The scene that greeted Taylor and Aria was one they’d have expected to see on the television after a national disaster in a third world country – not on an ordinary night of the year in the United States. The street was lined with disheveled tents and makeshift plastic tarps, propped up over piles of clutter. Hundreds – maybe even thousands – of men, woman and children, rotting under the iron hand of poverty. Shopping carts full of every possession that their owners had. A paralyzing smell. Urine and feces stained the sidewalks, but people didn’t seem to care, or couldn’t care because there was nothing they could do about it. Drunk and high, or having succumbed to the decay of hunger, people sprawled out against the pavement and chain-link fences. Luxury lofts rose above the blighted lane, like specters cruelly reminding the people below of the luxuries that they would never have. Aria could feel the precarious overcast of crime lurking just underneath the patrolling eye of the cop cars that seemed to be making supervising rounds throughout the area. Concerned with criminal justice instead of human rights, they felt more like sharks ready to attack at any moment.

An internal warning of danger screamed at her through her nerves. She couldn’t stay there. “I can’t do this,” she said, expecting to be met with resistance. But there was none.

“Yeah, fuck this, let’s just go back to Walmart tonight, this is disgusting,” Taylor said. They did an about-face and walked back the way they had come, hoping to go unnoticed. During the walk back to Walmart, the initial shock of the experience compelled them to exchange remarks back and forth, in search of mutual validation about how bad the place had been. And then both Taylor and Aria fell into a self-preoccupied silence.

Now that her period had started, Aria was regretting running away more than ever. Suddenly the problems that had caused her to run away seemed minimal in comparison to what she was facing now. The details of her former life seemed sweeter than she had originally believed. So many things she had taken for granted. The memory of them moved in slow motion, like a scene from a movie deliberately trying to be nostalgic.

She was in torment. Before finding a hiding place to lie down for the night with Taylor, Aria sat in a stall in the Walmart bathroom and cried.

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 11