by Teal Swan
Today, Aria arrived early enough to find a place at a table. She planned on keeping to herself, and was fully involved in her relationship with the food alone when she was assaulted by the energy of unattuned enthusiasm belonging to a man who had decided to place himself in the chair directly beside her. There were plenty of tables open, she noticed. She was puzzled by his oblivious nature already. Common social protocol dictated that people would sit as far away from each other as possible, until there were literally no seats left and you had to sit next to one another, whether you liked it or not. The defiance of this social norm made her feel violated and distrust his motives. Though her body language reflected the sentiment, she tried not to overtly react to him so as to give those feelings away.
He was tall and effeminate with cadet-blue eyes, high cheekbones and an overhanging brow. At 19 years old, his lips were full and wide, just hiding a gap in his upper front teeth that was more fashionably quirky than it was unsightly. His hair was buzzed on the back and sides, leaving a quiff of bleached pompadour-style hair on the top of his head, which he had swept to one side as if frustrated with the way it wanted his attention. Aria did not pay attention to his pants. But she noticed that he was wearing a powder-blue shirt with cap sleeves, whose neckline dived almost far enough to expose his sternum. On the front, in white letters, were two words with boxes beside them, the first “Single” and the second “Taken.” The box next to the word single was run through with a check mark.
Not even half a minute passed before, growing uncomfortable in the tension between them, he decided to crack it. He put out his right hand, dissecting the space between Aria’s face and her plate, and said, “I’m Taylor.”
As if on involuntary autopilot, but still keeping turned to a distrustful angle relative to him, Aria put her right hand in his and accepted the handshake. “I’m Aria,” she said.
She had planned to resign herself to an even more awkward silence sitting next to him after that, but he would not let it happen. “What’s your deal?” he asked. “I mean, why are you here? I’ve never seen you here before.”
Aria shrugged her shoulders, partially because she didn’t know how to answer and partially because she did not want to give herself away. Seeing the shrug, Taylor turned away slightly to take the pressure of his focus off of her. “Oh, I see, you’re not a talker. That’s all I need today.”
He took a sip from his water cup and began to whisper to himself in exasperation that he obviously wanted her to see. Though she could not fully hear what he was saying, it seemed he was having a dialogue with himself about the downward spiral caused by his bad luck. It was obvious the ulterior motive for sitting next to her was his need for connection, or at the very least, some mental stimulation.
Feeling guilty for the wall she had erected against him, Aria dialed down her coldness and said, “No I can talk, it’s fine.”
Instantly, his monologue stopped and his enthusiasm returned.
“Do you come here a lot?” she asked.
“Depends,” he said. “Sometimes I’m here every day and sometimes not for a while. But I guess you could call me a regular.” He winked at the staff behind the counter, who took no notice of him.
It was clear to Aria that this Taylor was lonely and that his method of coping with it was to invent an idea of closeness with people, where it didn’t actually exist.
“Shouldn’t you be in school or somethin’?” he asked in his blunt manner, which Aria had already ascertained was not rudeness, but rather the vein of his personality.
“I dropped out,” she said, bracing herself for some kind of judgment that never came.
“Me too,” he exclaimed through a mouthful of breadstick. He shouted it as if delighted to have something in common with someone … anyone at all. Immediately, he opened the door to his world for her. “I got jumped at a group home because I really didn’t follow the rules and really they were just trying to get rid of me.”
Aria felt a surge of contradictory feelings toward Taylor the minute that he said that. On one hand, she felt an immediate commonality and rapport because they had been in the same position. But just as immediately came the familiar ingrained feelings of competition. At the group homes, attention was scarce. For Aria, and most other children who grew up there, the feeling of hearing that someone grew up in group homes was similar to the feeling of opening a restaurant that your life was dependent on and having someone open a restaurant right next door to you on the same street.
But she consciously curtailed the feeling. Aria could read between the lines of what he was saying. She knew how bad it was for LGBT youth in group homes. But she let him continue to avoid telling her the real reason he had been jumped.
“My mom got breast cancer when me and my sister were really young,” Taylor continued. “She went in for chemotherapy and when she came back, she wasn’t the same mom anymore. She would beat us and scream at us and my dad left her ’cause of it. She’d put us in the crisis stabilization center for thirty days here and there, but pretty soon, they took us away for good because of it and then she died.”
Although it was a story that would have been difficult to tell for most people, growing up in group homes and foster homes made it so that telling the story of the tragedy of your life became something routine. Something you could do with almost no emotion, as if it were just a matter of fact. Something the advocates would add tragic emphasis to when trying to get someone, like a foster parent or a judge or a teacher, to cooperate with their prerogatives.
“I was in over fifteen foster placements. Most of ’em just fostered us so they could get the government checks. They’d kick me out of the house in the morning and tell me not to come back until curfew, so I didn’t get picked up by the cops.”
Taylor continued to eat in a way that suggested he expected someone to take his food away before he was finished. While he ate, he bled himself clean of so many details of his life story that Aria was having trouble processing it all. Eventually, he turned the stage over to Aria, who reluctantly did the same in return, but with less zeal and decorative detail. He prompted it out of her with impolite but endearing questions.
By the time they had finished their food, Taylor had decided they were friends. Just like that, their paths through life were affixed together. When two people don’t have a place to live or a set life to speak of, it doesn’t work the same way it does for everyone else. You don’t pop around for get-togethers and common interests on occasion and gradually get to know one another. Instead, you walk in the same direction rather than going your separate ways. You form a symbiosis until that symbiosis ends, which you have already learned could come at any minute.
Aria was glad of it, despite her reservations. Even though she was intimidated by Taylor’s overly familiar nature, which felt foreign to her, she also felt sheltered by him. She felt softened by his casual way of implying that they had known each other for their whole lives.
Taylor and Aria returned their trays before leaving the shop. They walked north up the street, stopping to look in the windows any time Taylor noticed something exciting inside. Having stayed at the mission for three nights, Aria had exhausted her monthly admittance there, so that night, she followed Taylor to the back exit of a nightclub, where he had been sleeping and keeping his things in a friend’s 1996 Buick LeSabre.
It was almost impossible to fall asleep. The sound of the bass from the club pounded like impending footsteps against her exhaustion. Taylor was unfazed by it. Having found a companion, he felt replete. They were cuddled under two flannel sleeping bags that had been unzipped to function as blankets, each leaning against opposite sides of the back seat, when Taylor made a confession. “I want to be an actor,” he said. “I’ve been saving up for a year and a half now to go to LA.”
He reached into the front pocket of one of the bags below his feet and pulled out a piece of paper that was now soft with wear, handing it to her. It was an advertisement he had printed off of cra
igslist.
WORK/STUDY POSITION AT LA’S PREMIERE SITCOM ACTING & WRITING SCHOOL
We are currently looking for creative people for our Work/ Study Program. Excellent attitude and willingness to learn a must. Social media skills are a plus. These are work/study positions – ongoing weekly acting class in exchange for a four-hour work shift each week. That means you come to our studio twice a week – once for your class time and once for your work/study shift. All terms and conditions for attending class apply.
This is an amazing opportunity to grow as an actor/creator/writer by staying in an environment where you’ll be guided into a career. Make one of LA’s top acting schools your home base and surround yourself with dedicated, career-oriented actors and writers at a dramatically reduced price. Our studio has the best reviews of any acting studio in the city. Check out our incredible five-star reviews on Google and the testimonials on our site. Minimum six-month commitment. We look forward to hearing from you!
Aria handed it back to him when she had read it. She could feel the way he cherished it. “Isn’t it awesome?” he said. “If I can get there, these people will teach me to be an actor. I’m gonna go next week.”
“What do you like about acting?” she asked.
“I guess I like becoming someone else for a while,” Taylor admitted. “One of the schools I went to used to put on plays sometimes. I loved being on the stage and just forgetting myself. I’d pretend I was the character I was playing and I’d try to feel what it was like to have their past instead of mine. I guess it feels good to just not be me for a little while.
“Plus I wanna be rich and I love to be the center of attention.” He giggled as he owned up to it, then went on. “Plus I’ve got a friend there who said I could work at the restaurant she works at until I get accepted at the acting studio or land an acting gig, whichever comes first.”
He was silent for a few seconds and then, as if hit by a stroke of insight, peeled back the corner of his side of the blanket and said, “You should come with me if you can. The bus costs two hundred bucks. I bet you could even work with me at the restaurant when we get there.”
He looked at her like he expected an answer from her right then and there. She smiled at him and raised her eyebrows as if to say she’d consider it. Satisfied with the response, Taylor pulled the blanket back to buffer his face from the cold of the window, closed his eyes and leaned his cheek against it.
That night, after Taylor had fallen asleep, but before she could, Aria imagined herself as a waitress. She reached for the inviolable feeling of self-sufficiency.
She imagined waiting tables. She imagined what she would wear. Though it felt out of reach, she loved the idea.
She imagined LA to be a land of promises, a place where no one could hold you back from personal advancement. She could feel the sun on her face, she could imagine palm trees, which she had only seen in pictures but never in real life.
Just before she fell asleep, she found herself wondering what the leaves of palm trees really felt like, whether they were hard or soft. It didn’t matter whether this vision of her future was given to her by someone else. What mattered was that suddenly she had one.
CHAPTER 8
On Sundays, at the community Christian church, the preacher stood in front of the pews, using a lectern to buffer himself from the onlooking crowd. Behind him, white organza fabric had been fashioned, like a curtain, to hide the bare wall behind it. Affixed to the center of the scene was a giant wooden cross, illuminated by cream-colored Christmas lights.
Aria was sitting in the pews. The sound of the lecture was drowned out in the churn of her thoughts. Aria had found hope in the idea of going with Taylor to Los Angeles. It was hope she had no intention of relinquishing. There was just one problem. She didn’t have any money. Having exhausted every potential for making the money that she needed, she had finally resolved to steal it. It was now a matter of where to steal it from. Before settling upon church as the best place to go unnoticed while getting ahold of someone’s wallet, it seemed she had spent the entire day running through different scenarios in her head. She eyed the purses sitting on the floor or beside women in the pews. She tried to profile people for how much of an impact the loss would have on them and for who might have the total amount she needed, instead of only part of it.
Halfway through the service, three musicians stepped up in front of the room. Their imperfect tones were loud on the notes they felt confident playing and soft on ones that they didn’t. Aria was embarrassed for them. She couldn’t figure out what the congregation was doing during this time, which seemed to be like a disorganized intermission. But when the woman sitting next to her handed her a giant basket full of bills, she realized that she was expected to make a tithing and pass it on to the next person. For a split second, she thought about making a run for it with the money. She passed it on, though, unable to face the implications of doing so.
But she could not stop thinking about that money. She watched the priest thank the crowd and hand it to a dutiful member of the congregation, who then disappeared with it into the hallway adjacent to the curtain. Aria waited for ten more minutes before pretending to excuse herself to the bathroom. She even asked a few people where it was. They pointed her in the opposite direction to where the man had gone.
Acting as if she was going to the bathroom, she sauntered into the outlying hallways of the building and wandered frantically through the maze of corridors, trying to ascertain where the money in that basket might have been taken. Soon, she spotted a door with a door mount that read “Pastor Ferguson.” It was a long shot to think that it would be open. It was also a long shot to think that the money would be there. But Aria reached for the doorknob anyway. To her surprise, the door was open. She looked both ways to ensure that no one had seen her before slipping inside.
Sitting on the desk, as if part of a cosmic joke being set up in her favor, was the basket, still filled with money. Waiting for the pastor to allocate it to its proper place, it was just sitting there. Aria ran toward it and grabbed money out of it by the handful. She stuffed all but a few of the bills into her backpack as fast as she could, not bothering to count it, terror-stricken that someone might catch her in the act.
She waited a few seconds for the right moment to exit, and while she was waiting she caught sight of a picture of the pastor’s family, neatly displayed in a frame on the bookshelf by his desk. In the picture, his wife and two kids were all wearing white T-shirts. It was a close-up taken at a park. They were smiling and posed as if to suggest that it was placed there to set an example to the other members of the church. As contrived as it was, before Aria exited, she felt that all-too-familiar punch of envy, the bait of a belonging that would never be hers.
Aria left the building in a collected manner that would have suggested to no one what she had done. She made her way into the waiting room of a hospital – Taylor had given her the idea that it was the perfect place for someone underage to go unnoticed by the police. Placing her backpack on her lap, she was able to disguise her actions in smoothing out and counting the money that she had just stolen. From what she could tell, it amounted to $519.
She felt torn. On the one hand, she felt guilty to have unintentionally taken so much more than she thought she had taken. On the other hand, it provided unfathomable relief. She entertained the idea of all of the things she could do with it, replacing the basic luxuries she had gone without. But then she remembered that she could not afford to just spend it. She didn’t know what the future held and liked the security of knowing that she could use it as a kind of secret safety net.
Taylor had gone off to find food for both of them. When he arrived at the hospital, he was carrying a container of Chinese takeout, full to the brim with white rice. Rice was dead cheap. You could fill your belly with it to offset the hunger and buy yourself some time to find better food. Aria didn’t tell him that she had stolen money. She hadn’t even told him that she didn’t have any in
the first place. No matter how close they were to each other, they both knew that in a state of desperation, relational ties meant next to nothing.
For the first time in weeks, while Taylor napped in his chair, Aria took out her journal and wrote. She wrote about everything that had happened to her in the last few weeks. She cried as she wrote. It was as if her pen had uncorked everything she had been suppressing and the grief could finally get out. Like every day in the hospital, in those hygienic halls looking over the city, the windows kept grief in and held life out.
With a kind of cold devotion, the machines that kept lungs breathing in and out told of people’s inability to see death clearly enough not to fear it or resist it.
Aria could see despair in the minds and movements of the people there, holding each other’s grief tightly. Trying to survive the unknown together. Every trivial thing erased by the emptiness of loss … By the earthquake of a moment of change. She felt at home there, with people who, due to the tragedies that required them to sit in that hospital waiting room, shared her despair.
A few mornings later, they approached the counter to purchase their tickets to Los Angeles.
“Hello, I’m Taylor and this is my sister. We’re going home to see our father in Los Angeles. He’s really sick and in the hospital, our mother is already there with him. We thought he was gonna get better, but he isn’t so the whole family has to be there with him.”
Taylor handed the receptionist a forged minor travel consent form and both of their drivers’ licenses. There was an awkward moment. The woman behind the desk took the paper and the IDs and stared at them for a while, looking up at the two teenagers as if wary of making a mistake that would put her own job on the line.