Aria knew the likelihood of finding the backpack again was slim. But against all odds, she saw something vaguely the color of it just over a hundred meters away. She left Taylor to run over to take a look. As she got closer, she could tell it was indeed her backpack. Now all she felt was the fear of what inside it might be missing. The crunch of broken glass broke through her leery focus. It called her attention to the ground. Sparkles had spilled out across the gravel. A short distance away, the globeless base to the snow globe she had brought with her was lying there on its side. She rushed forward and searched desperately through her discarded backpack.

The money was gone, all of it. Whoever had taken it had thrown and scattered whatever contents of the backpack that they didn’t have a use for before abandoning the scene.

Aria gathered her clothes and her journal and the plastic bottles, zipping the body of her backpack around them. She lifted it onto one shoulder and stared down at the base of the snow globe. The bright yellow cartoon-like half moon and the tiny figure of the girl sleeping on top of its bottom curve were now chipped and exposed to the dirt of the floor. She remembered how she used to play in the dirt as a child. Back then the dirt seemed to make this world whole. She remembered how as a child, she used to pretend. Or maybe she didn’t pretend at all and that was what made it all so much more perfect than this. She remembered how many times she had escaped the torture of her world by imagining herself to be cradled inside the safe confines of that snow globe. She had imagined she was the girl that the moon held, come to life. She had imagined the benevolent cradle of that moon underneath her. She imagined the sparkles falling against her face.

That was a game for a child. In just one night, Los Angeles had stripped that innocence and safety from her. Even though it was difficult, Aria left the snow globe behind, an emblem of the life she had walked away from. She left behind not only the comfort it had given her, but also every circumstance that caused her to require that comfort in the first place. It was almost poetic. She walked back toward Taylor before he could reach her. It was a poem that belonged to her alone.

PART TWO FUGUE CONCERTO

PART TWO

FUGUE CONCERTO

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10

Aria felt the all-too-familiar cinching, the slippery, warm feeling of newly sloughed blood. Having been so preoccupied with surviving day to day, she had forgotten that it had been over a month already since her last period. She looked around for some kind of quick solution, but there wasn’t one.