Jaden leaned back, shifting all his weight onto his arms, and exhaled. Sunlight was coming in around the edges of the heavy curtains. A pool of it spilled on his shoulder. He was silent for a moment, thinking. Then he said, “We can’t. We’d have to pull up all the rugs, pull out all the drywall . . . that’s a lot of slag, and we’re only two people. Whether we want to or not, we’re going to have to get more people into this building.”

I was shaking my head before I even knew what I was doing. “No, Jaden. We will not. This is our place, and we need to keep it that way. We need to be safe, we can’t get in another situation like in that shelter.”

“Funny you say that, because the shelter was the first place I was going to suggest we go to get people from.”

“Are you phrenic?” I asked. “Are you absolutely outside of your goddamn mind?”

“There were some good people there, Makayla,” Jaden said. “People who deserve to be safe, too.”

Suddenly, I felt cold. My arms were shaking just a bit. I pulled the covers around me. Good people, he said. I thought about the same words going through my mind as I rode on the boat out to Gravesend to find my grandmother.

“How could we ever know who’s good?” I asked. Inside my head, my voice didn’t sound like mine. I felt like I was somewhere else.

Jaden put his arm across my stomach, cupped my hip, and pulled me just a bit toward him. “We can’t do this alone. Remember when our parents used to help put on those block parties? And how everybody had a piece to do? And who were those people? They lived down the street from us, they were our neighbors. These people are, too. Maybe even more than those who used to live here before, because we’re the only ones left. Maybe not all of them are good, but we have to trust at least some of them.”

I steadied my arms. Jaden was already up and pulling on his clothes. We went into the bathroom and bathed as best we could with the hand and face wipes we had found there. They wouldn’t last long. Maybe nothing would. We had to figure out what to do next.

4 The girl in the cutoff shirt’s name was Kristen, and she smelled like patchouli so bad I could hardly breathe around her. As we walked around the ground floor of the building with her and the other people who lived in the building with us now, she wouldn’t stop jawing to me about extreme sports.