The closer it got to when I was supposed to leave, the less I wanted to. I had been spending more and more time that week with Kenny, half out of guilt, half out of loneliness. I had called a few places to rent, and got a phone interview with one. It was a studio apartment attached to a house where a four person family lived. The dad told me after the phone interview that I would probably get it, he just had to check with his wife.

It was really happening. I was really going to leave South Park, forever, finally. And I was having doubts about leaving.

I guess it was because I had finally faced what I'd been running away from for so long. I had gone back to the school, I had talked about it with Kenny, far more explicitly than we had before. It felt like I was taking huge steps backward, just moving out of town like this.

Then again, I had always been afraid of change, and maybe that was it. Maybe I was just making up reasons to stay. I'd spent so much time believing that once I left South Park, once I started my life, had a job, had my own place… Once all of that happened, I'd finally be happy. I'd finally be okay again. Maybe I was just afraid that I was wrong, just afraid that I'd still be just as unhappy as I am here.

I could barely imagine a life without constantly running away, constantly trying to escape. Maybe I was just scared that without all the running, my life would come to halt, and I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

But it felt too late to back out. I needed to try, at least. As much as I couldn't only ever run away, I couldn't just stay in South Park forever either. I needed to grow up.

There was a knock on the door, late that afternoon. Kenny was outside, grinning as always. The second I opened the door, he walked in, no invitation needed. "Hey, dude, how's it going?"

I shrugged. "Alright. I just keep thinking that I should maybe pack or something."

He sighed. "You really are leaving, huh? It feels kind of surreal."

I laughed. "Yeah, no kidding."

"There's no set time for you to come back this time, either. You're abandoning me forever," he sighed melodramatically and fell onto the couch.

I chuckled and he smiled, sitting up.

"So what are we going to do for your last few days here? Go rock climbing? Commit arson? Steal street signs?"

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Well, I have to pack up all the things that I own."

"Come on!" he whined. "You can't spend all the time you have left here doing boring things! I can't set things on fire by myself!"

"Well, either way, we're not committing arson, Ken. Probably wouldn't end well for you anyway."

"That is how my luck usually works," he replied. "Okay, nothing potentially fatal, then."

"You know what'd reasonably safe?" I said. "Helping me pack."

He sighed, rolling his eyes. "Fine, I'll help you pack. But we have to do fun things, too."

"Of course," I replied.

In my room, Kenny decided that the best way to pack was to pull everything out of my drawers and closet and just throw it in a pile in the middle of my floor.

"It makes it so you don't have another choice," he said. "You can't put it off now."

"But now it'll be harder to sort through everything," I said, staring at him in confusion. He could be so incredibly weird sometimes.

He shrugged. "You asked for my help. You knew what you were getting yourself into."

I laughed a little, still kind of in shock from how quickly he managed to make my room such a mess. Then again, I've seen his room. There's a reason we usually hang out at my house. You can't even see the floor in his. I have no idea how he manages to sleep in there, or even get to his mattress in the first place.

He immediately started opening the drawers in my desk. "So this is how you keep your room neat!" he said. "Dude, do you use your desk as a trashcan?"

I crossed my arms. "At least I don't use my floor."

"I use my floor because it's harder to ignore that way," he said, as though that was perfectly reasonable.

"You still manage to ignore it, somehow."

He paused and grinned at me. "Well, it was a good plan," he said. "It just backfired when I realized how little I care."

"I can see how that would be a problem," I replied.

He shrugged. "Alright, here's the plan. I'll get through this mess," he said, pointing at the desk. "You deal with that one." He gestured to the pile of clothing on the floor.

We spent about an hour mostly in silence, playing some music loudly to make it seem more fun. I'd managed to fill one suitcase of clothes to bring and one plastic bag of clothes to throw away. It seemed like Kenny had gotten through the first drawer, maybe a little more. I looked over at him to ask, but I paused when I saw him.

He was holding something in his hand, staring at it, frozen. His smile was gone and all the color was drained from his face.

I frowned in worry. "Dude, you alright there?"

He snapped out of it so quickly that I wasn't sure I'd read his expression right. He quickly put down whatever he had been looking at and the grin reappeared on his face as though it had never left. "Dude, we've been doing this a while, want a break? It's almost happy hour at the bar!"

I was about to say that we really hadn't been here that long, but he had this sort of look of desperation in his eyes that made me think better of it. "Sure, man, let's go."

At that, Kenny practically ran out of the room, dragging me with him.

When we got to the bar, he immediately ordered four shots. He said we should each have two, because one is never enough. I decided it best to not disagree with him.

We stayed there for a while, hanging out, talking. He seemed to have calmed down, though I wasn't sure what had set him off in the first place. I didn't ask; I was afraid of ruining this.

Kenny took a sip of his beer and looked at me. "I've figured it out."

I laughed. "That sounds ominous."

He shook his head. "Okay, so you vetoed arson, yes?"

I raised an eyebrow at him.

"What about theft, though?" he said, and his eyes were so bright and his smile so excited I couldn't possibly disagree.

I sighed dramatically. "What did you have in mind?"

"You'll see!" he said, pulling me out of the bar.

We ended up at Stark's Pond and there was a long silence as we stood there.

"So was this on accident? Or did we actually come here on purpose for once?" I asked.

"Shut up, Stan," he said, lightly punching me in the arm. "I know what I'm doing, alright?"

"Sure, okay," I replied with a chuckle.

"We're taking the Stark's Pond sign," he said emphatically. He paused. "Well, you are."

I looked at him. "Why? Also, how?"

"Well, I get the actual pond to comfort me. So you can have the sign," he said. "And I didn't really plan out how."

We walked over to look at it. It was a wooden sign, with rusted nails holding it in place.

"We might need a hammer," I said. "Or a screwdriver or something."

He shook his head. "No. That's what the sign wants."

He then spent about twenty minutes trying to pull the nails out with a rock.

"Dude, it's not going to work, let's just go get my dad's toolbox," I said.

"But then the sign would win!" he said. Less that thirty seconds later, he managed to pull the sign off the post. "I told you I could do it! Now when you get upset, instead of running to Stark's Pond, you will have this sign."

"It's not quite the same thing."

He grinned. "No, not really, which is why you should still come visit the real thing every once in a while."

We stayed at the pond a little bit longer, but Kenny pointed out that he spent quite a while wrestling with the sign and was tired, so we both went home. I put the sign in my suitcase, and I was getting ready to go to sleep, I noticed the picture that Kenny had been staring at.

It was from sophomore year, and it was a picture of the four of us. Me, Kenny, Kyle and Cartman.

I didn't sleep well that night.

For the next few days, I spent the whole time cleaning, packing, or hanging out with Kenny. I'd gotten a phone call confirming that I'd gotten the studio apartment. Two days before I was supposed to leave and move, I made a plan to do the one last thing in South Park I really needed to do. Kenny offered to come with me, but I figured I should do it on my own.

I had never visited Cartman's grave. Kenny has gone every year, on Cartman's birthday. He invited me the first few times, but stopped when he realized I wasn't going to come.

So that day, I drove to the cemetery. But as I was walking through it, toward where Kenny had told me to go, I froze.

There he was, standing at Cartman's grave, tall and lanky, with a mess of red curls.

Kyle.