It’s an awful adventure coming back to this place — the place where you grew up, the place you’ve been away from for scarcely three months, but now seems a strange, warped mirror of your adolescent world. It’s a haze of faceless voices, voiceless faces, classic rock and squealing serpentine belts.

I approached it a week ago with complacence, driving down I-35, hanging a right at Kansas City to I-70. Neil Young was in the passenger seat, with his guitar and harmonica, singing, “Every time I think about back home, it’s cool and breezy.”

Neil failed to mention that “cool” meant 25 degrees, and “breezy” put the wind chill into single digits. So, in the driveway I threw him out and invited Biggie Smalls to take his place. B.I.G. understands Lawrence, Kan., and the mental toll of reentering it after 12 weeks in a different universe.

He chilled in the truck as I went inside, threw down a basket of dirty laundry in the living room, said hi to mom and called up the gang. Fifteen minutes later, we were on the streets.

It was Thanksgiving break, and the world, or at least this town, was ours. Wasn’t it? We smiled and laid down tracks over a beat, “’cause all we wanna do is party and bullshit and party and bullshit.”

But rolling around the old stomping grounds this way is dangerous. Running by the school you used to own, driving past the golf course where you kissed her for the first time, working a few shifts at the hardware store owned by your second family and drinking nights away with the kids you’ve known since the days of Dennis Rodman jerseys and 007 videogames — it’s tempting to think it’s all the same.

But even that first night we noticed something amiss. “Things done changed,” Biggie said.

The week crept by with late nights, naps, F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories and cold air that made the truck squeal for two blocks. My co-pilot switched every few trips — Neil Young, Nas, Lauryn Hill, Big Boi, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd — but over it all, I kept hearing one melody I just couldn’t place.

The meat of the adventure began Wednesday night, when I met up with two fellow expatriates — one who goes to Texas A&M, the other to Georgia Tech — to go on a cross-town beer expedition before meeting up with friends to watch a movie.

We rode in a 1993 Plymouth Voyager, sans three hubcaps, a stereo, and, as we learned on a steep hill by the University of Kansas campus, engine coolant. We found ourselves in a parking lot in the KU student ghetto, relating stories of Ames, Atlanta and College Station, the steam from the engine competing with the steam of our breath in the chilled air.

The town we were in — the town we grew up in — was never a topic of discussion.

The journey culminated Thursday, beginning early with that same melody in my head, sharing space with a mild hangover. A shower killed the hangover, and on a hunch I searched for the melody on a Bob Dylan album, played loud to drown out the squealing belt as I drove to the house of my first best friend.

At 11:30 a.m., amid the bustle of a kitchen on Thanksgiving morning, among parents, grandparents and a video camera-wielding younger brother, we mixed Bloody Marys. We did this in the same kitchen that not three years earlier we would sneak into at 11:30 at night, silently lifting a bottle of rum from the cabinet above the fridge and inaccurately mixing it with Dr. Pepper in plastic cups.

It was Thanksgiving, and we watched football, drank, said our thanks and ate. From there, the day devolved, the hours of bacchanal extracting a heavy toll. By late evening the world spun, and only images — a pyramid of beer cans, a room full of high school friends whose residences now traversed time zones, a fat man screaming in Macho Man Randy Savage’s voice, “It’s sooo easy!” — faded in and out.

Driving home alone, it was Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends,” the theme from “The Wonder Years.” Friday, while assembling a tricycle at the hardware store, the words to that evasive melody stuck in my head finally dawned on me: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

It’s a strange place now, the town I grew up in. Things have changed, but which things? I’m still 5’9″, 145, with running shoes and a unibrow. This town is still 35 miles west of Kansas City, pop. 90,000, with two high schools and no shopping mall. But it’s different.

Rolling through a tollbooth yesterday morning, Tom Petty sat next to me, humming and strumming, “It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going, when I was ahead, I had no way of knowing.”