Brandon was sitting in his room, half-watching an episode of _M*A*S*H_ on the small, scuffed black-and-white TV that he had spirited away from its usual home atop a stack of books in the living room.

A duffel bag, and several of the multicolored stackable plastic boxes in which layers of childhood toys resided in plastic and metal strata, each layer filled with battered artifacts of years of his life thus far, were positioned near him, emptied of their previous contents as he deliberated over what he should pack.

He thought about a “what if?” game he and his stepsister had played in the car on the family’s last summer road trip. “What if the house was burning down, and you could only take three things?” He hadn’t had an answer then, when his house had not, in fact, been burning down.

I guess I’d grab the matches first…