Bee used to live in a community shelter, and she hated it.

During the first months of the aftermath of the catastrophe, everyone was confused, scared, but was amazingly caring towards each other. Food, water, and blankets were rationed, and Bee even played her CDs at night, inside the gigantic makeshift tents on that parking lot behind the rubbles of what used to be a seven-floor shopping mall. Lots of boys and girls her age quickly became friends, and even though they had diverse taste in music, they were thankful for Bee and her small indie collections. That touching story lasted for about a month and ended one morning when Bee woke up to find her poster and half of her collections missing, along with her six-year-old discman and packs of AA batteries. She never saw her friends again, even after she dedicated the next three months going on a blind search to find them and get her stuffs back with of course, zero results.

So when Jenna opens the door to their lovely space in the community block, Bee can’t help but feeling a little sick. She tightens the grip on her backpack as she steps into the dimmed living room.

Kevin disappears through a shower curtain that serves as a door at the back corner of the room, and the familiar whirring noises soon follow. One neon bulb above Bee starts to flicker violently and light up with a loud crackling sound, and one more above the now visible kitchen on the left, lights up in the shade of yellow.

It’s exactly what Bee thought their home would look like, and at the same time it looks nothing like she’d imagined. They have a tattered sofa, that probably doubles as a bed right on the center of the room; barricaded by stacks of books and magazines that almost creates this illusion of an actual bedroom privacy. The walls surrounding them seem to be made of logs and wood planks, but when Bee knocks on them, it is anything but hollow- there seems to be solid rock or steel behind them, which is impressive yet pretty doable now that people have learned the ropes of ‘temporary architectures’, if that’s even a term.

Jenna and Mainard have changed into something more comfortable, a pair of matching pink hoodies that Bee saw once when she met them months ago in a foraging trip. Bee reminds herself that the two just got married a few hours ago, and wearing their fave pink hoodies might be just what they need on their honeymoon- which they choose to share with their awkward neighbor and their wedding DJ.

“Guess what we’ll have for dinner!” Jenna opens their crate in the kitchen and places four plastic cups on the kitchen counter (which is basically just more stacks of magazine), “We’ve been saving these for special occasions!”

“No way…” Bee takes a closer look.

Instant cup ramen, all seafood flavors, with only seven months beyond its expiration date.

“We traded our engagement rings for a year supply of these. I don’t know why anyone would even want rings anymore, but we shook hands and took them before the man changed his mind.” Jenna added proudly, while preparing the plastic jug for the cooking water. “Go wash up first, we have a communal shower in the back.”

“Ah, thanks,” Bee says, carefully skipping through all the junks and even more books to reach the shower curtain, the one that Kevin used earlier.

Turns out, the curtain leads straight to an open backyard that connects several small houses and cabins together, including Jenna and Mainard’s. One of the neighbors, a middle-aged balding guy who happens to be outside, waves at Bee, “Hey! Aren’t you the song monger? You sleeping over at Jenna’s tonight?”

Bee tightens her grip on her backpack and just walks towards the showers, which she assumes are the only two tiny sheds sticking out on the yard.

“Use the one on the right.”

Kevin appears from behind the sheds, almost as alarming as that middle-aged neighbor who’s still low key watching her from his side of the backyard.

“The left one is still broken, making only droplets lately,” Kevin explains. Bee notices he’s out of his stupid, sleeveless tux now and in a normal-looking parka and jeans. The mountain sandals are still on, though.

“Thanks,” Bee mumbles, weirded out by how many thanks she has uttered out today. Thanking someone nowadays usually means getting involved in some kind of a debt, and for years Bee has been doing such a good job in doing exactly not that. But when she thinks about how Kevin is probably the one who’s going to be thanking her in the near future, maybe she should just let go of a small thanks over which shower to use.

“I’ll be inside,” he gestures towards a cabin exactly a few walks away behind the showers. “Just, uh, knock or something when you’re done. I’ll walk you to the generators.” he says, walking backwards into his cabin instead of turning around like a normal human being.

Bizarre as it was, that wasn’t the thing that keeps Bee staring at him or his cabin. Before the door fully closed, Bee swears she saw her poster; the one that she rescued out of the house instead of Piecrust, the one that was stolen from her at the community shelter, the one and only Rocket Cornflakes poster from their '92 tour with that ugly white vertical fold line that had been hanging in her room for years and now hangs in the wall of a cabin of a stranger slash popstar-wannabe named Kevin.