Ale came out of his shell bit by bit, playing with the other kids in the place. The scratches I had found up and down his arms were mostly gone. I saw one here and there, but they were isolated and faded in a few days’ time. He liked talking to Sebastian, and that kind of made me like Sebastian more. When I would see him jawing away in Spanish with Ale, and Ale lighting up and looking up to him, and him giving Ale high fives, it made me feel like maybe these kids who had been living up the Bronx weren’t so bad. Ale started speaking a little bit of English here and there, and we would talk together as much as we could.

I usually kept it light, talking about games and music and food, but once or twice I tried to ask him questions about where he’d come from, what had happened, who he was missing. He stopped talking, dead, whenever I did. Though we hadn’t had electricity in months, he kept the dead phone he’d clutched in the emergency shelter on the nightstand next to his bed when he slept, and in his pocket when he walked around the building. He never let the thing go.

He told me one day he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. I bit my lip and didn’t tell him there was no guarantee he would grow up.

Some of the apartments had musical instruments in them. The people who could play them brought them down to the lobby, and we would sit in circles while they played. Sometimes they played Top 40 songs that we hadn’t heard bumping out of car stereos in months, sometimes they played old songs that me and lots of the other people around my age had never heard before, and sometimes someone who came from far away would teach everyone else a song they had brought with them across oceans. The little kids danced and some of the adults cried.

Sebastian saw the effect that the music had on the kids and started an entertainment committee. He rounded up all the art supplies he could find, all the games, all the balls and bats and hoops and baskets, and took the kids into the muddy street twice a day to play, or to the lobby to draw when it was bad out. Parents caught onto it, too, and we had more people in that committee than we needed, so we kept rotating them. Ale liked soccer the best, and was so good at it that I knew he’d played before. I wondered once more about his life prior to the storm.