As mentioned, David’s basement was basically a house in itself, because for several years a middle-aged couple had lived there and paid rent to help David’s mom afford the mortgage. When she was finished paying it off and owned the property completely, she promptly, politely evicted them, and the basement became a lair for her then-pubescent son. The wheels of capitalism turned. And though the tenants were long gone, the basement remained more or less how its former residents had left it: the bedroom still had its Van Gogh prints on the wall, its random selection of books left over from David’s mom’s law school days, the kitchen with its mosaic splash guard (theme of rooster), the middle-class niceness was more or less preserved. Tyler remembered the first time David had brought him down here, he’d thought it was nicer than his own house. Now he stood and went through the bedroom to the fridge in the basement kitchen. He took a beer from its massacre-like interior—it was almost pathetically clear which parts of the basement David had touched in his tenure there. Tyler looked over the bed in the bedroom, neatly made, which David hadn’t co-opted even at all. (In David’s mind, it was still the resting place of someone else.) Tyler noted the claw-footed vanity desk; an antique, human-sized wooden chest by the window; a table at the foot of the bed ornately painted with scenes of fancy country life. Possessions, he suspected, handed down over generations, like you’d find in a museum, stowed here in a room no one used. He went back to the couch, to the teen area, and slid to the floor. He found David’s laptop sitting within reach, its hibernation light slowly pulsing. He pulled it toward him and opened it up to find David was one of those people who left himself perpetually logged in to everything. Tyler bounced back and forth between David’s email and his social media accounts; he sent ominous emails that drew heavily from the lyrics of the band he was listening to and made changes to David’s Facebook. He posted videos from dark corners of the internet and sent messages to random friends; he posted a set of grisly photos that was almost instantly deleted. Before he shut the computer again, he changed David’s passwords and the email addresses associated with account recovery to his own. He texted his girlfriend, Rhea, and told her not to expect him at school the next day, or indeed for the rest of the week: “I’m trying out a new house,” he wrote. By this time it was about 2:30 a.m.