I eventually spotted Ana sitting beside a guy outside a yurt. The two of them appeared to be sharing two halves of a pomegranate and a grey flannel blanket. The yurt was wrapped in a thick white insulating sheet, and its elaborately painted red door had a small cardboard sign taped to it with the words Library, Please Come In scrawled in blue indelible marker.

“This is Will,” Ana said with her Cheshire grin as I approached. Will looked up at me, his hand on his brow to shield against the setting sun. He looked a bit like a teenage daughter in an early-nineties family sitcom: long, bleached-blond hair, an oversized sweater, ripped jeans. He handed me what was left of the pomegranate.

“Thanks,” I said, before turning to Ana. “I uh — just came to ask if you were going to be home tonight. Because if not I might… you know.”

She cocked her head to the side. “You wanna sit with us for a bit?” Sensing my reluctance, she turned to Will and said, “He’s not so into Occupy.”

“That’s not true, I am. I’m just not, you know, generally that…” I trailed off, adjusting the straps on my backpack.

Will nodded and deadpanned: “It’s okay, I don’t like white people with dreadlocks either.”

Ana rolled her eyes while suppressing a grin. After all, even though she’d been encouraging me to get involved for weeks, she was the one always raging about white girls in elephant-print harem pants and the “activist bros” with their bongo drums. In fairness, I hadn’t seen much of that on my walk through the park. But still, something in me appreciated Will’s wry cynicism. I slid my bag off my shoulder and sat down beside them.

“Will and I know each other from an old life,” Ana said, which I thought she meant in a reincarnated sense, but it turned out she meant from an acting gig two summers earlier — working as performers at Avonlea Village, a mock-historical theme park in Prince Edward Island, based on the fictional hometown in the Anne of Green Gables books.

“The whole village wasn’t much bigger than this camp, to be honest,” Ana said, nodding at the tents in front of us. I suddenly imagined a mock-Occupy camp theme park in a hundred years’ time.