Our old four-door struggled down the dirt road. I stared out the window, to the cabin where we would spend the next week; it was even shabbier than the prior year. Ivy had crept up the siding, creating viridescent veins where the weathered planks separated. The screen to the door, ripped by a dog who had died a decade earlier, had disappeared entirely. The house was rotting away, destined to be sold before the next summer arrived.

To my right was Joseph; he was nineteen, staring down at his phone with bloodshot eyes. He’d been high for the most of the last five years--something that had become almost constant since he graduated from high school. We’d told each other everything as kids, but with age, he’d begun to spend most of his time committing misdemeanors with the town delinquents, so we weren’t as close as we’d once been.

To my right, Diana had her eyes set on the trees, one arm resting on her stomach. In the past weeks, she had taken to baggy sweatshirts and peanut butter sandwiches. When I noticed, I asked her if there was anything she was hiding; she just cried and begged me not to tell our parents. A month later, I was still the only one who officially knew-- not because it wasn’t obvious, but because our parents didn’t want to acknowledge that their barely fifteen-year-old daughter was pregnant. And I suppose Joe was just too out of it to notice.

And, sitting in silence in front of us, were our parents: married because that’s simply what they knew. There was a similarity in their relationship, and I suppose that was enough from them. Because there wasn’t anything else, really.

When the car stopped, we filed out onto the dirt patch we used as a driveway. We then stood in the driveway, being swarmed by mosquitoes, while Mom and Dad desperately turned up the car in search of the house key. No one had seen it since we had left the house the prior summer, nor bothered to make sure we had it before leaving home.

Twenty minutes in, we were about the have Joe force himself through a window when Mom pulled an envelope vaguely labeled House from the glove compartment. Inside was the rusted key, hanging from a flip-flop keychain.