While she was cleaning herself up, Taylor resolved to make them some money so Aria could get a packet of sanitary pads. He told her he had a soft spot for women because he’d had a lot of sisters over the years and he’d seen what they had to go through every month. So she spent the majority of the day moving from place to place in the park, watching Taylor passively panhandle next to a crosswalk just outside the park fence with a sign that said “Hungry, Anything Helps.” Aria didn’t know what to do with the kindness. She felt dissected by it. One part of her wanted to soak up the solace of that care and trust it. Another part of her wanted to stop him from doing it. She feared that this would simply put her in emotional debt to him and flip the axis of power in his favor. She didn’t trust people to do good things to her if they had the upper hand. She had no way to get ibuprofen, like she usually took for cramps, so during the three times that she had to revisit the bathroom to wash the socks and dry them again to the best of her ability, she tried to relieve the pain. She splashed cold water on her face and on the back of her neck to thwart the sweating. She contorted herself into different positions, hoping that one of them would take the edge off of the sharpness of the ache.

The pain had created a deleterious state of mind and she saw Taylor through it. She watched the people walking by him. She watched people pretend that he didn’t exist. She watched people scream at him to get a job. And she watched him shoulder the dehumanizing treatment in the same determined way as he maintained his affability even when everyone seemed perturbed by it and pushed him away. She felt a fondness growing for him. Because his sexual inclination was toward other men, there was something pure about the link between them. People had deceived her before and people had disappointed her even more times than that. But with Taylor, it seemed the only ulterior motive he had was to feel like he had someone in the world to exist with. It occurred to her while she was watching him that she might actually have a friend.