“I want you to do more, Jaden. I want you to do better. Get your shit together.”

He looked at her. He probably saw what I did, the hollow eyes, that she was clearly losing her shit as we watched. Since he was Jaden, he probably felt a lot worse about it than I did.

“Okay, Makayla,” he said. “I’ll get a bike. I’ll go out and gather things we need. Does that make you happy?”

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t look happy. She looked like she was trying to think of something else to say, but couldn’t. Finally, she turned and walked away, back toward the staircase on the other side of the lobby. Jaden took a deep breath and turned around and began walking the other way. He passed by me without saying anything, even though I’d obviously seen it all.

I started to wonder if maybe Makayla needed help that we couldn’t give her. Maybe we needed to get her out of the building and to New Jersey. Not like, commit her or anything bullshit crazy like that, but get her somewhere where she could talk to someone. I wondered what had happened to her before we’d gotten there. It seemed like something bad, maybe. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

After I saw that fight, Jaden started going out in the mornings and collecting food and water. Since we had the in with the Red Cross truck and all the stores around us had gotten so depleted by people scavenging, anyway, it seemed more like he was doing it to appease Makayla than anything. It was kind of uncomfortable how much he still loved her. We all saw it, even if he was living with new people on a different floor. I guess I used to think that sort of thing was weak and weird, but since Lux disappeared I’ve been pretty weak and weird myself. It’s strange how much people can mean to you. I guess I had never really known before that night of the attack, you know? Before then, nobody meant much to me.

I would think about that for a second. Then I would push my mind to something else.

3 We had pretty much everything we needed in the building, but I was running really low on painkillers. I’d tapered down my use—at first, after finding so many in the pharmacy, I’d gone a little nuts. Then I’d worked my way down to taking them every other day, then every couple of days. It was really goddamn uncomfortable, too, but what are you gonna do? It wasn’t like there were any pharmacies where everything good hadn’t been taken. So I started sobering myself up. I kept a couple for emergencies, but mostly I was clean.