She takes a long pull of the sweet, floral vapor. Her nerves begin to uncoil.
“Got you!”
Her brother’s head pops up from the hatch.
Nora smiles in spite of herself. She pats the spot next to her and Addis drops onto it, dangling his feet over the edge.
“One puff,” Nora says, handing him the joint. “And if you start rambling about ‘the Higher’ again, I’m cutting you off for good.”
He looks at her with that cryptic smile that unnerves her even as it fascinates her. He doesn’t talk about his days in the space between Living and Dead—it only slips out when he’s high, whether on sugar, coffee, or more potent substances—but he knows something. Sometimes, Nora feels like she knows it too, though she can’t quite put it into words.
“L remembered his name,” Addis says. He takes a quick puff and returns the joint. “It’s Levi.”
Nora nods. She watches the traffic in the narrow streets below, like blood flowing through a brain. “You’re good with them, Addy. You’re good for them.”
He shrugs.
“You know they look up to you, right?”
“But they’re all older than me,” he says. “They’re teenagers.”
Nora takes another puff and smiles. “Technically, so are you.”
A month ago, he would have gone cold at this. He struggled at first with his ambiguous identity. He couldn’t decide which group he belonged to, who he should play with, how he should talk and behave. He would bristle at any inquiry about his age—some older folks even questioned his race when his yellow eyes gleamed in the sun—but now he just smiles with sheepish amusement.
“I’m weird, aren’t I?”
Nora laughs. “Yes you are, Adderall. The weirdest.”
“Marcus is here.”
Nora pauses with the joint near her lips. “Here? Right now?”
“He’s at the front door.”
She looks at him sideways. “Can you…sense him or something?”
“He knocked earlier. I told him I’d go get you.”
“He’s been at the door this whole time?”
Addis grins.
“You little shit,” Nora chuckles and flicks the joint over the roof. She pauses at the hatch opening and turns around. “I’m glad you’re here, Addy.”
A brief hesitation, a cloud across his face, then: “Me too.”
“I love you. Even though you’re a little shit.”
His grin returns.
Nora descends the tower past floor after floor of other little shits. She pauses at the elementary level and peeks in the door for the day’s final check. She sees Gael and Gebre sipping coffee at the kitchen table, splitting their attention between the stack of essays in front of them and the dozen rambunctious kids around them. They look happy. All of them. The boy Nora knew as L is sitting in the corner, but he’s not alone. He’s playing a video game with a girl about his age. He’s laughing.
“Welcome back, Levi,” she whispers. Then she hurries down the stairs.
She resists the urge to check the hallway mirror, but her hand sneaks a quick hair primp before she opens the front door.
“Sorry about that,” she says with an apologetic eye-roll. “Addy’s into pranks lately.”
Marcus shrugs. “I did kind of kill him once. I’d say he has a lifetime pass to fuck with me.”
Nora smiles, then pauses to look him over. Still the baggy jeans, but he’s traded in the t-shirt for a button-up. He looks trimmer, his bulk a little more contained. Considering how many surgeries he’s been through lately, this probably doesn’t mean much, but still, it’s always intriguing to watch a person change.
“So we’re really doing this?” she says, eyeing him cautiously. “A date?”
He shrugs again, waves a hand over his stomach, his ribs, the scars of all the wounds Nora stitched. “You’ve already been inside me. What’s a couple drinks?”
“Jesus,” Nora groans, clapping a palm over her eyes. “Let’s go before you charm me to death.”
They don’t say much as they cross the town and ascend the winding maze to the Orchard. They take stools at the bar, elbows resting on the rough texture of a hundred tiny carvings—jokes, quotes, doodles, or sometimes just names, alone or joined with plus signs. They remain lost in private contemplation until the sound of whiskey filling their tumblers pulls them out.
Marcus raises his glass. “Do you toast?”
“Last time I did, it was R’s toast. He said ‘to life.’”
“R,” Marcus chuckles, shaking his head. “Love the guy, but what a cheeseball.”
Nora raises her glass and clears her throat. “To world peace!”
“World peace!”
They clink their glasses and sip their whiskey. Nora likes the way its warmth spreads over her cannabis-cooled nerves. She instinctively glances at the TV above the bar, but all four of the Orchard’s flatscreens have bullet holes in them. She’s curious to see what the world is up to now that it’s able to tell her, but she can watch the news some other time. Right now she’s on a date.
“It’s packed in here,” Marcus observes, glancing around the crowded room and almost shouting to be heard. “There’s really only one bar for the whole stadium?”
“One bar for the whole city, unless the Nearlies have started opening businesses.”
Marcus watches people drink. He watches friends laughing, couples cuddling, hips moving to the noisy rock on the speakers.
“Maybe I’ll open one,” he says, and begins to nod to himself. “Maybe I’ll open a bar.”
“You could be your own bouncer,” Nora offers.
“Nah,” he says, shaking his head. “Tired of all that.” He smiles at the ceiling with a distant twinkle in his eye, then turns toward Nora, inviting her in. “I’ll be the piano player.”
Nora hides her grin behind her whiskey. It occurs to her that the idea of world peace might no longer be such a punchline. Naive? Probably. Premature? Certainly. But laughable? These days, she’s not so sure.
“Put that one on the corner stack.”
“It’s too high. It’ll fall.”
“You hold that one and Alex, you hold that one, and I’ll put the curtain rod across. The weight will keep them up.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah, now I’ll just…there. Perfect!”
Sprout stands back to admire their progress and almost trips on the pile of architecture books scattered at her feet. She got them mostly for the pictures—from log cabins to government buildings, she soaks in the visual language and wonders what it means—but she has recently started skimming the text, too. She has no shortage of passion, but she’d like to buttress it with some solid theory.
Because this is no ordinary couch fort. In the history of sofa architecture, there has never been such ambition. Ten sectionals worth of cushions went into its construction, as well as nontraditional materials like road signs, car doors, and the awning of a liquor store. It fills the entire living room of this spacious suburban home, a house within a house. Sprout wonders if R and Julie will be mad when they get back, but she doubts it. The plywood wall patches, the bloodstained carpet…there are other houses they could have claimed if they wanted tidy lives.
“See how the curtain makes the south wall?” Sprout says, running her hand across the gauzy linen. “So you get privacy but still have natural light. You need lots of light when you’re working with small spaces.”
“Lots of light,” Alex says.
“Obviously,” Joan says.
Sprout is eyeing the last corner of unused square footage, thinking they could probably fit another closet in there, when she feels her stomach growl. “I need a snack,” she tells her friends. “But let’s start thinking about bathrooms.”