It took weeks of asking around, weeks of crashing at the punk houses and weeks of searching. But then one day I walked into a party and there she was passed the fuck out drunk on the floor. I shook her and woke her up and she puked on me and that was just about the second-happiest moment of my life.

With Lux in tow, I went back and found Sebastian and José and Ale. The five of us traveled a bit, more inland, until we found this shitty apartment in just outside of Allentown. We sold wristscreens and other shit Lux had dumpstered, like always, and came up with enough money to get it. We knew it wouldn’t be long before we got forced out of there, with all the people moving inland. But for the moment, it was ours.

It was a seedy place where nobody asked for much of anything besides our rent in cash every month. Nobody asked who the kid was, or who his legal guardians were, or anything like that. We made sure everything we dumpstered didn’t have bedbugs because we knew no one would ever fumigate the house to get rid of them. That was the kind of place it was.

We watched on the news as the anonymous artist’s work got removed from the places it was left. After that last painting, the one that had gone up on our building, he didn’t paint anymore. No one ever knew who he was, where he had gone, if he’d been killed by police or a gang or what. We kept seeing other stories about New York, too. Ones where buildings like ours popped up all over the city, little pockets of resistance. They got cracked down on one by one. But they kept springing up. But then, slowly, the people who owned the city came back. City officials started building walls that were supposedly levies, but we all know walls keep out more than rising oceans.

The twins kept doing the work they’d always been doing, volunteering at the local activist space, working with undocumented immigrants, the homeless. They took Ale along with them a lot. We figured he should learn about the world the way we saw it. We want him to see through all the shit that some people never get a chance to see through.

At school, Ale’s always the one with the questions that the teachers can’t answer. Sometimes he asks us them, too. The other night, Lux came in from dumpstering a rich neighborhood with her usual stuff, and some perfectly good, fancy cupcakes in a box that someone had thrown away. I woke Ale up to give him one. As he was eating it, frosting all over his face, he said to me, “Makayla was a hero, wasn’t she?”