I had to squint since I still had my sunglasses in the backpack. But that place would be familiar to me even just by the smell of leaking sewage.

Casper's house was right behind me, one of those prefab houses placed on the ground ready to be carried away at the first gust of wind. Yet that house had stood for almost eight years. Of course, the off-white exterior had become dull gray, and no one had ever repaired the roof after a tree branch cracked it, but it was still better than the alternative.

Involuntarily, my eyes were drawn to what was left of the house next door. The blackened embers of the skeleton should have been removed years ago, but who knows where the public funds for removal went.

I found that view unsettling. I couldn't imagine what Cas must feel waking up every day next to the burnt house.

The rest of the neighborhood wasn't any better. Without sunglasses, I missed the details, but I remembered well enough the rundown street, with rusty bikes and unkempt grass bursting through the cracks in the sidewalks.

I didn't know the people who lived there, but I knew it was the locals who had pooled their money to buy the house for the Coyote family. Much could be said about the Pit, the low-lying area surrounded by Norgree's three hills: the criminal neighborhood. But the people who lived there and were born there remained united. And if a house burns with a child inside, you dig out the spare change from your piggy bank and roll up your sleeves to collect blankets and shoes.

This was something I had always been envious of. If my house burned down, my neighbors would throw a party to show off to their friends what a beautiful panoramic view they had gained.

Casper started the engine to maneuver the bike into the strip of land next to the house, then turned the corner and hid it at the back.

It wasn't clear to me whether it was out of friendship and respect that no one from the neighborhood had stolen that beast of a motorcycle yet, or if it was because of the sixty-kilo Rottweiler and the Coyote's reputation.

I followed him, wading through the mud, and as soon as I emerged at the back, Christopher Walker started barking and pulling the chain like crazy.

"Chris..." Casper reprimanded him as if he were a kitten jumping on the kitchen counter, instead of a beast as big as a pony with knives for teeth. "Did you forget Ben's scent?" Cas abandoned the bike in a clean spot and rushed to grab the dog's head between his hands, shaking it like a maraca, making drool splatter everywhere. "Did you forget Ben's scent, dummy? Come and smell, come."

Casper grabbed him by the collar and led him forward, where I was minding my own business. "Have you decided that I must die today?"

"Don't make a scene, you know he doesn't bite."

I stood still as Christopher Walker sniffed me cautiously. Eventually, the beast snorted with its infernal mastiff muzzle and turned back to return to its kennel.

It seemed to say: "I remember this guy, and I never liked him."

Dogs really had an incredible memory. How long had it been since I had been in that godforsaken hole? Was it already longer than two years?

"Ben? Let me satisfy my curiosity. Technically, are you still forbidden to come here?"

Before I could stop it, a smirk spread across my face. Yeah... "Technically, the ban was never lifted."

My mother had been quite pale the first time she had come to pick me up from Casper's house. She'd said my new little friend was welcome in our home at any time, but I didn't have permission to go to his.

I asked if it was because Cas lived in a rundown dump, and she said not to call my friend's house a "rundown dump," but she never denied that that was the reason.

By the time I was fourteen, I think my mother had come to terms with it. My excuses about where I spent my afternoons had become increasingly unrealistic and fanciful.

That's why she let my sneaky visits to that rundown dump slide.

"It's probably best that your mother doesn't find out, then." Cas said it playfully, but those words immediately reminded me of a better time. When the secret and the prohibition were exciting, when everything was new and unexplored. We thought we were the first humans to discover sex.

We believed we were meant for each other.

His playful joke was dangerously close to flirting. I stiffened, gripping the straps of my backpack.

"I'm only here for the letter." I said it for both him and me. Forget having sex with him on every surface of that house. "The letter and nothing else. And once I've found the sender, I'll have no reason to come here anymore."