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He nods, and I walk up the cracked front path with my duffel and my backpack and my sweet potato.

He doesn’t leave. I can hear the engine running behind me the whole way up the walk. I can feel the headlights on my back. He’s waiting. He’s going to sit there until I’m inside, like I’m a girl he’s dropping off after a date and not a girl he spent four years making cry in a bathroom stall.

It annoys me. I want it to annoy me.

It doesn’t, entirely.

The front door’s unlocked. I open it. And the smell hits me before anything else. Weed. Not faint, not the stale sweet ghost of it that used to hang in my cousin’s room. Fresh. Thick. A cloud of it rolling out into the cold, over the Pine-Sol and the old coffee, over the whole smell of my grandma’s house, so that for a second I can’t even find it underneath.

The TV’s on too loud. Men are laughing in the living room.

My body knows before the rest of me catches up.

My cousin is on the couch. He looks older. Dylan’s twenty-two now, and it shows in the wrong places. Thinner in the face. Gray under the eyes. A scruffy little beard that doesn’t quite connect. But he still has the same face, the face people always forgave things, with the dimple in his left cheek and the long eyelashes that every aunt at every funeral said were wasted on a boy. He has my grandma’s crocheted blanket over his legs, the orange and brown one she made the year I was born, like he owns it.

There are two guys with him, one on the other end of the couch and one in my grandma’s recliner with his boots up on the footrest. Both older than him, maybe. Both with that look I know, gray and sharp-boned and a little too awake. A girl is curled in the corner of the couch with her knees up, picking at her chipped nail polish, watching the door with eyes that don’t blink enough.

The joint’s going around. It’s in Dylan’s hand when he looks up.

He sees me.

Surprise first. Real surprise. His eyebrows go up.

Then he smiles. The dimple shows.

“Well, shit,” he says. “College girl.”

I inhale and hold my breath to stop smelling the weed. I’ve stood in this same doorway, arriving at this same exact scenario with the TV loud and older boys on the couch. Back then it was much more daunting when they’d say something about my body when I walked past to the hall. I remember Dylan laughing with them and never once defending me. I remember locking my bedroom door every time I stepped inside it, and on the nights they were loud, I pushed my desk chair under the handle. Nothing ever happened, but I didn’t trust them enough. I’d stay up every night until they got quiet, happy to have been invisible.

Dylan looks past my shoulder. Through the open door, at the driveway, at the headlights backing out into the street.

He laughs. “Who the fuck was that?”

I don’t answer. I shut the door behind me. I hear the engine go up the street. Then I can’t hear it anymore.

Dylan holds out the joint. “Want some?”

“No, thanks.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t push. Sometimes he’s just my cousin, the boy who taught me how to ride a bike in the alley behind this house when I was nine and he was thirteen, running behind me holding the seat and then letting go without telling me. Sometimes he’s the one who used to steal me a pack of Swedish Fish from the corner store and hand them over without a word. And sometimes he’s the boy who would slam me against the wall, put me in headlocks, and force me to take a shot of alcohol so he could laugh at the way my face scrunched. And I never knew which one I’m going to get.

“Seriously,” he says, taking a hit, talking through the smoke. “How do you know somebody who drives a car like that?”

“Where’s Grandma?” I ask.

He looks at me for a second, like he’s deciding whether to make me answer him first. Then he lets it go. “Store.”

“Why?”

“Because I made some money this week, and I gave her some and told her to go grab some food for tomorrow.” He says it easy. Proud, almost. Like a man taking care of his family. “You’re welcome.”

He’s so full of shit. I know he stole the money from the top of the fridge, but I don’t mention it. I just nod.

“Okay,” I say.

“Yo, D,” says the one in the recliner, looking me up and down slow, from my shoes to my face. “You gonna introduce us to your sister?”

Dylan doesn’t correct him. He doesn’t say cousin. He doesn’t say she’s my little cousin, back off. He just waves the joint at me.