On our third beers, while we dug up the offshoots of an agave plant, the phone rang. It was dark by then, but the porch and streetlight illuminated the front yard. “What are you saying?” Orion said into the phone. “Okay, we’re coming.” Orion threw the shovel down and told me we had to pick Anna up. She had been hit by a car on her way home.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“She called,” Orion said.

We found Anna sitting under a streetlight with her bike, an old Peugeot with drop-down handlebars. Near her, in the bike lane, was a broken headlight. We were only a couple of blocks from the house, and because Orion and I were both a little drunk, we had walked. I asked if she’d called the police, but she shrugged her shoulders. She twirled the helmet around a finger.

“Look, Orion,” she said.

Orion took the helmet and flipped it over. I looked over her shoulder. A crack like a fault line ran through the center of it. I reached down to help her stand up. She staggered and leaned on my shoulders. I asked her if she was okay.

“He stopped,” she said. “Tried to offer me money.”

“Did you take it?” Orion asked.

“He had a thousand dollars in cash.” Anna tapped her pocket. “He just put it in my hand and drove off.”

I didn’t believe her. Something else must have happened, but she only repeated that she wanted to go home, take some painkillers, and go to sleep. She thought a toe might be broken.

“Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?” I asked.

“No,” Anna said. “Just home.”

The streets felt unusually wide, without centerlines, and we walked down the middle. The houses were old, one-story structures, front yards filled with lemon trees. An empty lot had been cleared of its house years ago and was overgrown with a thick lawn and one tree-like bush where a flock of chickens roosted at night. Anna said no when I brought up the hospital again. I tried to remember when the walkin clinics opened and gauge how hard she hit her head by asking simple questions.

“Shut up,” she finally said.

The front rim was bent and the bike wobbled in my hands. Anna said the man had made a left-hand turn into her. Of course he saw her—she was under a streetlight with the blinking safety light Orion had secured to the bike—but he thought his car was faster.

“You saved my life,” Anna began to repeat. I wanted to roll my eyes. She started to limp.

“My legs hurt,” she said, giggling.

“You got hit by a car,” Orion said.

“We should call the police,” I said.

“She took the money,” Orion said.

“It was a bribe,” I said.

“FIL 097,” Anna said. “That was the license plate.”

A block from our house was the city’s oldest cemetery, which was divided in half by a public road. I wondered what it had replaced, if it was split because the road had already existed or if the road had come after the land was designated. The city had taken the land at some point. I convinced myself that if the road came after then, of course the graves had been moved. I stopped to read the plaque before running after Orion and Anna, who were moving surprisingly fast. We walked past the university’s baseball stadium to our house.

Orion pushed open the front grate and we walked up to the front porch. I left the bike against the railing. The night had not cooled off and the sweat from the walk dried in salty streams along my arms and legs. I wanted Orion to suggest we run through the sprinkler.

“How do your legs feel?” I asked.

“Hurting more.”

“Sit down on the couch,” Orion said. She went inside for the painkillers.

I suggested to Anna that she might have a concussion.

“Orion will take care of me,” she said.

“What are you going to do with that cash?” I asked.

“Orion and I will go somewhere.”

Orion came back then with two cups of tea and handed one of them to Anna. “Try to relax,” she said, sitting down on the couch. Anna held the mug up to her face. She thought her cheek was bruised. I sat on the steps with my back to them. I repeated what Anna had said to me about her and Orion going somewhere, together, alone. I wanted a cup of tea, too.

“Did you bring me a cup of tea?” I asked.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I only have two hands.”

“You wait tables,” I said. “I’ve seen you carry way more.”

A line of ants moved along the lowest step. The front yard was dug up with piles of dirt that mimicked ant colonies, but the real colonies were in the corners where the fence connected at its joints. Orion’s truck was parked just beyond the fence in the gravel driveway. The truck bed had a shell covering and I wondered how many more of our belongings Orion and I could fit if Anna was coming along too.

Our house was not terrible. There was dust in the corners, maybe mold in the shower, and the furniture looked used because it was used. Orion and I had collected so much of it on bulk trash days when we drove around the city and picked through the throw-outs, considering each piece as if it was in a display window. We’d modeled for each other in the chairs, pretended to bake cookies with the plastic play kitchens, taught each other the secrets of the golf swing with the discarded clubs. This was all before Anna moved in. Now I had to throw our collection away.

I went inside and brought some of the good chairs out to the curb. I positioned them so they looked usable, like they could be taken home and set around the table. I carried a floral-print armchair to the curb, beers tucked into my back pockets. I sat down and waited for the sun to rise again.

By the day of the party, Anna still hadn’t gone to the doctor. She limped around the house as bruises appeared on her legs and on the left side of her body. Orion helped me carry the table and bed frames to the curb. The chairs were gone, so we knew people would stop for the rest of the furniture. If we left them in the house, they’d be thrown in a dumpster. Our friends stopped by to take the dug-up plants, pick out chickens, and drop off cases of beer. Orion wanted to invite everyone who had ever lived in the house. She hoped news of the sale and the party would spread by word of mouth. Our house had been passed down through friends for so long that the original names on the lease were people we’d never known, but she wanted to reach those original names—back to the late 90s—because she knew the house would be torn down. We heard the beams groan under our weight, noticed how the family of cats under the porch had disappeared overnight, and how, when the furniture was finally gone from its inside, the house leaned toward the road. I imagined it rising up from its foundation and staggering towards the highway. At the curb, we dropped the living-room couch.

A truck slowed down in front of us. Through the open window I heard the engine shift into park and a slow, familiar tune wandering from the radio.

“Take whatever you want,” Orion said.

“Not here for that junk,” said the man in the truck. “Just here ‘cause the landlord sent me.” He had a beer gut, but his muscular arm held the condemned notice and a staple gun. The man looked Orion over, then looked at me. I expected him to ask, What are you? We were filthy, covered in sweat and dirt. He searched our faces.

I smiled and said, “Do you want an agave plant?”

“This place is a shithole,” he said. “But the university owns it now.”

After the man stapled the condemned notice to the door, he spoke to Anna for a few minutes. I saw him shake his head and squeeze the arm of the couch after she pointed down the road. Orion dug up another agave plant and asked why I had offered him a plant. I said that maybe a gift would make him a nicer person. Instead it was Anna, who was pretty and had a way of flirting with men, who made him a nicer person.

“I’m sorry you have to move,” he said on his way out. “You shouldn’t ride your bikes in the dark.”

“I need more ice,” Anna yelled.

“That notice is hand-written in sharpie,” I yelled as Orion walked toward the house. “Isn’t it the city that condemns buildings?”

Orion never came back to help me with the yard. She sat on the porch examining Anna’s bruises until they snuck off to the only room left with a mattress. I walked around the back of the house to see if any of the vegetables were ready to be harvested. The garden was tucked into a wooded area next to the chicken coop. Past it, the backyard, with its overgrown vegetation, stretched toward the alley where Orion found the dead cat. I picked a couple of tomatoes, wrapped them in lettuce leaves, and took a bite. A fire ban had been in effect for most of the summer, but there was a faint smell of firewood burning. I heard beer cans crack open.

My room was almost empty and I only had to pack up the last of my belongings: the quilt folded in the corner, the copy of The Fact of the Doorframe, and the jar of petrified wood and seashells I’d collected. Orion and I had moved through different houses and borrowed beds, slept in the back of her truck while it was parked in driveways, driven hours to find the sunrise when we had nowhere else to go. Nothing was stable, but I had managed to keep these things safe, and to keep Orion laughing. I picked up the mesh shirt and slid it over my head, over a black tank top. Orion would wear a matching shirt. We had spray-painted them silver and gold, together, in the street. I knew we would dance and blend.

Orion and I hadn’t talked about where we would live since Anna’s accident. The idea had been to camp in our friend’s backyard. But when I went to pack my quilt, book, and jar into the truck, I had trouble finding room for them. Anna’s bags were there taking up space. I slammed the cab shut.

It was time to say hello to our guests.

“Hey,” I said as I passed through the front yard. I knew their faces, others whose faces I recognized from around the city, serving food in the restaurants, drinking in the bars. I saw whole bodies covered in silver paint that sparkled, bodies glued head-to-toe in glitter. Orion was clearing out the fire pit with my old lover, the one whose divots had filled with sweat.

“Where’s your mesh shirt?” I asked.

Orion used her keys to open a beer for me. She had changed into something I didn’t recognize: a white tank top with shiny gold and purple ribbon hand-sewn across it. It looked like it had been done in a hurry.

“Anna made this for me,” she said. The wood was dry and broke in her hands.

“I think there’s a fire ban,” I said.

“It’ll stay contained if we watch it,” she said.

The heat from the fire made us sweat and the glitter from one body stuck to another body without glue. I watched as a man spilled beer on another man’s bare chest and a beautiful stream of color ran through his chest hair. Orion climbed one of the pecan trees and opened tubes of glitter over the party. The fire was built bigger and the heat from the flames melted the plastic glitter onto our bodies. The backyard became a dance floor, with Anna DJing from a lawn chair. People overflowed into the front yard, the driveway, the street. School was out for the summer so the parking lots were empty and the stadiums were dark.

After midnight, Orion pulled me aside.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Anna and I are leaving in the morning.” She slurred her words. “Don’t make a thing of this. I’ll drive you over to the 12th Street house so you don’t have to bike your stuff over.”

The house provided plenty of wood to make the fire bigger, but first I ripped the condemned notice off the front door and held it to a flame. This had been our house for the past year, two rooms next to each other, a knock on the wall instead of an alarm clock. I grabbed a crowbar from the shed so the siding came off easy. I threw that first piece on the fire. It cracked in two and sank into the embers. After that, everyone wanted in. I’d start on a board and someone would come up behind me to rip it off with their hands, without fear of the nails. We breathed in the burning paint. Our lungs would be sore in the morning. Our guests became part of another dance—a tearing and rupture. Up until then, there hadn’t been any violence to the place. I wanted to watch it burn—to watch the shingles slip and the shutters drop as the hinges melted. But Orion kept the fire under control. One side of the house was removed and we became voyeurs looking in on our own lives, taking inventory of how objects were once arranged. Then the front and back doors came down.