The store I saw that night was not open to me, I could tell you that. I could tell, looking in, seeing the dim lights, seeing the woman who looked like she’d just come off some decorating magazine cover, looking dap even in her slag clothes, that it was not a bodega. I saw a little sign inside. I saw it next to a little bowl of dog treats that the sign told me were made of traveled ingredients from the finest places in the world, the cost of getting them there be damned. And my head started feeling squeezed together like my brain was expanding and taking up too much space. In all the years I’d lived in this neighborhood, in all the times my family had helped organize block parties, in all the times my dad had volunteered to talk to kids in school about street violence as someone who barely got out if it alive himself, in all the times my mother cooked food for the old lady who lived down the hall and struggled to get by on her piddly-shit sienty disability check and whose kids never came to see her, no one ever, ever, offered us a damn thing that could be called “traveled.”

I reached into my bag then. And from all the things that slipped through my fingers, my keys, my wallet, my sunglasses, I grabbed one thing. A combination lock that I kept on my locker in the break room of the 24/7 and took home with me at night. The metal weighed heavy in my hand there inside my bag, but only for a moment before I whipped it up and back behind me, then over my shoulder and through the dimly lit window.

The glass broke and fell like bells. I heard the woman in her slag clothes scream, and I ran.

2 I’ve heard that years ago they didn’t know just where a storm would hit. Now they know. There’s no maybe paths, no loose science. There’s no “somewhere along the Eastern seaboard.” There is: Duluth will be hit by 100 mph winds. There is: Sarasota will face torrential downpours. There is: New York City will have pieces of it knocked into the ocean.

So we all knew Bernice was coming and where she was coming. She wasn’t the first storm, and I didn’t think she would be the last, not then—New York didn’t seem like a place that could have an end. We would all wake up to our coffee in Greek paper cups and be furious about the train delays no matter what happened.