He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the house as fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn't leave then, he wouldn't get out all day. # As he got closer to Kurt's storefront, he slowed down. The crowds were thick, laughing suburban kids and old men in buttoned-up cardigans and fisherman's caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths and punks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth. He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shop apartments, passing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between his knees. Link didn't see him, he was laughing at something the boy behind him said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he'd shaved his head and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along the double seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked like it had been abandoned on the set of *Space: 1999*. Krishna had his own little girl between *his* knees, with heart-shaped lips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually on her shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it. Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he'd been punched in the stomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flattening himself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to see Mimi, and wanting to rush out and shield her from the sight, but she was nowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his? And then he spied Natalie, standing at the other end of the street, holding on to the handles of one of the show bicycles out front of Bikes on Wheels. She was watching her brother closely, with narrowed eyes. It was her fault, in some way. Or at least she thought it was. She'd caught him looking at Internet porn and laughed at him, humiliating him, telling him he should get out and find a girl whose last name wasn't "Jpeg." He saw that her hands were clenched into fists and realized that his were, too. It was her fault in some way, because she'd seen the kind of person he was hanging out with and she hadn't done a thing about it. He moved into the crowd and waded through it, up the street on the opposite side from his neighbors. He closed in on Natalie and ended up right in front of her before she noticed he was there. "Oh!" she said, and blushed hard. She'd been growing out her hair for a couple months and it was long enough to clip a couple of barrettes to. With the hair, she looked less skinny, a little older, a little less vulnerable. She tugged at a hank of it absently. "Hi." "We going to do anything about that?" he said, jerking his head toward the steps. Krishna had his hand down the little girl's top now, cupping her breast, then laughing when she slapped it away. She shrugged, bit her lip. She shook her head angrily. "None of my business. None of *your* business."