“Put that out before you come in,” he said. He took out his keys and looked for the right one.

I put the smoke out in the puddle of water my clothes left on the floor.

Inside his apartment, I told him I was sorry to show up like this.

He didn’t say anything. “I have to be back for my next class this afternoon, so you can’t stay.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

“So what do you need?”

I told him.

“How many?” he asked.

I said I had five hundred.

He looked to be counting in his head, and then he left the room. He was gone for a minute or two, a minute or two in which I took in how clean his place was, except for where I stood, a puddle of muddy water under my shoes.

When he came back he had a bottle with the label peeled off. “I only have seventy-eight,” he said. “That’s three eighty.”

I paid him, and before I left he said he should have more next week. “If you’re looking.”

I left and wondered if this, this looking, this constantly looking, is the future my grandmother’s smirk seemed to suggest she knew about.

And then I figured it out. I had the fucking question all wrong. It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me. How did I get here, and how do I get out?

I took three pins before I left the building and walked out into the rain, which got real, real warm by the time I made it back to the rez. I took the path that ran along the river and split through the swamp, and when I passed through that, I realized I was walking slow, so slow, and so I stopped and sat on a fallen tree and looked out at the river and the millions of drops of rainwater plopping on the surface.