I was something of a basement connoisseur when I was a kid. Our family didn’t have one, which wasn’t that uncommon in the tornado-free San Francisco Bay Area, so I loved checking out a good basement when I could. My friend Joshua had a concrete-floor basement where his parents let us conduct science experiments of the exploding volcano variety. Another friend, Logan, had a finished bottom floor that I counted as a basement because it was technically subterranean, and in which we got to play video games, eat a disgusting number of Sour Patch Kids, and generally live the good life on the days when we weren’t jumping on his giant trampoline or when his parents weren’t taking us on a Jelly Belly factory tour (he was rich, it was a sweet setup). And then there was Kevin’s basement, which was really special. For one thing, it had a laundry chute that connected with the second-floor hallway upstairs, and we would throw his little sister’s Bratz dolls down it to see if their heads would pop off. Plus, it had the perfect combination of playing-around space (the rug-covered concrete floor section) and creepy space (the place where the finished part ended and packed dirt formed a gradual slope up to the concrete wall, getting closer and closer to the exposed beams that made up the ceiling on that side of the basement). A couple of exposed-filament incandescent lights were strung up haphazardly in the creepy area, making me think of the mineshaft in an Indiana Jones movie.

One listless Saturday afternoon—September 10, 2011, to be exact (for some reason I was really aware that the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 was the next day)—Kevin and I were playing tennis in the basement. Well, by tennis, I mean we were playing wall ball against a support beam, throwing the ball overhand instead of using rackets. We stood in the non-creepy part of the basement, but were facing the support beam that seemed to mark the threshold of the creepy section. Being children with generally poor aim, we often missed the beam, causing the tennis ball to make contact with the dirt, but because the dirt sloped, the ball usually rolled back. The fifth time the ball ended up in the dirt, though, it got lodged against a little ridge, and didn’t automatically make its way back.

“Go pick it up, you threw it!” Kevin said shrilly.

“No way man, you do it, it’s your house!” I pushed back. There was no way I was going to risk getting bit by a spider in my friend’s basement, but I didn’t really want to let Kevin know that I, a recently minted eleven-year-old, was afraid.

“But there might be black widows up there, and I’m scared of spiders!” Kevin protested, clearly less embarrassed than I. He rubbed his bare arms unconsciously, probably sweeping for bugs.

In the end we agreed to go together to retrieve the ball; it was a matter of just a couple of yards, and the only spiders we had ever actually seen in the basement up to this point had been daddy long legs (even these freaked Kevin out, but I was personally able to handle those at least). We scrambled quickly up the dirt hill, ducking our heads to avoid hitting the overhead beams. The ball was close to the top, in an area saturated with shadow despite the mounted lights. I got my hands around the ball before Kevin did, and was looking to see if I’d break anything by throwing it back down to the concrete when I noticed something.

“What’s that on the wall?” I asked, stepping to the side to reduce the amount of shadow I myself was casting on the area in question. “Did your sister do this?”

“I don’t think so,” Kevin replied, now also looking at the chalky purple outline of a door on the concrete wall. It was just a drawing of a rectangle with a smiley face for a doorknob on the left-hand side, but what it represented was clear. I felt a wave of nausea pass through me, then subside.

“I don’t like it,” I said, without then knowing why, and took a step away. Kevin seemed to feel otherwise, as he instead stepped forward and tapped with his closed fist on the wall. A knock on the door. The lights in the basement went out—I mean completely black, so black that I didn’t even register light from the small windows on the other side—and I felt that nauseous wave again, followed by a tingling in the palms of my hands. Just as I noticed that I was holding my breath, the lights came back on, and I gasped in the earthy scent of soil and old wood.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked, dropping an h-bomb because the situation seemed to call for it. Kevin was facing me straight on, his arms by his sides, a subtle slackness to his face that I didn’t recognize in him.

“It let us in,” Kevin replied simply.

“Uh, OK . . .” I said. “I didn’t move, though . . .”

“And it let us out, too.” Kevin said with a sigh, as if this explained it. Kevin and I both noticed, at the same time, a shiny black spider crawling on Kevin’s hand. Kevin calmly raised his arm to his face and blew the spider off in my direction. Then he smiled.

“Time for you to go home, I think” he said.

That was the last time I chose to go to Kevin’s house, and I didn’t invite him to my place either. We went to the same school and lived in the same neighborhood, so there was no natural reason for us to drift apart, but I just didn’t have any desire to spend time with him after that day in the basement. It was nothing I could pinpoint, but looking back as an adult I would say our friend chemistry was gone after that day, and it also weirded me out that he had basically launched a black widow at me. At the time, the spider incident was what really stood out to me about basement day anyway; I wasn’t thinking about the door or the blackness.

The following September—on Monday the 10th, actually—a girl at our middle school, Sara, went missing. Kevin and I had math with her for the final period of the day, and even though I didn’t really talk to Kevin any more, I did notice that he left class about three minutes early that day because I thought it was random that he couldn’t just stay for the whole thing when class was almost over anyway. When the police talked to the students who had seen or interacted with Sara at all before she disappeared, I explained to them that Sara walked out of the classroom before I did, and that she wasn’t in the hall by the time I had donned my backpack and walked out of the classroom myself. She never turned up, and the dominating rumors were either that she had run away with an older boyfriend or that she had gotten mixed up in some kind of custody thing her parents were going through. I don’t know exactly what happened to her, but whenever I thought of her disappearance, for some reason I thought of Kevin.

The September after that—September 10, 2013, according to an online newspaper article I bookmarked and look at every year around the same time—the assistant coach of Kevin’s cross-country team also went missing. He left the coaches’ office in his little silver Hyundai in the late afternoon, and no one (almost no one) knows where he went next. If Kevin and I had still been friends, and if basement day hadn’t happened, I might have jokingly asked him whether he liked to make people disappear (too soon, I know). But although I didn’t want to admit it, and although reality had a way of obscuring itself in the weeks and months that followed, I didn’t really have to ask Kevin that to know the answer.

Kevin and I went to different high schools, so he and I no longer had any organic reason to run into each other. Our parents weren’t close, so there was no overlap there, and I ended up spending most of my evenings either being whisked to and from extracurriculars or holed up in my room cramming homework with one half of my brain and texting friends and girls I was talking to with the other. I don’t know where Kevin went to college, or if he even did. I had originally wanted to go out of state for college, but when it came time to apply, I found myself only applying to places within a two-hour radius of home, and even though I did move out, I still opted to live and study nearby. I guess I just didn’t feel right straying too far from the nest.

This year, September really snuck up on me. Usually my thoughts start returning to Kevin as the tenth day of the month approaches, but this year basement day fell on a weekend, and I was camping with my girlfriend, Petra, in Chabot Regional Park, at a campsite about thirty minutes’ drive from my old neighborhood. We’d started the weekend off with hot dogs, s’mores, a few beers, and even some songs around the campfire, with Petra laughing while she made up words to the parts of “Margaritaville” she didn’t know. That was Friday the 9th.

I didn’t even realize it was the 10th, and what that meant, until Petra and I were in the car on CA-13, heading away from our still erected campsite. Imagine you’re on an old wooden roller coaster, the kind where you climb and climb, higher and higher to where the summit meets the sky, knowing there’s nothing you can do but wait for the inevitable, terrifying free-fall. That’s how I felt in that car, with Petra beside me; that’s how I now know I’ve felt every September 10 for the past eleven years. I don’t know what words my lips formed to get Petra to walk quietly with me along the side of Kevin’s house to his backyard, or if I had to do anything other than lead her there; she had no reason not to trust me. With sick recognition and remembrance, I met Kevin at the backyard entrance to his basement, a plain wooden door flanked by empty, stacked pots and long-rusted gardening tools, where he took Petra’s hand and led her inside.

It’s January now, but I wrote most of this down back in September, thinking, praying that writing it out might help keep me from forgetting next time. Oh god, there will be a next time. Although one part of me has been certain I could never let the memory of what happened this September fade, another, stronger part of me is just aching to forget. Needs to forget. I’m sharing this now, because more and more I do crave the unconscious release of not remembering, and at least this way you all can know, and remember, what happened, even if I don’t for a little while. See you next September, I guess.