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his long-deserved promotion at the plant and buying a new car for the first time in his life, a small coupe. They talk about it, his father haltingly pointing out features Cam would never have imagined he would want.
    At the house, he and his father unfold similar long frames.
    “Every­thing in your room is the way you left it,” Cam’s mother Julie says, as soon as he walks through the door, and kisses both his cheeks. Of course. Because clichés have a basis in truth, and what college home­coming would be complete without a realiza­tion that one no longer fits into the husk of one’s old life? “I know it’s din­ner and not breakfast, but I thought we’d do arepas tonight. Your favorite.”
    “Thanks, Mama,” Cam says, kissing her back.
    “I wish you were staying longer than a few weeks,” Julie says that night. “We miss you.”
    “I know,” he says, smiling at her.
    She’s changed her hair slightly; it’s shorter and lighter. Cam has a feeling of slight displacement, as if everything he’s deeply familiar with, constants during his whole life at home, are slightly off-center. Not unfamiliar, but strange. The kitchen table is the same, but the chairs are different. They’ve recovered them.
    Luis nods in acknowledgment and goes back to cutting his arepa , a cornmeal-based flatbread his mother made from scratch for Sunday breakfasts since Cam was a kid. There was always an array of cheeses and deli meats laid out on the table to stuff into the steaming, torn-open pockets, where the cheese melts deliciously in the heat. He hasn’t had them since he left for Carlina. He opens one carefully and avoids the steam; thin-sliced asadero cheese and ham are at the ready.
    “But I got a job that I could keep through the semester, and…”
    “And?” she prods gently.
    “I really like it there,” he admits. “Not that I don’t here , it’s just different.”
    “I can’t imagine Lex holds much of a candle to Chicago,” his dad chimes in.
    “Just a different pace,” Cam says. It seems like betrayal, to feel hemmed in by his old home and old room and the big, empty spaces in their small town. The running here is better, true. But he just doesn’t feel as awake. What was home doesn’t sit right around his skin anymore.
    He thinks of Wren, of five minutes in a library that felt like a supernova in an empty room.
    “Do you want more?” His mom bumps his foot under the table and smiles when he nods. The foods of his childhood—hot, fresh, the perfect grit of maize flour in his mouth, these are the things he’ll gorge on before he has to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he quietly watches his parents as they gossip about news in town. His father looks a little older.
    “How’s Pey?” Cam asks out of nowhere. The fourth chair at the table looks empty to him. His father tightens his lips until they’re thin and white.
    “Oh, you know Peyton,” his mother says lightly, taking another arepa . “Always on the move.”
    “Needing money,” his dad chimes in.
    Cam ignores that last bit. “Where is she now?”
    “I’m not sure, honey,” his mom says.
    “Oh, well.” Cam knows better than to worry, knows that his worry would only stress them further. Peyton will call if he needs her; somehow she always knows. He bites his lip and grabs the butter from across the table. Even though Peyton usually calls using what they’ve always called their twintuition, there are times he just plain misses her, and it’s hard not knowing how to find her. It’s been a long time since they’ve talked.
    “I know you miss her,” his mom says, covering his hand with her own. Cam resists the urge to pull away. How can she see him so trans­parently sometimes and not at all at others? His parents miss Peyton too, but he knows that they also feel a certain relief at the distance. The trouble she always made was harder for them.
    “Can I help with the dishes?” he asks. His dad is still frowning at his plate and