I sat there thinking for a second before I said, “That’s some pretty deep shit, Jaden.”

“You’re the one who wanted to hear a story,” he said. “Guess you would rather hear ‘The Three Little Pigs’ after all? Even with the wind blowing our house down?”

For once he did not look like the happy, friendly guy I had known all these years. He looked like he had something deeper in him than smiles and flirting with everybody. I looked at his eyes, downcast and dark, and something flickered in me like lights after the power has just come back on.

3 We could only tell it was morning by the fact that we’d woken up. Without any windows in the room, there was no light to tell us. The sounds of wind and rain had stopped. There was an eerie, peaceful feeling in the room. The candles had burned down to nothing just before we’d fallen asleep. We’d watched each one wink out in the darkness. Then Jaden had gotten the couch ready for him to sleep on, and I’d covered my head with the blankets and squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could.

“Jaden?” I said, not long after I’d opened my eyes. “You awake?”

“Yeah,” he said, next to me. My eyes adjusted to the dark enough to see him. He sat up and stretched his arms above his head as if it were any other morning, as if we hadn’t seen all we’d seen last night. I didn’t want to turn on the TV or go outside. I just wanted things back the way they were. Not back to last night, back to years ago when I was a kid, helping sweep up the block after a block party that my mother and father had taken part in putting together. There had been the easy way of hiring the department of sanitation, but there’d barely been enough money to pull the whole thing off, much less hire them. As someone young and able to do little else, I’d always gotten put on the street clean-up committee. It hadn’t been so bad, though. While cleaning the streets I’d always found things—money, lost jewelry, treasures shining in the dirt and empty cups and food-stained paper plates. Once, when I was fourteen, I’d found a little bag of weed and slid it into my pocket before anyone saw it and smoked it in the park with my only friend who knew how to roll a joint. Lying there in bed, I wanted those days back. Before the storm. Before any of the storms. There was a longing inside me until that voice that’s my reality came back and said, “You don’t have time for this shit, and the past couldn’t have been that great anyway.”

“Want a breakfast bar?” Jaden asked me. Without waiting for me to answer, he got up from the couch and walked over to the boxes and the cooler he’d dragged into the living room the night before. He took out two blueberry cereal bars and handed me one. We ate them in silence, chewing slowly.