The Halloween party at the Bedford-Stuyvesant community center smelled like cheap punch and someone's mother's perfume. Maya Torres was on the roof because roofs are where people go when they want to be alone in a city of eight million people and it still doesn't work.

She was leaning against the water tower, notebook open on her knees, trying to get the line right—something about the skyline looking like teeth against a black mouth—when the door behind her creaked open.

"You gonna write the whole city into that thing or just the parts you hate?"

She turned. He was tall—really tall, like someone who had grown too fast and forgotten to tell his legs—and he had the kind of face that made teachers give him extra credit and principals give him extra trouble. Dark hair, dark eyes, a mouth that looked like it was always one joke away from saying something it shouldn't.

"Both," she said. "The city is everything I hate and everything I can't leave."

He sat down next to her, not too close. Up close, she could smell Old Spice and something else—cigarette smoke, but not from him. He didn't smell like smoke. He smelled like the people he hung around. "I'm Deke."

"Maya."

"Maya who?"

"Just Maya. I don't give out last names on rooftops."

He smiled. It changed his whole face—made him look younger, which was dangerous because he was already eighteen and looked thirty. "Fair enough. From now on, you carry my books. It's payment for the line about teeth. That was good."

"I didn't say it was for you."

"You said it on my rooftop. That makes it mine."

He stood up, slung an imaginary bag over his shoulder, and said, "Tomorrow. Seven AM at the bus stop. Don't be late, notebook girl."

---

He was at the bus stop the next morning. He was at the bus stop every morning. He was at the bodega where she worked Saturdays. He was at the library. He was, she realized with a mixture of irritation and something else, everywhere.

"Are you stalking me?" she asked him on Wednesday, because she had run out of more interesting things to say.

"I'm optimizing," he said. "Statistically, the probability of our paths crossing in this neighborhood is approximately—what?—forty percent. I'm just maximizing the data set."

"You're quoting math."

"I'm quoting me. There's a difference."

She should have been annoyed. Instead, she was curious. There was something about him that didn't fit the narrative she had written for him in her head. He was the guy who got suspended for fighting. He was the guy who sat in the front row and answered every question and then got in a fight at a Halloween party and broke some kid's nose—well, not a kid, some guy from a rival school, but still. He was grade point average four point zero and smelled like trouble.

"Why do you do it?" she asked him one night, when they were sitting on the steps of the abandoned L train platform. The city sounds drifted down—sirens, music, the rumble of a train that never stopped. "The fighting. I mean. You're smart. You could—"

"I could what? Go to Harvard? Learn to sell other people's problems? I've seen what a Harvard education buys you in this neighborhood. It buys you a condo in Williamsburg and a guilt complex."

"That's cynical."

"It's accurate. There's a difference."

She looked at him. In the dim light from the street above, his face was half in shadow. "Then why are you here? Sitting in a bunker with a girl you barely know."

"Because you're the first person in this school who looks at me like I'm a problem to be solved, not a problem to be solved."

That was either the most intelligent or the most manipulative thing anyone had ever said to her. She couldn't tell which. "You're weird, Deke."

"Yeah. I know."

---

Pogo was a three-legged cat that lived behind the bodega. The owner, Mr. Santos, fed him once a day and pretended not to notice him. Maya fed him extra on Saturdays. Deke started bringing him tuna from the deli across the street.

"He likes you more than me," Maya said, watching Pogo eat tuna out of Deke's palm with the devotion of a creature who had learned to trust selectively.

"He's smart. He knows a good investment when he sees one."

"You're not an investment."

"No? What am I then?"

She didn't answer. She was thinking about the photograph she had seen in his backpack—a picture of a construction site, a crane against a blue sky, and on the crane, in small white letters: Brennan Construction. She had seen that name before. In the paper. The company was building luxury condos in Park Slope. The ones that were pushing rent in Bushwick through the roof.

She asked him about it on a Thursday, because Thursdays were when the weight of the week made honesty feel possible.

"Your family builds those new buildings on Seventeenth Street?"

Deke went very still. "Where did you see that?"

"Your bag. Brennan Construction."

He was quiet for a long time. Pogo jumped onto the fence and looked at both of them the way dogs and cats look at people when they know something is about to happen.

"My father's company," he said finally. "Yeah."

"And you're—"

"Declan Brennan. Third generation. Valedictorian. The crown jewel of Brennan Construction's future leadership program, which I am not going to participate in but which my father believes is inevitable because I was born into it and intelligence is just another form of inheritance."

"You're building this neighborhood out of people."

"I'm not building anything. My father is. I—" He stopped. The city sounds filled the space where his answer should have been. "I'm trying to stop him from inside. Is that pathetic? Knowing what he's doing and sitting at his table and not being able to get out?"

Maya looked at him. She looked at Pogo. She looked at the bodega, at Mr. Santos sweeping the sidewalk, at the people on this block who had lived here for thirty years and were being priced out of their own history.

"You're just like him," she said quietly, "just slower about it."

She got up and walked away. She didn't look back. Deke sat on the steps of the bunker for a long time, and Pogo came over and leaned against his leg, and Deke put his hand on the cat's head and didn't move.

---

Maya transferred to a school in Manhattan two weeks later. Not because of Deke. Because of everything else. Because she couldn't stand looking at the contradiction every day—the boy who protected kids on the street while his family destroyed their homes, the boy who was smart enough to see the machine and strong enough to break it but too loyal to do either.

On the subway, heading to the new school, she opened her notebook. She wrote the first line of a poem:

The city is a machine that turns people into addresses.

On the seat next to her, someone had left a photograph. Manhattan skyline, taken from above. In the corner, in a hand that was sharp and fast:

Coward.

She didn't smile. She kept the photograph.