He left the table in a hurried stumble, scanning the room for the familiar pepper red of Trevor’s hair among the hungry tourists crowding the food displays like survivors at a postapocalyptic shelter, or animals at a fresh spring in a drought-stricken savannah. He walked past the meats and the desserts, past the shrimp and far into new uncharted territory, grilled vegetables and salad bars, entire tanks of unspecified white condiments, maybe yogurt or sour cream. There was no way he was staying in Vegas illegally. No way. The optimism Trevor was selling, the standing-up-for-himself, the social market of all human interactions, the wanting, wanting, wanting, it just wasn’t him. Things didn’t happen to him. Trevor wasn’t just a better version of him, no matter how much he changed. There was a fundamental difference, a predisposition to the act of wanting, of taking, something primal, genetic, or too deeply ingrained to fuck with anyway. It was time to stop this daydream and go home. Past the meats and to the left, he discovered an ample bread region, stocked with an overwhelming variety of baked goods: ciabatta, sourdough, baguettes, several types of bread rolls, breadsticks, garlic bread, olive loaves. He realized he was holding his empty plate; he must have grabbed it when he’d stood up to chase Trevor. They had those puffy, soft, shiny buns he would eat as a kid—known in Rome as panini al latte. He picked up five. Go home. Go home to Rebibbia, to his quiet corner, where the world could forget about him, to the calm hopelessness that made his father gasp for air, but where he’d always felt a certain sad sense of safety, the safety of not choosing, of accepting his fate, of just surviving. There was fried rice, sticky rice, brown rice, saffron risotto (he scooped up a good helping). He would go home to his mom. She had always needed him, counted on him all those days when leaving the living room couch was too much to undertake. And yet, if he had to be honest, a case could be made that she was really better off without him. If she could keep renting out Tom’s empty room, she wouldn’t have to go back to washing hallway floors and scrubbing toilets once the school year started. She would have time for herself, get off her couch, maybe pick up painting again. He’d told himself it wasn’t his fault that she would have to give that up, that his tourist visa was expiring and that he just had to go back; but now that Trevor was showing him another way, a way for him to stay if he only had the guts to go for it, was it not his cowardice that forced her to keep working? There was a whole huge sushi corner too! Hectares of nigiri, spicy tuna rolls, California rolls, sea urchin rolls, rolls with fish he had never even seen before, and supple pink slabs of salmon sashimi, and wine-red chunks of tuna, and four different kinds of soy sauce, and he couldn’t find Trevor, and he picked up a lot. And honestly, why not? Why not, really? Why not stay? He rolled out his mental legal pad and began running down a tempting list of pros: (1) Money in his pockets. Enough to pay rent, maybe enough to buy a shitty car, enough to cover the virtually non-existent expenses of living in Las Vegas. (2) A job. A remunerative job, nothing special right now, but in a kind of business Trevor had called “scalable.” (3) A source of income, serenity—maybe happiness?—for his mom. One that was entirely and conditionally dependent on his absence from home. (4) A friend. A friend who cared enough about him to research the really quite easy-looking scenarios of undocumented alienhood in town, and to push him, for once, to make a decision, take a stand, be a man. (5) An improbable, exhilarating streak of good luck. (6) A future? And after fears and changes of heart, fresh omelets and fried fish and mashed potatoes, and Trevor nowhere to be seen, he walked back toward their table with a storm in his head, and a plate so full he had to wrap an arm around it to keep his food from falling off, and wishing the decision would once again not be in his hands. That it would be made for him.