Now Is Not the Time to Panic(12)

So we made a hundred more. We now had one hundred and twenty copies of this weird thing. It felt like alchemy, like all those brooms in Fantasia, like the world was finally big enough for the things that we cared about, that we’d make it ourselves.

When we were done making copies, we covered up the Xerox machine again, put the junk on top of it so no one would know what we’d been doing. We gathered up our stuff and went back into the house. Zeke counted out sixty for him and sixty for me, and we put them inside our backpacks. Pretty soon my mom would be home, my brothers. And they would have no idea what we’d done. They’d think that maybe we had sex, those idiots, those dumbos. They wouldn’t know what we’d brought into this world.

“What about the original?” I asked, holding it up.

“You keep it,” he said, maybe the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me in my life. I had hoped for this, did not want it to be out of my possession.

“Yeah,” he went on. “You have the copier, right? So you keep the original. But be careful. Don’t lose it. Don’t let anyone find it. Ever. For the rest of your life, you have to keep it, okay?”

“I will,” I said, as serious as I’d ever been about anything.

“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers,” he told me.

“We are fugitives,” I said, smiling, “and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

And then we just stood in my living room, not sure what to do next. In our heads, we were both saying the words, over and over, until we had them memorized. We sat there, the words rolling on a loop, again and again, until they didn’t mean anything, again and again, until they meant something, again and again, until they meant everything.

Okay, yes, we were going insane, maybe. We’d kissed and our prudish brains couldn’t handle it, so we invented some mantra that would unlock the mysteries of the universe. We’d created meaning where there was none, but, I don’t know, isn’t that art? Or at least I think it’s the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them. But I didn’t have any theories then. I just had those words, those little kids in their beds and those giant hands reaching out for them. Meaning would have to come later.

MY MOM SHOWED UP WITH FOUR LARGE PIZZAS FROM TWINS, A rare treat, and I could see that she was trying to impress Zeke. I didn’t want to tell her that Zeke was from Memphis, a real city, and pizza wouldn’t impress him. But, honestly, Zeke looked pretty goddamned psyched to eat pizza.

“How’s the art coming along?” she asked as she breezed into the kitchen.

“Great!” we both shouted, way too loud. I’m sure my mom thought we’d been tentatively exploring each other’s bodies, which made me want to gag, but she just nodded. It was a weird thing. Before the divorce, my mom had been kind of strict, the triplets constantly wrecking shit as she sternly tried to wrangle them. She had no patience for people who might complicate her life or create more work for her, was always rolling her eyes at how stupid everyone else was. She made checklists that no one else ever checked. She frowned a lot. I was slightly afraid of her, even though I knew that she loved me. And though I knew the divorce had messed her up, it had also seemed to relax her, like the bad thing had finally happened and she didn’t have to keep waiting for it. She chilled out. The triplets, if they burned down the Dairy Queen, well, that was someone else’s problem. If I invited some strange boy into our house and made out with him, who was she to intervene? We were eating pizza on a weekday. She was the coolest mom in Coalfield.

One by one, like a Xerox had spit them out, the triplets trudged into the house, each of them reeking of weed and french fry grease. We told them that we had pizza, and they just grunted and disappeared into the room they all shared. The smell in that room, the air. I cannot describe it.

Mom put the pizzas in the oven to keep them warm and Zeke and I started setting the table. “What happened to your hand?” she asked me.

“What now?” I asked, dropping a fork onto the table, so much noise.

“And your hand?” she asked Zeke, pointing at his tiny, laughable wound.

“Hmm,” Zeke said, like she’d asked him a philosophical question.

“Did you guys do a blood oath or something?” my mom asked, like she’d heard about this from Phil Donahue.

“No!” I said, too loud. “God, Mom, we didn’t do any kind of blood oath.”

“It’s unsanitary,” my mom offered very gently.

“I sliced my finger cutting up some apples for a healthy snack,” I finally told her. Zeke nodded, though he looked a little pained, like he wished he’d thought of that.

“And this,” Zeke said, holding up his finger for my mom to inspect, “was, like, a previous accident. I came here today wearing this Band-Aid.”

“Oh,” my mom said, “okay, then.” She was smiling like, what did it really matter? She’d already seen us making out. She knew something was going on. “Boys!” she shouted to my brothers, which made Zeke flinch. And they rambled into the room. I don’t think they had realized that Zeke was in the house yet. It wasn’t until we were all seated, eating our pizza, and my mom asked Zeke a question that my brothers all looked up in wonder at this strange name, this strange boy in our house. Then they went back to wolfing down pizza.