We lost weight and we wore our clothes until they smelled so ’trosh that we couldn’t wear them anymore. Some people, when the bridges opened back up, took up the Red Cross on their offers and left the building to head to shelters in New Jersey. But most of us stayed. Most of us had nowhere to go, and what we had built was infinitely more upswing than anything any disaster relief organization could offer us. Some days, where we were, what we were doing felt normal. It felt better than normal. It felt like a whole building, a whole life, of the block parties my parents had helped plan back before everything got sienty for people like us in this city, back before they both checked. I thought about those days less and less, the good times, and more about the good ones we were building now.

Some days, days when dusk would fall on the kids playing out front in the street, nights when the music we made in the lobby would float out the open door into the dark night, the building was better than anything I’d ever had before.

3 I was in our apartment after the food had been collected and distributed for the day, relaxing. There was stuff to do, stuff to go to, other ways to help, but sometimes I just wanted to sit back and be alone and think or talk to my granny. That day, one of the truck drivers had given us a treat, something he had likely bought with his own money because God knows FEMA wasn’t going to think of it—three cases of beer in Styrofoam coolers full of ice. We each got two beers; we even gave some of the older kids one, why not? I had brought mine and my granny’s upstairs while Jaden stayed down in the lobby where everyone was drinking them together. We hadn’t drank anything in so long; the liquor we found in the apartments hadn’t lasted much past our days of removing rugs and washing things down with bleach. After one beer we were giggling like we’d split our faces off.

“Makayla, you go downstairs, there’s no use sitting up here alone with an old lady like me,” she said.“Before you know it, I’ll be telling you stories about dead people and times when rent cost a couple of hundred dollars.”

“I don’t believe you even would,” I laughed. “You’ve never told me stories about the way things were when you were younger. I don’t think before we got to this building you ever jawed to me more than to tell me a bedtime story when my mom and dad were working late. You’re nails, Granny, not the kind I expect to drink a beer and reminisce.”