1 I couldn’t sleep at night. Things were real dissat, all the time. I walked through sunlight hours in a daze, trying to figure out what was real, what was upswing, what was distorted by my insomnia. People seemed to give each other looks that meant something I couldn’t decipher—but how do you tell what a look means anyway? Or if it’s even real? It was so hard to figure out what was real and what was in my head.
When I did sleep, which wasn’t often, I had nightmares about the boat and Peter. Or about Jaden leaving the building or checking like my parents had. He was gone now, I knew that, and there was nothing I could do to help how angry I was at him. I yelled at him all the time. But what I really wanted to say all those times I was yelling was come back, come back. I wanted back my friend from the neighborhood, wanted back the guy who had made me feel safe and calm again after all the shit that went down on my way to Gravesend. But I’d hoddered it all up, I’d hoddered everything up.
Even Alejandro started backing away from me. He still stayed in our apartment, but he constantly asked where Jaden was, and ran to him when he saw him. It just felt like everything was falling apart.
Then came the morning where Ale came into my room late at night. I wasn’t sleeping, I was awake reading one of the zines I’d gotten from José, a photocopy of a real old book called The Anarchist Cookbook or some stupid shit like that. It was about all I could focus on. Ale came bursting into the room without knocking. He had smears all over him, I could see it even in the dark. They were on his face and hands and clothes. I lit the candle next to my bed and pulled him closer. I could see that the smears were paint.
“Where the hell did you get those all over you?” I asked. José and Sebastian, who could communicate with him in Spanish, had started teaching him English, too. He didn’t speak it so well yet, but he understood what I was saying.
“Outside!” he said. He started pulling on my hand.
I walked with him down the dark stairs, carrying my candle. Flashes of shadow leapt all around us, and I was even more on edge than usual. He pulled my hand down the stairs, through the lobby, out into the strange, surreal night.
I stood across the street and looked up at the building in terror.
The wind was blowing, pulling our clothes back against us. I held onto Ale’s hand and he chattered in excitement. All I could see were huge, dark forms, there up against the wall. And I knew what it meant. I knew that it meant it was all over for us. We were hoddered.
2 The next morning, we all stood out there staring. We had heard of this artist, we had heard of these paintings. Words were whispered about them along the streets and the places we went to collect food. And now, there was one on the side of our building.
Ale had seen him. He was talking to José in Spanish, and José was translating for me and other people who didn’t speak it. It was the most I had seen Ale speak, ever.
“He says he was a tall guy, with a plain black bandana over his face, so he couldn’t see what he looked like other than being tall. Everything was covered, his face, his arms, his hands, Ale doesn’t know if he was black or white or Latino or what. There was paint all over him, on his gloves, on his bandana, on his boots. He says he helped him up the ladder to help paint, and he was really nice, and kind, and gentle, and that he was a real artist like in books and museums.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s real goddamn upswing that we’ve got his credentials. But the fact of the matter is, we’re hoddered. First the camera crews come, then the cob rollers come, then they find us. Then what?”
José took a deep breath. Ale was still talking to him, but he put a finger up to his lips to tell him it was time to be quiet. He looked serious.
“We’ve been getting ready for this day, right? I mean, I know we have in the street defense committee.”
“You think your shields are going to stop them from taking this away from us?” I shouted at him. “You think your protest-kid shit is going to work?”
Mo, who I knew better than these kids, who I’d been through shit with, spoke up. “It’s something. It’s all we have, Makayla. But there’s another way.”
“What is it, Mo?” I said, softly. My hands were shaking. They wouldn’t stop, no matter what I did. It felt like they’d been shaking for years.
“Maybe we leave before they find us,” he said. “Maybe we let go.”
“No!” I shouted in his face. “No! We can’t let this go. We can’t.”
Mo reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. He had been there with the cob roller, he had saved my life. Still, I jerked back from his touch. “Makayla, many of us will die if we stay. Some of us have to keep living.”
I slapped his hand away. “We need to have a meeting. The whole building. Get everyone in the lobby.”
◉ ◉ ◉
We gathered in the lobby, but as we stood there, people started to congregate outside our building. At first it was just the kind of people we saw every day, the stragglers, the ones left behind. Then the camera crews and the TV news stations showed up. After that, it was people like Kristen but worse—disaster tourists who didn’t want to help, just wanted to snap their pictures and go back to their comfortable lives. José joked that we should start charging them an entrance fee. Jesse said we should just jack them.
We relocated into a rear-facing apartment. There were about fifty of us, and it was like being at a really crowded party. José called for everyone’s attention, and reminded people of the hand signals he had introduced us to back when he got to the building.
“Times like these are when it’s most important to use them,” he said. “When we’re all worked up and there’s so many of us here. Makayla, you’ve been here longest and I think you have a lot to say, so do you want to start us off?”
“No,” I said. “Everyone knows how I feel.”
That kid Jesse started taking what they called “stack” of people who wanted to speak. They suggested that we do “progressive stack,” which they said meant people who generally don’t get to speak go first. Then they looked around and laughed.
“I mean, I guess that’s everyone. I guess none of us are exactly the ones behind the bullhorn.”
It broke the tension for a minute, but then José, who was first in line, got to jawing.
“It seems like one of two things has to happen,” he said, serious as fuck. “We stay and fight or we leave, go to the shelters in New Jersey, give up the building. I can’t say which is best. I personally want to fight. I’ve never had anything like this, and I don’t know if I ever will again, if any of us will. I think that’s worth fighting for.”
An older woman spoke up, out of turn. She was about my granny’s age, but was hunched over. “Some of us been fighting our whole lives,” she said.
Mo was next in line to speak. “For every good committee we have here, we’ve spent a night hiding in our apartments hoping the gunshots don’t come through the window. For every person who cares about us in the building, there are five more roaming around out there who would see us dead. For every meal we share with each other, there is a time when we have to post guards at the door. For every nice piece of clothing we take from the closet, we agree that we will not shower for one more day. I am tired. I love it here, I love that we have built what we have. But isn’t it time to go back to life? Won’t we get that? Won’t we be able to start again somewhere where we have a chance at that?”
Jesse raised their finger to denote that they had a point of clarification on what Mo was saying. “We go to the shelters if we leave here. Some of us know what that’s like. They’ll do everything they can to clean us up and throw us back into the streets. They will make us feel unwanted, and convince us that we are worth less than what they’re paying to keep us there. There will be prison food and you will have to watch your children like a goddamn motherfucking hawk because of the people there who would do them harm. That’s where you’ll start again.”
“Yeah, start over for what?” someone yelled from the crowd. José tried to remind him of stack, but he didn’t care and kept jawing. “For the same shit all over again? For poverty, and being pushed out? I’m tired of scrambling to eat, but I’m more tired of it when there are rentbosses breathing down my throat, and never enough smash for anything. Stay and fight, I don’t care if we die, it’s better than living the way we’ve been living!”
“You want to stay here and rot?” someone else yelled. “That’s what we’re doing! Rotting! I can smell our bodies rotting away!”
José tried to get the discussion back under control, but it had gone completely beyond his abilities. Heated voices yelled at each other across the apartment. My granny was standing near me, looking like she was about to faint. I pulled her aside, down a hallway where nobody was standing.
“Do you want to go to New Jersey?” I asked. “To the shelter?”
“Hell no,” she said, forcefully.
“Granny, I’m worried you can’t take the heat here come summertime, even if we make it through this next part. It’s pretty bad in New York without air-conditioning these days.”
“You think I ever turned on air-conditioning in my life? Do you know how that stuff skyrockets the energy bill? What am I, a Rockefeller?”
Around us, the argument raged on. The heat rose and rose.
“Granny, I just think . . . I can’t let you stay. You’re the only one I have left. I have to know you’re okay. Please. Please go to the shelter before things get bad here.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. She could feel me shaking. For a minute, she softened. I had never seen her that way before, and suddenly she looked old, so old.
“Will you come with me?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I stay here, Granny. I’ll probably die here.”
The voices around us reached a crescendo, and then I heard José’s cut through all of them.
“We don’t all have to stay. If you don’t want to stay, now’s the time to leave. Just go and be done with it. The rest of us will stay here and fight.”
3 When we made it back to the lobby, there was a line of cob rollers outside the door. One of them had a bullhorn and was yelling through it. They knew we were in there, they said, making it sound like we were robbing a bank. If we came out calmly, they would help us to the shelters. About half of us had decided to leave.
Mo was among them. So was my granny.
“I’m never going to see you again,” I said, hugging her in the lobby. I felt so sure. It had been my idea, and I still wanted her to go. But this moment was too much.
“You don’t know forever,” she said, and at first she said it harshly, like I was a numptie for even saying it. Then her voice softened. “You don’t know forever, Makayla.”
“I just want it all to work out,” I said. Tears were starting to leak out of my eyes.
“You don’t let them take it, Makayla,” she said. “You, you haven’t been fighting as long as some of us. So stay and fight. And don’t you let them take away what you made.”
People were lining up at the door, saying their goodbyes to people they had lived with, worked with, built their lives around. But in the end, those things were not enough to keep them here. For them, whatever was waiting in New Jersey was the lifeboat that had never come, the rescue helicopter they had waited on their roofs for, the house farther inland. I said nothing. I hugged them and kissed them. They took my face in their hands and thanked me for everything. But they did not stay.
The rest of us stood our ground. Ale had clung to my leg, refusing to leave if I wasn’t leaving. Outside, the cops kept yelling through the bullhorn. They knew we were there. They knew we had stayed. They gave us one last chance to come out. But we did not move.
“Okay,” José said, to those of us left. “We’re going to defend this place. And I think it goes without saying that we can’t leave the building, so whatever supplies we have left are what we have to use until they’re gone.”
Jaden had stayed, and somewhere inside me, I was so grateful for that. He spoke up. “There’s not that much. We’ll be able to hold out for a week, if that.”
José shrugged. He was just a kid, really, still a teenager, but he looked more nails than I had ever seen him look before. I wondered what these kids had been into before they got to the building. I’d read some of their zines—there was street combat, and weaponry, how to build bombs, things you didn’t need to know if you were living an easy life. I was suddenly so glad they were there.
“We’ll see how many of us are left to worry about it then, I guess,” he said.
“This is crazy,” one of the men said, shaking his head.
“Well, we’re all crazy,” I guess, Jesse said. “So let’s not talk about it anymore, let’s just make a plan of attack.”
We retreated to my apartment. It was empty now except for me and Ale. Ale curled up on the couch, suddenly looking tired. The rest of us pulled out José’s zine library and began to talk. If they tried to rush the boarded-up door, we used our shield, we used our strength. I still had the gun I had found early on, though I only carried it sometimes. I didn’t tell anyone about it, even as many of them, one by one, admitted they had found guns, too. Mine was tucked into my belt, as always, under my baggy shirt. If anyone could see it, they didn’t say anything.
“Do we use them?” Sebastian asked. “Or will they only make it worse?”
“Do we have to decide that now?” a woman asked. She was the woman in the filthy sari, who still wore it despite its holes and dirt.
“We can put off talking about it all we like, but I worry that when we need to make the decision, there won’t be time to talk,” José said. “If we have to use them at all, we use them as an absolute last resort.”
As we were talking, a sound started rising that I didn’t know the source of. It was a low sound that was almost like a machine grinding to a stop. By the time I realized the sound was coming from Ale, he had already sat up and vomited all over the white couch.
“Ale?” I asked, rushing over to him. He had been clinging to me just a few minutes before, but in the heat I hadn’t noticed what I realized just then as I touched his head. He was burning up with fever.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sebastian said, running over, too. “Ale? Not now, not now.”
“I still have antibiotics,” Jesse said. “If he’s got something bacterial, it’ll help.”
Oh God, this was ’trosh. The tightness in my head swelled until I thought it would burst. But watching those kids hover over Ale, offering him their help, my chest felt tight, too, like my heart was getting so big it might explode out of me. I was cradling Ale in my arms. I lifted him up off the puke-covered couch while Jaden started wiping up the mess with some old clothes that we’d worn into rags. I picked him up and carried him to his bedroom. As I did, Sebastian told Jesse to get the antibiotics.
All the thoughts of street fighting and guns were out of my head. All I could think about was how we were going to get things back to upswing for this boy that I’d taken in months ago, taken care of, this boy that I loved with all my heart. I was shaking again. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t.
“Ale?” I said.
“Sí?” he murmured.
“You’re going to be fine. I promise. You’ll be okay. You’ll feel better in a couple of days. And after that, no matter what happens in this building, no matter what happens to me, you’re going to hide out in this room, and nobody will hurt you. You’re just a little boy. Nobody would want to hurt you. You’re going to grow up and be a real upswing person, I know it. And a real upswing artist, just like you want to be. Better than the one who painted on the side of our building. I know it. You will be safe. You will be safe. You will be safe.”
I was rocking him back and forth, saying it over and over.
◉ ◉ ◉
The antibiotics that Jesse had made Ale’s skin break out in a rash. As he burned up with fever, and itched at the bumps that had sprung up, I walked over the window. I couldn’t breathe. Jaden tried to put his arm around me, and I flew off, telling him to leave me alone. The line of cops was gone, but would be back, I was sure. What I wasn’t sure of was why they had left in the first place. It might have had something to do with the news camera crew that had shown up. There was a silver police fence surrounding the building, the kind they put around places where they want to pen lots of people in. Tomorrow or the next day, the fight would go on, whether Ale was sick or checked or what.
Checked. With the rash all over his skin, it suddenly seemed like a possibility.
“He’s allergic to it,” Jesse said. The kid was like a walking pharmacy. “He needs a different kind, and that’s all I’ve got.”
“Fuck,” I said. I punched the wall next to the window, but not hard enough to break my hand. I didn’t care about me, not so much. But Ale needed me. I tried to get my head together.
“Somebody has to see the Red Cross,” I said, “get some medication for him, bring it back.”
“Nobody can go out there, Makayla,” Jaden said. He had been sitting at Ale’s side, cleaning up his puke as best he could, taking care of him. He loved the kid as much as I did, I knew that. But it didn’t stop me from flying off.
“You could go out there, Jaden,” I said. “You can ride your goddamn bike faster than anybody, you could be gone and back in no time. You could save the kid’s life. But you’re a goddamn ori, a fucking numptie who’s too worried about his own self to save a little boy’s life.”
Jaden stepped back, like my words had punched him in the face, and he was stunned. He stood next to me and looked out the window.
“The cops aren’t here,” he said softly. “They could be back any minute, in bigger numbers than before. But there’s a chance.”
“So stop goddamn talking and do it,” I said. While I was saying it, I had this moment of remembering our first night together. How gentle and kind he had been, how being with him had felt like the home I hadn’t had in so long. I wanted him to put his arms around me. But I wouldn’t allow it. I couldn’t. Not now. Not ever again. He had hurt me so much that day he walked away.
“Makayla,” he said, real slowly. Jesse and José and Sebastain stepped back, not wanting to get in the way of whatever harsh kind of jawing we were about to do. “I got a question for you. I want you to think real hard about it, and answer me for real this time.”
“Fine, Jaden. What’s your question?”
“After all we’ve been through, after growing up together, after surviving the storm, after being your lover, I still don’t know one thing. Why did you ever let me be close to you?”
I wanted to answer that I had loved him. That I still did. That he had just about killed me that day he walked away after us growing up together, after we survived Bernice, after we were lovers. But I couldn’t. I had to be nails. I had to be nails. It was all I had.
“Let me tell you something, Jaden, tell you something real,” I said. My eyes were narrowed as I leaned in close to him. The kids had left the room, and I could say whatever I wanted. “When I left the shelter, I got raped. Some ori forced his cock in me on a sienty boat floating in the middle of a pool of garbage. When I came back, I needed to push that shit out of my mind. Fucking you was the easiest way to do it. So there you have it. That’s why I let you get close to me after all those years. To get that shit out of my head. Now get the fuck out of here, and do what you need to do to save Ale’s life.”
Jaden sucked his lips in and pressed them together and he stepped back. He looked like a deflated balloon. Every piece of me wanted to take back what I had just said. But I had to get through this, I had to survive. I couldn’t be weak.
“Okay, Makayla,” he said. “I’ll go.”
Jaden walked around the room for a minute. He was picking things up and putting them down, things that he’d left behind, things that were mine, things that were Ale’s. He seemed like he didn’t know where to put his hands. He seemed like he didn’t know where to put his self. He stood in the corner for a moment, every bit the big-eared kid from the block party in middle school. He’d shrunk back into himself. He let out a big sigh.
“Makayla,” he said, “Makayla. You could have told me. You could have told me anything. I would have . . . I would have done anything to make you feel safe, to make it be okay.”
I wanted to tell him it was a lie. Not the rape. That part was real. But that I’d used him to push it out of my head. I had wanted to be close to him so much. I still wanted so much to just take his hand, to put it against my heart. But I couldn’t. I had trusted him and he had left, he had hurt me so deeply. I couldn’t tell him that this lie I’d just told him was the most hurtful thing the meanness inside me could think of.
“Go, Jaden,” I said. “Go.”
He walked from the room. He walked out of the apartment. I could hear doors slam. I could hear him walking away.
A few minutes later, watching from the window, shaking as I’d been shaking for days, I saw Jaden’s form bike away from the building. I stood and I waited, and I waited for him to come back. Those twenty-five minutes felt like the longest I’d ever lived through. I began to bargain in my head. If he made it back, I would apologize. I would tell him the truth. I would tell him that I loved him. About the lights that came on inside me when he’s around. I would be real, I would throw away the nails act, I would collapse in his arms and let him hold me.
But when he came back into my view, I could tell right away there was something wrong. He was leaning forward, pushing his bike with all his strength, racing away from . . . something. When the cob roller on a bike came into view behind him I wasn’t surprised. Jaden was beating him, though. He was going to win. He was the fastest biker, he always had been. My heart was beating so fast I thought I would faint. Jaden was so close, he would be fine, everything would be okay. It had to be.
Then the cob roller ditched his bike and aimed his gun. Jaden fell to the ground. Then I dropped to the floor, screaming. I didn’t stop screaming. I felt like I would never stop.