Now Is Not the Time to Panic(16)

“What are they?” I asked, so innocent. “Can I see one?”

“Frankie—” Zeke said.

Jake came over and showed us one. “It’s kind of cool,” he said. “I think it’s, like, some metal band.”

“Wow,” I replied. “Pretty cool, definitely.”

“I better get back to it,” he finally said, after we all stared at the poster for a few seconds. “You want to keep one?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and I handed the poster to Zeke, who just let it fall into his lap, stricken.

“Bye,” Jake said, and he went back to ripping down the posters. I felt like, soon, we’d have to come right back to this spot and cover that wall again. If we didn’t, I thought I’d burst into flames.

“He said his boss called the police,” Zeke finally said as we drove away, in search of another one of our posters.

“Yeah,” I replied, “but he said the cops didn’t care.”

Zeke thought about this, looked out the window. “They have no idea,” he finally said.

“They’re skinny with hunger for us,” I said, and we both laughed, this weird, wobbly laugh. And we kept driving.

There was an abandoned house where I knew some kids went to smoke pot or drink at night, a place solitary enough that nobody really complained and the cops let it slide. I’d never been, but my brothers were there all the time with their girlfriends, with all those popular, effortless kids who did whatever they wanted. I didn’t hate them. I didn’t want to be them. But I had always been curious about how you could live a life where you never worried about repercussions, never considered that the thing you did rippled out into the world. That part seemed pretty great. So I thought, if Zeke and I couldn’t be there at night, music blaring from a boom box, flashlights clicking on and off, cans of warm beer and crushed-up trucker speed passed around, then we’d put up our posters, force them to look at us.

The house seemed like it might cave in at any moment, broken glass everywhere. Who in the world would have sex in some abandoned house with this much broken glass on the ground? How did my brothers talk girls into it? And then there was the furniture: a moldy couch, a few recliners that looked like unspeakable things had been done to them, so many jagged slits in the fake leather. And I realized that, given the choice, it would be preferable to have sex on broken glass.

“This looks like a place where human sacrifices happen,” Zeke said, looking worried.

“It’s just teenager stuff,” I said, trying to be cool. “I’m surprised it hasn’t burned down because someone left a cigarette on the couch.”

The walls in the living room, where most of the damage had occurred, were covered in Sharpie graffiti, the absolute dumbest shit, lots of dicks. Someone had tried to spray-paint the bird-flipping mascot from the Ugly Kid Joe album, but it looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid. I recognized the name of a girl I had been friends with in grade school. Someone had called her a bitch, and even though she had ditched me for more popular girls in junior high, I didn’t like seeing her name for anybody to read. I grabbed a rock and scratched the wall over and over until you couldn’t really read it anymore.

“Is this the edge?” Zeke asked me.

“I think that, maybe, everywhere we are is the edge,” I said, mumbling at the end because I wasn’t sure of myself. Honestly, I didn’t want to think too much about it. I didn’t want it to fall apart under scrutiny. I wanted it to just be there, the edge, the shantytown, the gold seekers. I wanted so badly to make it real.

“Let’s cover the whole room,” he said, reaching into his backpack.

“Yes, please,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

And so we did.

It took longer than we thought, and every time rats scampered along the walls of the house, every creak as the foundation shifted, we startled and then looked to each other for reassurance. It took nearly two hundred copies of the poster, but we covered most of the room, and then we stood there, right in the center, and we turned slowly, around and around, and then it seemed like the whole world was just us, just this thing we’d made. It looked so close to what was in my brain that it took my breath away for a second. I thought about taking a picture of the room, to record it, but I just had my mind, my memory, and so I tried to hold it in there.

I knew that, with the broken windows, the holes in the ceiling, rain and damp and rot would get to the posters soon enough. I knew the next group of teenagers might tear it all down. I knew that it didn’t really mean anything. But I wanted it to be there forever, so that when I was older, when I’d become the person I was going to be, I could come back and it would still be there. So that Zeke, if he ever went back to Memphis, and then went to some university in the Northeast, and then got married and had kids and started to forget about this summer, could come back to this house and it would all be here, and he would remember. And maybe, if we came back at the same time, all those years later, we’d remember each other.

Zeke found an empty but unbroken rum bottle and he rolled up one of our remaining posters and placed it inside the bottle, screwing the cap back on. He went over to the stairs, to a hole in the wall, and he dropped the bottle into it, where it clattered and settled inside the house, hidden away.

He looked at me, and I thought about the broken glass on the ground, how dirty my fingernails were, the cut on my finger that was probably infected now. I thought that if my first time with someone was in this house, I’d regret it. But I was so young. How did I know what I would and would not regret? Maybe I thought that I’d regret everything, that the key to my life was to hide inside my house, never talking to anyone, writing my stories in my notebook, and someday I’d believe that had been the right decision, that I hadn’t ruined myself too quickly. But I wish I’d just done it, right then, ruined everything.