Heartless, I thought. What if it was your home, I thought, and your little dogs? But I looked around to see if there was anything worth salvaging. Anything that hadn’t been burned or pissed on. And that’s when I saw it. There in a garbage can that somebody had set on fire, was what remained of the face of my teddy bear, Jax. I’d had Jax since I was five. My mom had given him to me for my birthday the year she died. Her giving him to me in a big box with a bow on top of it is the last memory I have of her before the car crash. I’m close to my dad, I suppose, as close as you can be when years are spent away at boarding school, and summer camp in the Alps, and you only get winter vacation together the whole time you’re growing up. But I loved my mom. She died when I was so young, before she had a chance to be anything but wonderful. Sometimes I’d held Jax and talked to him like I was talking to her.

I went and picked what remained of Jax out of the garbage can. Then I dropped his charred fur back into it and sat down on the floor, crying.

“So there’s nothing you want?” Marcia asked again.

“I just need a minute to grieve, for God’s sake.”

So I stood there in my ruined living room crying, and I got to thinking how New York City really was heartless. And how I was never coming back.

Part Six Jesse—December

PART SIX

JESSE—DECEMBER

1 In my trauma dreams, Lux was the one who was ill As I roamed the streets looking for medicine, she was the one who was lying there, sick as some racist ass-clown, vomiting everywhere. What was even worse was that her attackers were out in the streets as I went looking for pills to make her better, and I knew that if I didn’t get back soon and defend her, they would find her again, but this time she was sick and wouldn’t be able to fight back at all. I always woke up from those dreams covered in my own sweat, halfway convinced I had whatever Sebastian had gotten.

After a few days, Sebastian’s fever broke. He stopped puking. He was able to keep down water and food. He looked like he’d lost a bunch of weight, and his face was drawn tight as an Upper East Side lady’s after a facelift. But he was better. José was still worried. We hung out in the squat for a few weeks, super careful about what we touched, how we washed our hands. Every time Sebastian as much as sneezed, José was next to him, making sure he wasn’t sick again.