“Here it is,” he said, and I parked in front of a house that was, thank god, a little more modest than the ones around it. It was more like a cottage, but it still looked so expensive, this pristine, two-story house with stone pillars holding up the roof of the porch. The front door was a kind of wood that seemed like it was a hundred years old. The yard was expertly maintained, not a single bike or rickety lawn chair on the grass. There was a swing on the porch.

“This is where you lived?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“I live here,” he said, and his eyes were glazed over.

“It’s really nice,” I offered, so embarrassed that he had spent all that time on the bed in my room that had sheets from a garage sale.

“It doesn’t look any different,” he said, more to himself, like he’d thought that, without his mom and him there, the house would collapse in on itself like a Transformer or something to account for their absence.

“This is a really nice house, Zeke,” I said, like I wanted him so badly to say, “It is a really nice house, and I am rich. But I’d rather be with you instead,” but he just kept staring at it. It was three in the afternoon, the sun finally starting to ease up, making it a little more comfortable to breathe. My A/C wasn’t great, and the car was straining, but we just kept idling in front of his house.

“Give me a poster,” he finally said. He was closer to the backpack, but I didn’t want to make it weird, so I twisted around and retrieved one. He folded it in half and got out of the car and walked to the mailbox, putting the poster inside. He came back and sat in the car, his legs shaking a little.

“Do you want to leave?” I asked, but he said, “Give me another one.”

I did, and he said, “Come with me? Please?” and we got out of the car. I grabbed the tape, and we walked onto his porch. He held the poster against the front door, and I tore off two strips of tape, and we affixed the poster to the door of his home. We stepped back to look at it, and he said, “Can you imagine my dad’s face when he sees this?” but I didn’t even know what his dad looked like. But I nodded. “Skinny with hunger for us,” I said, and just then the door swung open and this woman was staring at us. She had a bathrobe on, baby blue, and she was not that much older than us.

“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled, but then she instantly stiffened when she saw Zeke. “Oh god,” she said.