“The address! The ADDRESS! You have to look at the fucking address!” he screamed. “Whenever you are lost, whenever you are confused, you have to look at the fucking address! And UNDERSTAND that what you seek and whatever you get in the end is all part of an address! It’s the key to your escape.”

With that the man Jeremy had introduced as Hanson three hours earlier flipped the board and all of the game pieces into the air, and—almost the way a magician vanishes behind a cloud of smoke—quickly disappeared behind a slamming door. After a few moments of stunned silence—enough to let the man clear out—Natalie, Jason, Marie, and I went outside while Jeremy went looking for a broom to clean things up.

The sky was cloudless and inky, dotted with pinholes of starlight, shining with the beacon of a moon waning just a few days past fullness. The other houses on the street with their front room lights blazing. Chatter from others gathering outside floating through the neighborhood to us.

Natalie, laden with half-a-dozen bracelets of different widths and wrapped loosely in a shawl that enveloped her entire being, looked ready to explode with excitement. She danced barefoot in the grass, reared her head back, thick tangle of curls taken up by a light breeze, bared her teeth and screamed to the sky. “Goodbye twenty twenty!”

Jason, hopped up and down next to her, oversized army parka inflating like a parachute around him. He raised his champagne—his contained, for some reason, in a charming mug from some Bayonne diner called Dianne’s—and let out a whoop of assent.

Marie nudged me—barely perceptible, bundled as we both were in black, wool peacoats.

“Looks like we’re going to make it,” she said, breeze picking her hair up off her shoulders, tickling it around the freckles near the bridge of her nose.

I smiled, nodded. “Yeah,” breathless.

“Cheers,” Jeremy said from the porch, leaning against the railing like some Darkness on the Edge of Town era Springsteen knockoff: flannel sleeves shoved roughly up to his elbows, skinny, acid-washed jeans hugging legs down to tattered Van’s.

“Why don’t you get down here and have some fun?” Marie laughed up to him.

“I’m keeping my distance,” he grinned back. “Don’t want to catch the plague.”

“Alright!” Natalie was hopping with as much fury as she could without sending her glass of champagne spilling across the yard. “Thirty seconds.”

A giddiness, relief, was building inside of me. Bubbling up from somewhere near by navel past my heart and into my throat. We started counting down.

“Five, four, three, two, one!”

“Happy New Ye-”

The ground began to rumble beneath our feet.