Places change when I leave them. Dust sticks to the television and the picture frames when I’m at the grocery store. Moths nibble holes in my blanket while I’m at work. The longer I’m gone, the more the paint peels off the walls, and the more the dandelions and broadleaves grow in the gutters. When I moved away for college, the Bayonne-green shag carpet curled against the corners of my parents’ basement. It unlatched from the floor and rolled itself against my furniture, and the weight of my unused mattress splintered my bedframe. When I got my first long-term production contract in Boston, the streets of my hometown buckled and gave way to oak roots and grass. Cobwebs wrapped around the door hinges of Rosatta’s Pizza, and the oil from the sauce and garlic knots corroded through the brick oven. My mother used to tell me it was normal.

My LinkedIn says I’m a digital marketing designer – that because I like warm lighting and know my way around a bold typeface, businesses trust me to make ads for Facebook and Twitter, or even for TV when they’re rich or old enough. Business was dry, though. It had been dry for a while. That’s why I always sort of stayed away from social media. All I could see was everyone else’s success. I needed to get out of Boston for a bit, clear my head and forget about bills and money. When I called T and told him I was visiting him and Audrey for a week or two, he told me to, and I quote, “hurry my bitch-ass up before the party started without me.” He was thirty-one years old.

He waited for me on his porch with that same pair of whitewashed rocking chairs his parents had. His home’s awning dipped and caved against one of the support columns. The baby blue vinyl siding had faded pale; some of the higher-up strips dangled off the walls. As I parked my car on the shoulder of the street, T gripped his cigarette with his teeth, jogged to my passenger side, and opened the door. The air outside was cold. T had lost so much weight.

“Benny-boy, about fucking time! Had to see that beard in person to actually believe it.”

“Facebook makes it look way thicker than it actually is,” I said.

The paintings on his porch and concrete walkway – murals, his younger siblings had called them – were faded, but I could still see the white five-pointed stars, the beige, lumpy horses, the family’s names on the stairs. Mine was painted too, on the first step next to T’s. He told me the others wouldn’t arrive for a couple hours. I heard the rocking chair crack as I sat down. He offered me a cigarette. I declined.

“Is Audrey inside?” I asked.

“You’ve been gone a long time, bro.”

When T talked, his cigarette bobbed up and down between his lips like a telegraph machine. It was sending me a message, waving its cherry like burning palm leaves. I thought of selling them that way – having two guys on a deserted island, one calling for help, dancing and jumping and flailing his arms like a madman, and the other sitting in a white beach chair, smoking his cigarette. He’d have his red Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned, and without taking the cigarette out of his mouth, he’d look at the camera and say, Don’t be a drag. Take one. T tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
“You know what’s better than a cigarette?” he asked. He rose his butt off the chair and pulled two cigars from his pocket, “I was saving these for when the boys get here, but fuck ‘em.”

T smiled. His yellow bottom teeth arched inward. People change, too.

He asked me what the occasion was, why I came back to Hampton, New Jersey on a Tuesday. It had been eight years since I left, and I told him I missed everyone. I wanted to see what the place looked like. A month prior, I took The Colonial as a client. It was a new country club, lots of buzz, lots of money. I rented out over ten-grand in camera equipment – InkFace Designs couldn’t afford the big league expenses, apparently –  and I was ready to make the ad. The ad. The kind of ad that gets them YouTube subscribers and me a brand new reel in my portfolio. Then they quit. Bailed. The Colonial decided it didn’t need an ad team and pulled out entirely. No money, no commission, ten-thousand dollars I had no way of paying back. InkFace fired me, said they couldn’t afford to keep people who bombed opportunities that big. T stood over a green painted sun and cut our cigars. A gust of wind slapped the siding against the house.

“Damn matches won’t stay lit,” he said.

I unzipped my hoodie and sprawled it out like bat wings. I could see the smoke in his teeth, in his eyes, in his hair before the tobacco ever caught. I was three feet away from my best friend and he reeked yellow, smelled the way his fingernails looked. He seemed suffocated. I blocked the wind and when he lit his cigar, he closed his eyes and took it to his lips like it meant something, like he’d been waiting for a reason to drag a cigar for years. He handed me mine and exhaled.

“Cold as a witch’s tit out here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Fucking fifty degrees in May. God.”

“Yeah.”

T paced around, stepping on the works of art that stood out against the lime- and blue-painted concrete. Yellow stick figures, an orange heart, purple bushy trees. Sydney and Kate must have painted those fifteen years ago.

“Days like this I fucking miss Mom, you know? She loved your good luck. Thought it’d rub off on me, maybe.”

He spat into the yard. It was grey and landed on a princess-pink tricycle. Thing must have been laying there since high school. The way T was holding onto the awning column, his black hoodie flowing like a cape and his tank top clinging to his ribs, he looked like a vagabond. Like a bee without its garden.

“You’ve still got your good luck, right? Old Bahston’s treating you alright?”

“Yeah,” I said, “Boston’s something else.”

“Good. Still waiting for you to find a job that keeps you in Jersey, though.”

I peeled the band off my cigar. Across the street, vines choked the corners of Shawn Hansen’s old house. Garbage bags blocked the stairs. I asked what I’d missed, and as T gave me his oral tour of our hometown, I wondered what Hampton would be like if I never left, if the baseball field at my elementary school would still have sand, or if Grochowicz Farm would still host its haunted hayride in October. T told me Crossing Guard Ron couldn’t beat melanoma, that Matt Moran’s carbon monoxide detector broke in the middle of the night. My cigar’s cherry flared.

“Lots have changed. A shit ton. More than you know,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Me and Audrey – nah. We’re done. Been done for almost a year, maybe. Bitch took Emily with her.”

“You’re kidding. Emily? The urn?”

“My daughter.”

T had to push all his weight on the door for it to open. In his living room, all I could smell was polyurethane and cat piss. His house always smelled that way, even though they never owned a cat. The same family pictures taken a decade ago sat on the mantel, and when I asked him why all the lights were off, T told me something was up with the fuses. A dark stain was blotched onto one of the beige walls as if, months ago, someone chucked their minestrone. That was the dish T’s mom cooked best. He ran into the kitchen and opened the cooler on the table.

“Want one?”

“Should we really start drinking without them?”

T tossed me a can of Yuengling. It was soaked and warm. He raised his drink in the air; foam sizzled down its side, weaving between his fingers before dropping onto the tile floor. I imagined the beer as a river, tumbling over rocks with frothy rapids, cascading down an Appalachian hillside carved out by ancient glaciers. Someone like T – aging but never old – would stand at the bottom of the mountain, a Yuengling waterfall splashing down into his Solo cup. He would look at the camera, his hair and clothes drenched and sticking to his skin, and toast the viewer. The brand’s logo would fade in under his chin.

“Thank God for whatever brought you back home.”

T walked back into the living room. His beer dripped onto my shoes as he walked passed me. An empty bookcase blocked the window looking out to his backyard, and when T threw himself onto his couch, its bottom shelf collapsed. I sat on the loveseat across from him. It sunk in deep, and the cloth of the armrest was coarse and crusty.

“You don’t want to sit there. That’s still the dog’s couch.”

T patted the empty couch cushion next to him, and when I sat down he stretched his arm behind my shoulders. Droplets still fell from the beer can. Nineteen years ago, we sat in the same couch and watched our first pornographic VHS tape together. We were twelve, and when he snuck out of his parents’ bedroom and leapt down the stairs, I wondered how he decided what tape to grab. His father must have thrown away the cover, and scribbled over its label with permanent marker. When the man grabbed the woman by her neck and pushed her against the wall, tearing at her shirt until her breasts eyed the camera, T asked me if all sex was like that. I didn’t know. I told him we’d probably figure it out in college. Everyone had sex in college, we agreed. Sitting with T now, I wanted to tell him that I wished I could have taken him with me to Boston. He dropped his cigar into his ash tray; our smoke drifted just below the ceiling. I asked him how long he’d been without power. He hadn’t had a working light switch since Audrey left.

“The bitch,” he said.

“Wasn’t a bitch eight years ago.”

“Yeah, well, you know.”

T finished his can and crushed it under his foot. He watched me, as if I wasn’t drinking fast enough; it was barely noon and I’d only taken a few sips.

“Back then, did you know you were setting me up with a whore?” he asked.

“What?”

“Emily’s not mine, Ben.”

T’s arm moved from the back of the couch and gripped my shoulder. He sat up straight and grabbed his cigarette from behind his ear. I looked into his half-shut eyes. T stomped his foot down on the can; the floor and the walls shook.

“Seven fucking years, Ben. Poured seven fucking years into that girl and she’s not even mine. No flesh. No blood. Just time and money.”

I wondered if she had gone back to Fairfield, if the mini-mansions and pedicured lawns of rich and old Essex County could survive my leaving the way Hampton couldn’t. Once, in college, Audrey rested her feet on my Camry’s dashboard and watched the pastel clouds roll from the sunroof. She told me people and places changed when she left them, too. She was the first person to know I was leaving for Boston, and when she begged me to stay, I promised I’d be back eventually, and that I would stay the same. T went back into the kitchen. I heard him open the cooler and snap open another can.

“We can see your parents’ old house if you want,” he said, “no one really lives there anymore.”

T told me his Oldsmobile had a sticky shifter. He filled his cupholders with Yuengling and jostled and pushed and pulled the gears. He punched his steering wheel when it wouldn’t budge. The horn honked, and with one more grunt the transmission gave way. He put his car in drive. I could’ve spent the entire car ride counting the cigarette burns in the seats, the door, the dashboard, the ceiling.  T told me his little sisters were living with his grandparents in Clinton, that John and Charlotte broke up three years ago and Tristan lived somewhere is Edison.

“So who all is coming?” I asked.

“To what?”

“This reunion-hangout thing. Whatever this is.”

“Oh yeah. Not sure at this point.”

I hadn’t been in my old house since I started college. The windows were covered with wooden boards, graffitied and weather-worn and the lawn had probably not been cut since my parents last lived there. Certain things – mowing the lawn, washing my car, helping my sister with her homework – were miniature bar mitzvahs to my father. The house’s white vinyl was stained by years of oily rain and pollen. I wasn’t sure if my dad would be furious at the sight, or giddy at the opportunity to power-wash the house. Probably both. T put his car in park and lit another cigarette. He asked me when my parents moved away, but I couldn’t remember. Between cigarette drags, T drank beer and fidgeted the radio tuner. The car wasn’t even on.

“Is it weird that I’m nervous?” I asked.

“Just a house.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I don’t know why I knocked on the front door. I think it was to verify that the house no longer belonged to my family, that even if it was abandoned, I needed to knock because it wasn’t mine to enter. No one responded. T forced open the door as if it would resist the same way his did, carelessly and without remorse. The door let out a quick and sharp squeal. I wanted to rescue my old home, power-wash the walls and oil the hinges. Inside, floating dust particles cut through the sunlight of the foyer windows. The hardwood floors buckled and split, and what once were white carpets on the stairs were aged yellow and beige. The chandelier above the foyer was gone.

We walked downstairs into the basement, into the bedroom where I lost my virginity and kept a space heater always running, even in the summer, even when I woke up with a bloody nose. I opened my bedroom door and the room – underground and windowless – was shrouded, like I was blind or better yet that I had lost all sense of what my room was, or at least what it had changed into. T turned on his phone’s flashlight. The room was empty. The shag carpet was gone, the walls stripped of their mahogany coat. The ceiling fan lost its blades. I sat my back against the wall.

“Damn,” T said.

“Yeah.”

“Freezing down here,” he said.

T crushed his can in his fists. He threw at the wall, and when it bounced and clanked on the concrete floor I realized how much louder the echo of an empty room was. When Audrey and I parked our cars outside my new apartment in Boston, she asked if she could go inside before the boxes filled up the space. She slid in her socks on the hardwood floor like a figure skater, spinning and jumping and laughing. Laughing and laughing until she clenched her stomach, slapped her knee, held onto my shoulder as if it helped her breathe. It all echoed around me, like honey on a wand. I hoped, then, the boxes would stay in our cars. In the empty basement, I saw the glow of T’s lighter and the sprawling embers of a cigarette cherry.

“No smoking,” I said.

“Relax, you don’t live here anymore.”

“Dude.”

“Relax,” he said.

I heard dirt drag under his shoes. The cherry ate at the cigarette’s body as T inhaled.

“I’m sorry the gang’s not here,” he said.

“It’s good.”

“It’s not though, I guess. Obviously didn’t come here just to kick the shit with me. You’ve got how long?  A week?”

Somehow, in the pitch darkness of the basement, I could imagine the silhouettes of all my old furniture, my clothes on the floor, my Call of Duty 2 and StarCraft posters on the walls. I could see the pencil box of acorns I kept on my dresser, and the yellow Medieval Times pennant wrapped around my nightstand. I saw the youthful silhouettes of T, John, and Tristan drinking Pepsi on my futon. Where T stood now, behind the cherry and the smell, was the faint shape of a man I didn’t know. After all these years, I couldn’t recognize T’s silhouette anymore. I wanted to go back. Not back to T’s, not back to Boston – please, not back to Boston – but back.

“I don’t think I can go back home,” I said.

“What?”

I wasn’t sure how the debt would work. They’d repossess something, maybe. My car. Everything, maybe. Take whatever was worth ten grand and leave me with the bones, the dusty picture frames, the empty rooms. They’d take the laughter and leave me with the echoes. I told T about The Colonial. For some reason, I asked what I should do, as if he were in any better position than mine.

“That blows,” he said.

Audrey would’ve known what to do. She would’ve told me whatever and everything would’ve fallen into place. That’s just how things happened with her. She would’ve helped me.

“Where’s Audrey?” I asked.

“What? Why?”

“I need to talk to her. Where did she move to? What’s her number?”

“No, no, no,” he said, “eight years in the dark – no facebook, no phone calls, barely a fucking text – and you decide to finally show up only because you’re having money problems? And what, now you’re going to ditch me for that lying bitch?”

I heard footsteps above us. Distant at first, walking down the stairs from the second floor to the foyer, then heavier and closer as they rounded the foyer to the doorway leading to the basement. I watched the cherry fall to the concrete floor. Embers flew out from its core as it bounced.

“I thought you said no one lived here,” I said.

T was silent. I couldn’t remember if he shut the basement door behind him. The footsteps stopped for a moment. They must have been staring into the darkness of the basement, the door swung wide open. They must have heard T yelling from master bedroom, or the bathroom, or my sister’s old room. I heard the footsteps continue, the weight of each step reverberating in the northern wall. The footsteps were descending the staircase. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and tiptoed to my closet door. In my mind, I begged it wouldn’t creak, or squeal, or call out for help, scream that there was intruder opening it, inch by inch. The world thought I was an intruder in my own home.

The closet was built beneath the staircase, and in it I could almost feel each slow step. They must have paused at the landing. I flashed my light at T and he ran into the closet. The person continued down the final five steps, and I tried to control my breathing. I was trembling, more so than T, and had my hands ready to shoot up at the sky in surrender.

“I know you’re down here,” the voice said behind the wall. It was a man. An older man.

“Did you close the bedroom door?” I asked. I tried so hard to whisper.

“You’ve been caught,” the man said, “I’ll give you thirty seconds to fuck off.”

I heard him walk across the concrete floor. His knees cracked; he must have bent down.

“Smoking kills, you know,” he said.

I walked T to the back of the closet, a small crawlspace under the last set of stairs. The man approached the closet door. I could hear his hands shaking on the knob. When he swung open the door and pointed his flashlight into the closet, I thought it all would pass. I thought we would sit silently in the crawlspace and the man would be fooled. He would be convinced that we were elsewhere, that the cigarette on the ground had laid there for more than just a moment and the crushed beer can would tell him we were long gone. But when T leapt from the crawlspace and ran into the light, yelling like a Spartan, I knew that this place would never be as it was. When T tackled the old man, when I heard his bones collapse into the concrete, I knew I was the intruder. I ran from the closet and grabbed T by his shoulders.

We had also forgotten to close the front door, and as my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, I told T to unlock his car. I shut myself inside and breathed. I just wanted to breathe. T started his car and spaced out into his steering wheel.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

He sat there like he was listening to something, like something was going on in his head or maybe he was replaying everything that had just happened. I didn’t think that was it, though. We sat in that driveway and he looked me straight in the eyes. His mouth opened but he didn’t say anything. I asked if he was okay. I told him he was okay. He turned toward me and let go of his steering wheel.

“Did you fuck Audrey?”

“What?”

“She got pregnant right after you left. Right after you two ran off to Boston. Then you never came back.”

I told him he was crazy. I told him he was shaken up and upset and drunk and that we needed to leave. We needed to go back to his house and cook his mom’s minestrone or order a pizza. I remembered Rosatta’s closed down, and when T’s eyes flicked behind me, I turned around. The old man was limping out the front door, handgun raised at the car. I told him we needed to leave.

“Answer me,” he said.

I pulled the shifter down toward reverse, but it wouldn’t move. The man yelled something, but I couldn’t hear him. T watched me struggle with the shifter and I wondered, only for an instant, if all this was his intention. I asked him to help, to leave, to rev the engine and never come back. When the man stopped walking, steadying his aim with his left eye squinted, T gripped the shifter’s head and pulled back. I threw myself back into the car seat. At his house, we parked his car behind mine along the yellow curb. I told him I never touched her. Inside, T handed me an envelope and collapsed into his couch.

“Here’s her address. Fuck if I know her number now.”

T told me she wouldn’t be able to help. He recited all the names he’d come up for her and said I was better off leaving her alone. He said she’d changed since I left. I told him I would probably see him again in a couple days. As I drove down the street, the awning of his house collapsed.