The food gathering committee grew as the number of people in the building grew. Finding food grew harder in some ways and easier in others. Scavenging and what José and Sebastian and Jesse called dumpstering became nearly impossible. Most of what had been left behind but still usable was gone in the first several weeks. But FEMA and the Red Cross and the Natural Disaster Fund had all set up around the city and were handing out meals. Mo, who hadn’t backed out of the food gathering committee even after that ’trosh first day, made friends with some of the guys who drove the trucks of food into the city once the tunnels were functional. He told them about our building, what we were doing, how we were growing. Before I knew it, we had boxes of nonperishable food and water that the Red Cross didn’t have their shit together enough to notice were gone stockpiled in the utility closet of our building. We found a padlock in an abandoned store and I kept the key. Everyone trusted me.

I took that closet full of food seriously. I wore the key around my neck on a chain I found in the apartment that Jaden, Ale, and my granny were living in. We set up times when everyone would come down and the food and water would be portioned out. Some people wanted extra shares, Drusilla being the most vocal proponent of this. She cited her growing children again and again, said they needed more than other people did. I told her the same thing every time.

“Each one of us gets what everyone else gets. It’s the only fair way.”

Most people respected that I wanted to do the upswing thing. But not Drusilla. She gave me this ’trosh look every time. The rage that was glowing in her eyes was almost frightening sometimes. But anything we did had to be upswing for all of us.

My granny mostly stayed in our apartment, though she did what she could to help around the building. She’d cleaned houses for a living when she was younger, and she took to keeping our apartment and common space of the lobby sparkling. She would get down on her hands and knees and scrub the floors with a brush, arthritis and all. I would tell her, Granny, relax. I can do the slag you would be doing, no problem. But she wanted to contribute to the building as much as anybody else did. It was kind of beautiful, the way everyone wanted to slag, the way everyone wanted to make the place better.