Now Is Not the Time to Panic(23)

“Well, I mean, I’m not scared. It’s just . . . well, it’s the first I’m hearing about this. I’m new to the area, you know? I’m just here for the summer, and so I’m not exactly, like, privy to the news in this town.”

I realized that if Zeke stayed in this room with Hobart for more than five minutes, he would produce hundreds of copies of our poster, pulling them like a magic trick from the pockets of his jean shorts, admitting everything, convincing himself that, somehow, he was the leader of this satanic-drug-sex cult. I knew that he was jumpy, had some anxiety. I had it, too, but I think I’d had a head start on unhappiness, on being disappointed by people who supposedly loved you, and so I had settled into it a little more. I did not feel guilt for the weird things inside of me anymore. I was a fugitive, and I was not ready to be caught yet.

In my room, the door closed, I looked at Zeke for any signs of instability. “Are you okay?” I asked him. He had this faraway look in his eyes, like he was running simulations of how his life was going to turn out.

“Yeah, I mean, of course,” he finally replied. “It’s just . . . well, I don’t like the fact that the police are involved.”

“Okay, you’re from Memphis, so I get it, but this is Coalfield and the cops are idiots, okay? They think three random headbangers grabbed Sunshine Billy Curtis and his girlfriend and made them do drugs.”

“Yeah, I get it. But, like, that’s worse. Them being so stupid is what’s scary because now it’s this whole thing.”

“We wanted it to be a thing, though, right?”

“Not a thing that ended up with you and me in jail,” he said. “I wanted it to be more like a thing where somebody puts the poster on a skateboard deck in a few years.”

“Well, that’s better, yeah. That is more what I’d wanted, too. But we made it, right? We made the poster. So we can still control it, I think.”

“I don’t think that’s how art works,” he said, unsure of himself, which was disconcerting because, even though Zeke had always been kind of nervous, he’d always seemed really self-assured about what he thought he knew about the world.

“Okay, well, maybe we take a day or two off. We wait and see what happens,” I said.

“A day?” he said, almost shouting.

“Or two, okay? I said a day or two.”

“And then what?” he asked.

“We keep putting up the posters,” I said, like, duh, of course that’s what we do.

“I don’t want to get arrested for a fucking poster,” Zeke said, starting to shake a little.

It stung me a little to hear him talk about the poster like that. Like, I know that I was the crazier one, the more broken one, but that summer, what I’d written, what Zeke had drawn, what we’d bled all over, it was the most important thing in the world to me. I would have gone to jail for the poster. I think I would have killed someone if they tried to keep me from putting up the poster. Because if it stopped, what was next? Zeke would leave. I’d never see him again. I’d go back to school, invisible, sad. My dad would never come back. My brothers would all move away. My mom would marry Hobart. It wasn’t really that bad, I know. It was life. But I didn’t want life right then. I wanted the summer, that poster. I wanted the edge, the shantytown, the gold seekers. I had said it. I said we are fugitives. I had meant it, even though I didn’t know what it meant. And now, maybe, we were. I wanted Zeke to understand. The hands that he had drawn, hovering over the children, never actually touched them, couldn’t reach them. How could he not see that?

I leaned into him, reached for his backpack. I got out his notebook, all those strange little drawings. “What are you—” he said, but I just shook my head. He made an ineffectual gesture toward the notebook, trying to protect it, but I carried it over to my desk. I reached into the drawer and produced what I had of my novel. I slammed it down on the bed, which was also really ineffectual, not the sound that I’d hoped for.

“This is my novel,” I said.

“I know,” he replied.

“Read it,” I said. “I’m going to let you read it.”

“Okay,” he said. “Do you want, like, suggestions, or—”

“I do not want comments or suggestions, no,” I replied. “Just read it. And I’m going to look at your drawings.”

“You’ve seen most of them already,” he said. “And you’ve told me a lot about your book.”

“We’ll do this for maybe an hour, and then we’ll decide what to do next,” I told him.

I lay down on the bed, and Zeke scooted over to me. I looked at a drawing of a landscape, but drawn in sections, like an ant farm, and in one of the underground tunnels, there was a fire burning.

“I like this,” I said. “This is new.”

“Thank you. This is a really good first line,” he said.

“Thank you.”

And we lay like that, absorbing the thing that mattered to the other person. And then I said, “Zeke? It’s okay, all right?”

“Okay, I believe you.”

After a second, Zeke added, “Please don’t say the line. Just not right now. I know it. I think about it all the time. You don’t have to tell me.”