“Do you think they’re in their other houses having, like, storm parties? I mean, watching all this and ordering food and being comfortable and dry?”

“Maybe.”

“And what about their places here? I mean, a lot of these people probably own these apartments and condos.”

“Yeah, probably. At this point, the ones that do know what kind of gamble they were taking buying a place here in the city, after all these storms. So to them, it was probably like buying a scratch-off ticket. Fun while it lasts, but at the end of the day, you know you’re throwing your money away.”

I got to thinking about that, about how if I had that money, I’d make it last into something that worked for me for a lifetime. Things got even darker in my head. Even with the lightness of all the beer I’d drunk, my head was feeling tight again.

We turned the TV off to save the power, and we were left there in the dark with just the candles. The dark was still spooking me. I kept admonishing myself, there are real things to be afraid of. But it didn’t make it any better.

Around midnight, a loud crack sounded out, and I must have jumped a mile in the air. The sound was followed by breaking glass and the musical noise of it hitting the ground, just like a few days before with that shop window. Jaden rushed toward his bedroom, leaving me alone in the living room. Even in the dark, I could see through the door what had happened. A big branch had broken off that tree that’d been scaring me and gone through the window. It had ended up directly in the place where his bed had been before we dragged it into the living room. I’d be dead if I’d been in there, or at least seriously hurt. My heart was pounding, and I didn’t feel very drunk anymore. Anything that had been fun about the night had ended.

“Stay out of here,” Jaden said, and pulled the door shut, coming back into the living room.

“Should we go outside and see how bad things are?” I asked.

“No fucking way,” Jaden said. “I saw enough through the window. It’s bad out there.”

“How bad?”

“Bad. We’ll go up to the roof in the morning when the rain stops, but right now we need to stay in here where there’s no windows.”

“What do we do in the meantime?” I asked. I had begun biting my nails again. They were down to the quick, and still I kept biting.

“I’m going to try to put something over that window, to reinforce it to keep all the water out,” he said. “You stay here.”

I took my hands away from my mouth and stopped biting my nails. For the first time, I realized how I must look, sitting there on the bed, chewing my hands and scrunched up like a kitten in a thunderstorm. I straightened out, stood up.