At the end of the block of childhood, the lone house stands filled with squatters unwilling to leave. Every three days, a few kids decide they’ve had enough and slip through the chain-link fence out back to the valley of adulthood: mortgages, jobs, annual checkups, and antacids.

The oldest resident, Carl, a boy turning 24, points out his counterpart lives in his mother’s basement watching other people play video games over Twitch. Mom says it’s time to get a job or go back to community college, but I’m not quite there yet. There’s a tournament next week I gotta watch.

Twice a day the ice cream man stops his truck outside the house, yet no one ventures outside. They move quietly, fear being a tight huddle they form in hopes that no one will disturb them.

The truck’s music plays for 10 minutes before the driver packs up and drives off. It’s hardest on the new ones, Carl says. If parents just backed off, we’d eventually leave when good and ready. Some games require more time on the easy levels. There’s a nostalgia in predictable things, the way a game controller reacts in concert with the hand as you gobble up coins and mushrooms.

A girl puts on the backpack she arrived with and hugs everyone goodbye. Her name is Alice, Carl says. She’s been here four years, the second longest after me.

The girl turns to Carl and says, I go by Allison now. I think it sounds more mature, plus it’s what my parents put on my birth certificate.

As she opens the back door, Allison calls out, See you on the other side.

Not me, Carl says.

Especially you, Carl. I’m looking forward to our first date, she says, closing the door behind her.

Mickie Kennedy is a gay American poet who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his family and two feuding cats. He enjoys British science fiction and the idea of long hikes in nature. A prior Washington Review poetry award winner, his work has appeared in The Bangalore Review, Hole in the Head Review, Midway Journal, Plainsongs, Portland Review, Rattle, and Wisconsin Review. He earned an MFA from George Mason University.