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Acadia, for vacations before you were born—­you could get a lobster everywhere. I chipped a tooth one year sucking the meat out of a leg.”
    â€œI’m going to be sick,” Ike said.
    The oven in our kitchen was electric, and we never got enough juice to make it work. It was good for food storage, though, since rats couldn’t gnaw through its metal walls. We did our cooking in a little firebox with a plastic chimney that ran out the window. My dad had nearly asphyxiated us a ­couple of times while building that, but it worked pretty well now. Mom had a pot of water already boiling over the coals. She grabbed the lobster, not even trying to be careful with its claws, and dumped it inside the pot. She put a lid on it and told me to set the table. Ike helped. Meanwhile Brian stood near the door with his shotgun. Standing guard. As if Mrs. Hengshott or the mayor might come bursting in with guns to take our lobster away. I smiled and rolled my eyes, and my dad laughed and punched me in the arm.
    â€œBe nice,” he whispered. “You have no idea what it was like, during the crisis. We all had to learn to be paranoid. It takes longer for some of us to unlearn things, you know?”
    â€œSure,” I said, though I really didn’t understand at all. I mean, the world is what it is, right? They tell me it was different before. I don’t know. It must have been just as dangerous, especially with all those cars shooting up and down the streets. How could you even walk anywhere?
    The lobster made some pretty freaky sounds as it boiled, though I don’t think it really screamed.
    I felt pretty good. I was home with my family and some friends. We had food to eat, even a special treat if what they all said was true and lobster was better than crabmeat. We had a place to live that was warm and dry, and an hour of electricity every night when the government sent us fuel for the big generators.
    Now, looking back, I realize just how perfect it all was. Back before all this—­before I got my tattoo. It was like paradise. Hard to hold on to that kind of perfection. But we did it. We kept it going.
    While the lobster cooked, Ike and I made a salad with lettuce from the roof and herbs from the window gardens. My mom and dad moved around the kitchen almost as if they were dancing, smiling and clutching each other’s hands. It was great to see them like that—­like most first-­generation ­people, they rarely seemed actually happy. Even Brian seemed more, well, more there than he usually was. He turned the crank on the radio and we pulled in the Emergency Broadcast Ser­vice. In between tips on boiling all your water and how to make a tourniquet, they played some old music. Music from before always sounded to me like it was coming from a much louder world, like it had to compete with all the other sounds. Now it felt like the musicians were right in the room with us, crowding us. But my parents loved it when they played music, so I didn’t mind too much.
    When the time came, my mom opened up the pot and grabbed the lobster out with a pair of tongs. It had turned bright red, just like Mrs. Hengshott predicted. It was like a magic trick, I guess. My dad hushed everyone while he prepared to crack it open. “A claw for Brian, and one for Finn. You and me, honey, we’ll share the tail, all right?”
    My mom closed her eyes as if she was already imagining what the lobster would taste like. Then my dad picked up the lobster carefully, wincing a little because it was still boiling hot. He held its body in one hand and the tail in the other and with a kind of flourishing motion snapped the tail section off the rest.
    Black, sludgy liquid poured out and splattered on the kitchen counter. The smell was horrible—­not like sewage, like the worst kind of chemical smell you get from bad water. The meat inside was veined with black and green and fell apart in wet