She had always been hungry, but not for the simple thing the word suggests. Her hunger was a constellation: for music that made the ribs resonate like hollowed drums; for words that stuck like sugar on the tongue; for faces that could be read as maps—routes that led somewhere worth getting lost. That evening she carried a small aluminum can in one hand and a notebook in the other, the pages already studded with quick, undecipherable stars—fragments of melodies, a line of stolen laughter, a notation for a beat she’d only just felt.