Now Is Not the Time to Panic(20)

“What do you mean, he’s going to write about it?” I asked. “What is there to say?”

“Well, you know, it’s kind of a mystery, all these posters spread out across the town. He figures it’s a bunch of teenagers just messing around, but he said it’s pretty sophisticated. He says he’s pretty sure that the quote is by a French poet named Rimbaud. He thinks the art is from some underground comic.”

“Rimbaud?” I said. “Leonardo DiCaprio played him in that movie.”

“Well, there you go,” my mom said, satisfied. “Teenagers love Leo, so they probably started reading a bunch of Rimbaud.”

“That’s not what teenagers do, Mom,” Charlie said.

“Well, it’s all just a theory right now,” my mom said, already moving on, so happy that her boys weren’t responsible.

I looked over at the triplets, all three of them mouthing the words on the poster, their hands hovering just above the drawings. “What are all these dots?” Andrew asked.

“Stars,” I said. “They look like stars.”





Mazzy Brower


MAZZY CALLED ME AGAIN, THIS TIME WHILE I WAS ALONE IN THE house, folding laundry, always folding laundry, my daughter going through four pairs of socks a day, stripping them off and tossing them behind the sofa, under the bed, and I was forever washing them, drying them, rolling them into balls, placing them in her dresser, until she would do it all over again. The phone rang, and, like an idiot, I picked up.

“Frankie?” she said, getting my name right.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thank you.”

“Just wait. I want to talk for just a few seconds.”

“I don’t want to talk, though,” I said.

“But you answered the phone, right? Do you think maybe you wanted me to call you again? Do you think maybe it might be good to talk to someone about it?”

“First, I did not want you to call again. Second, it would not be good to talk to someone about it. Third . . .”

“Yes?”

“I actually don’t have a third thing. I am just very afraid of you and this story.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this, though,” she continued. “I know parts of the story, but you know all of it. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I want to get a sense of how this came to be. I want to know how you did it. Why you did it. And what you think about it now.”

“I don’t know how to answer any of that,” I told her.

“I think you do,” she said. “I think maybe this is something you think about a lot.”

“Well . . . yes. That’s true. But I still don’t know how I’d answer any of those questions.”

“That’s okay. I’d just love to meet, to talk, one-on-one. Off the record at first, even. Whatever you want.”

I could feel the world getting smaller and smaller, and that scared me because I’d already made myself pretty small to ensure none of these memories got out of me. To have the larger world shrinking down made it worse, to know that people were searching for you.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Frankie,” she tried, just as I was hanging up, “I think you need to talk about this. People died. It’s . . . it’s a big deal.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And the memories sped up even more. And that made me angry, that they were moving too fast for me to even recognize those moments. I sat on the sofa. The room smelled fresh, like fabric softener, and I closed my eyes and I willed the memories to slow down. I made them go at the exact speed as it happened then, like I was stepping right back into it, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it get away from me.





Eight


THE NEXT DAY, I PICKED UP ZEKE AND WE DROVE AROUND TOWN. Zeke was playing a cassette he’d brought from Memphis, a mix by someone named DJ Squeeky, this slowed-down voice saying, over and over, “Burn, baby, burn, baby, burn, baby, burn.” It felt hypnotic, the way the whole world seemed wavy and shimmery, the windows down, the heat oppressive, and then we’d see another one of our posters, and everything would speed up for a second. My backpack was filled with more copies, but Zeke was worried, afraid that we’d get caught. We put a few in mailboxes of houses that were obviously empty, marking the spots on the map, but mostly we just drove.

I’d never felt particularly connected to Coalfield; I mean, I felt anchored to it, like the years I’d spent here would make it harder for me to live anywhere else, but I never felt shaped by it. Everyone thinks the South is, like, Flannery O’Connor. They think it’s haunted. And maybe it is, deep down, in the soil, but I never saw it that way. We had a McDonald’s. I don’t know how else to say it. There was no bookstore, okay, fine. The museums we had were of the Old Jail Museum or Military Vehicle Museum or Railroad Museum variety. We had a Wal-Mart. I wore normal clothes. And as I drove Zeke around my town, I pointed out things like “I fell off that merry-go-round and knocked out a baby tooth,” or “That shoe store is eighty years old and if you buy a pair of shoes, you can put a wooden coin in this machine and a mechanical chicken will poop out a plastic egg that has candy in it,” or “I stole a heavy metal magazine at that Bi-Lo because I wanted a poster of Lita Ford for my room.” I felt like maybe I kind of loved the place. Or, no, I just wanted Zeke to love it. And if he didn’t, if the old-timey pharmacy where you could get cherry limeades didn’t impress him, I’d tape one of our posters under the counter and then how could he not feel something like love for it?