The house seemed like it might cave in at any moment, broken glass everywhere. Who in the world would have sex in some abandoned house with this much broken glass on the ground? How did my brothers talk girls into it? And then there was the furniture: a moldy couch, a few recliners that looked like unspeakable things had been done to them, so many jagged slits in the fake leather. And I realized that, given the choice, it would be preferable to have sex on broken glass.

“This looks like a place where human sacrifices happen,” Zeke said, looking worried.

“It’s just teenager stuff,” I said, trying to be cool. “I’m surprised it hasn’t burned down because someone left a cigarette on the couch.”

The walls in the living room, where most of the damage had occurred, were covered in Sharpie graffiti, the absolute dumbest shit, lots of dicks. Someone had tried to spray-paint the bird-flipping mascot from the Ugly Kid Joe album, but it looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid. I recognized the name of a girl I had been friends with in grade school. Someone had called her a bitch, and even though she had ditched me for more popular girls in junior high, I didn’t like seeing her name for anybody to read. I grabbed a rock and scratched the wall over and over until you couldn’t really read it anymore.

“Is this the edge?” Zeke asked me.

“I think that, maybe, everywhere we are is the edge,” I said, mumbling at the end because I wasn’t sure of myself. Honestly, I didn’t want to think too much about it. I didn’t want it to fall apart under scrutiny. I wanted it to just be there, the edge, the shantytown, the gold seekers. I wanted so badly to make it real.

“Let’s cover the whole room,” he said, reaching into his backpack.

“Yes, please,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

And so we did.

It took longer than we thought, and every time rats scampered along the walls of the house, every creak as the foundation shifted, we startled and then looked to each other for reassurance. It took nearly two hundred copies of the poster, but we covered most of the room, and then we stood there, right in the center, and we turned slowly, around and around, and then it seemed like the whole world was just us, just this thing we’d made. It looked so close to what was in my brain that it took my breath away for a second. I thought about taking a picture of the room, to record it, but I just had my mind, my memory, and so I tried to hold it in there.