“It’s a box,” said Hana. Her gaze wouldn’t stray away. A blue box, adorned with some sort of tribal design, the only thing left in the attic after what the kids called The Spring Purge, a halfway house tradition.
    Out with the old, in with the new (if they could afford it). The whole idea was to bring in good luck for the coming summer, to wash out all of the overdoses, stabbings, and suicides of the past few months. Did it work? Not really, there was a lot more trouble that happened after them, but it was still nice for the residents to get together and do something every once in awhile.
    “We can see that,” muttered Ferris, idly picking at the threads of his stained, cotton shirt. “It looks like it’d be worth something.”
    “Well, we can’t just sell it!” Hana brushed a lock of brown hair out of her eyes. She kneeled on the ground, as if she were praying, and placed the palms of her hands on the top of the chest.
    “It’s not dusty,” she said. Ferris looked. She was right. It looked fairly recent, as if it had just been put there.
    “Do you think it’s someone’s?” he asked, reciting in his head the names of anyone in the house that actually had enough money to own such a thing.
    There was Miriam, the old, wispy Jewish woman that somehow got addicted to crack at 60; Kaden, Miriam’s caretaker, who wasn’t a drug addict, but basically resided in the house under some guise of ‘community service’; Devin, the twenty-something whose parents own some factory or some cure to cancer, and send him huge amounts of money each week (he was the house’s designated grocery buyer); and Lorelei, who was a recent addition to the group, but arrived with gold bracelets on her wrist and diamond earrings on, so Ferris (and everyone else) kind of assumed her wealth. None of them, according to his knowledge, liked the color blue, and none of them had been to the attic in months. In fact, everyone but Devin (who was out getting groceries) was lazing around downstairs, refusing to even enter the attic.
    Hana traced her fingertips on the lock. “Very high quality. Should we take it?”
    Ferris shook his head so hard that he felt it coming loose. There was no way that he was going to willingly take something from someone that could easily catch him.
    “Phooey,” said Hana. “You’re no fun.”
    Ferris squatted down to Hana’s level and took a closer look at the box. It was quite small, but not tiny, and had a few knife scratches on the edges. The lock on the thing was shut tight, so whoever scratched the sides was probably trying to get in.
    “This is weird,” he said.
    Hana nodded. “Super weird. Like, who would put something this new in the attic if they knew we were going to Purge it?”
    Ferris stood back up and nodded. Who would do that? He knew that there had to be someone who owned the box, but it was a hard thing to narrow down. They could’ve tried to open it, but he didn’t want to invade the person’s privacy. Besides, the thing was locked severely, as if the person wanted to keep everyone and their mother from catching a peek at the contents.
    “Let’s open it,” said Hana, and before he could express his objection, she rushed to the corner of the attic, snatched a crowbar, and pounded relentlessly at the small lock of the box.
    “Stop!” He tried prying her away from the box. “Stop it!”
    It was like he was speaking to a deaf child. She kept going at it, hitting the lock, then stomping it underneath a toed boot. Swing, stomp. Swing, stomp. Stomp, swing (the loss of the pattern was her signal that she was getting tired.) Ferris, from the back, wrapped his arms around her and locked his hands, dragging her downstairs to the first floor.
    She went with him, kicking and screaming.

    After securing Hana safely in Lorelei’s room, Ferris went around the house asking each and every resident, cook, or counselor whether they owned a blue box, or not. The counselors and cooks said no, but the majority of residents were deadset on the value of the box. If it was expensive, they could pawn it off and buy more smack, but Ferris made sure to keep his lips sealed.
    He returned to the attic and sat down, criss-crossed in front of the box. It didn’t move, not like he’d expected it to, but it just sat there, as if it was waiting for him to do something.
    Ferris didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. He just sat there, waiting for events to unfold from behind his goggles.
    After ten minutes of him doing nothing but staring, Ferris grew frustratingly impatient. he wanted the box, if it was no one else’s, but he had no idea how to get it open. Could he shoot at it? Drop it from fifty feet? Try to run it over with the house’s car?
    He did all of that.
    Firstly, he fired a few shots at it, using his BBgun (the counselor had passed out earplugs to everyone in the house). The shots did nothing but ricochet off of the lock (not in his direction, thankfully) and hit all of the walls in the attic.
    After that failure, Ferris went up to the roof and tried to drop it from the top. At the bottom, Kaden stood, waiting to collect the loot and pass it up. (Ferris thought that anyone else might’ve stolen it). When it launched, the box hit the ground and bounced right back up on its bottom.
    Fail.
    Kaden tried mashing it with his boot, and Ferris joined it, stomping and clattering all over the driveway, as if they were playing soccer and the box was the ball.
    It didn’t even dent.
    “Ok, you know what?” asked Kaden, after two hours of Kick The Box The Farthest. “I don’t get enough hours for this.”
    He left Ferris in the driveway.
    At this point, he was at the end of his rope.
    “Just open, already!” he yelled, picking up the box and screaming into its keyhole. “just. Open.”
    And open it did, releasing a white flash of light that blinded him in the driveway of his own halfway house.