After we finished eating, I grabbed my bag and went back into Jaden’s bedroom to change clothes. I pulled on a pair of tight-fitting black jeans and my still-wet combat boots. I pulled on an old band T-shirt that I’d gotten at a stoop sale, a band called the Ramones that I’d heard on a light rock station and liked anyway. Next, I layered on a fleece-lined hoodie and a vest that had a million pockets in it for things like my cell phone and keys and wallet. I checked my cell phone before putting it in a pocket, and saw that, though the battery still had some life in it, there was no reception. I walked back out into the living room where Jaden was waiting.

“Let’s go see what it looks like out there,” I said.

“You’re ready? Okay. Let’s go up through the fire escape onto the roof.”

We made our way toward one of the rooms off the entrance hallways, where a guy named Kyle stayed. There was a fire escape through Kyle’s window that didn’t have a tree in the middle of it. There was sunlight peeping out through the crack at the bottom of Kyle’s bedroom door. I took it as a good sign. I was hoping, really hoping, that last night had seemed scarier from where we were than it actually had been.

We opened the door and stepped through it. The guy had left the room a complete pigsty when he packed up and left—dirty clothes and plates everywhere. We stepped over the garbage, picking our way between piles of it. Jaden opened the window. He put one leg over the ledge and then another so that he was standing on the grating of the fire escape.

“Holy shit,” I heard him say from out there.

“What?” I said. “What?”

“The water made it out this far,” he said, his voice flat.

Okay, I thought to myself. So there’s a little water down there. No big deal. Couldn’t be that much. Not this far into Brooklyn.

But when I climbed out into the fire escape, I saw that I’d been very wrong.

The world outside the building looked like a lake. Water was up to the halfway mark of the first-floor windows. We were as far as you could get on any side from water, but the water had found its way right to where we were. The water was murky, brown and green and gray at the same time. I broke up my brain a bit trying to figure out where it all had come from—the rivers, the ocean, the rain? But those things had been there before, and they had never swollen so much that the water came in this far. I mean, I knew the oceans were rising, everyone knew that. But they’d been rising, and still they’d never come in this far inland. I just kept thinking, How did this happen?