sentenced him to both probation and counseling. When he was released from the detention center, he was driven to an entirely different group home. He had been transferred. This was what it had felt like when he was young, an endless routine of hopping, of never belonging to one place, of never staying long enough to grow roots.

As he watched the country passing by, Taylor felt like he was leaving the prison of it all behind. He felt defiant and victorious. He saw his father’s face in his mind. Taylor couldn’t decide if his father had been sad to lose him or if he was glad to see him go. He wondered why he was not enough. Not enough to value, not enough to want. Not enough to make his father stay, instead of leaving them all behind when he did. The cool of his father’s indifference could not calm Taylor’s fury at not being loved enough. He felt the agonized sea of parting ways crack and heave against his heart. The sound of his heartbreak rang like a bell underwater. But he did not break under the blow of it. The hope he held for the life he was headed toward wouldn’t let it happen. He was done wanting, done waiting for a life he would never have there. He was done wanting things from people who would never give those things to him. As they were driven across that open country, the promise he made himself – not to return to where he had come from, unless he came home a big success – amounted to little more than a whisper. But that whisper was still a vow.

The austerity of the desert eventually converted itself to palm trees and freshly watered lawns. They had arrived in Los Angeles before dinnertime. It felt strange to Aria to watch the people she had spent the last couple of days with scatter and disappear, knowing she would most likely never see any of them again.

The quality of the air was completely different. The city buzzed with enterprise and it excited her. She could tell immediately that the law of that land of opportunity was “every man for himself,” but there seemed absolutely no one to try to get in your way. Every person they passed walking out of the bus station seemed to be striving for something and to be so busy in the striving for it that they had no time for anything or anyone. They were observing that fast current toward success, knowing that soon, they too would be in it … but not today.