Now Is Not the Time to Panic(24)

“Okay,” I said.

And that hour in the room, the two of us almost touching, the thing we made beginning to fully assemble itself, to spread out into the world, was the happiest I have maybe ever been in my entire life.

THE FRONT-PAGE HEADLINE OF THE NEXT DAY’S EDITION OF THE Coalfield Ledger read EVIL COMES TO COALFIELD. My mom yelled at Hobart, and he said that he’d originally had a question mark at the end, but the editor changed it. “If it’s interrogative, you know, it’s really not that irresponsible,” he said. When I rolled my eyes, he said, “And, by the way, sometimes it’s the role of the journalist to be provocative.”

“At the Coalfield Ledger?” my mom shouted.

The front page also had two images. The first was a color photograph of the abandoned house where Billy and Brooke had been “held captive,” and it really did look like the cops had accidentally unspooled a dozen rolls of police tape and, instead of rolling it all back up, had just decided to hang it on anything in the vicinity of the possible crime scene. The second image was a reproduction of our poster, which honestly looked kind of fuzzy and unthreatening on the crappy newsprint. It had been reduced in size so you couldn’t really make out the phrase, but I still found myself silently mouthing along to it as I stared.

Hobart hadn’t even talked to Billy and Brooke because their parents said they needed privacy in order to recover from the shock of the experience. He had made a three-minute phone call to a retired professor of criminal justice at ETSU, who said that the poster was interesting because hands were not a typical symbol in satanic graffiti, although the children certainly complicated things. He said he’d need to spend more time with the words on the poster, look at the mathematical possibilities for converting the letters into numbers that might connect with 666. He said it also might be lyrics from a heavy metal song, which was typical for graffiti of this nature. He said his last real work had been on the prevalence of the occult in unsolved murder cases in the eighties, so he felt certain he might find some linkages to this poster.

“A reporter from Nashville is coming today to follow up on the story,” Hobart said.

“About a poster?” my mom asked, dumbfounded.

“About the possible implications of the poster,” Hobart clarified.

“This is stuff that people disproved a decade ago, Hobart,” my mom said. “Tipper Gore? Hobart, do you want to be like Tipper freaking Gore?”

“That’s different and you know it,” he told her. “Dungeons and Dragons and, I don’t know, Judas Priest, of course that’s bullshit. But there’s no source for this, okay? It’s a mystery.”

It suddenly dawned on me that it was eight thirty in the morning and Hobart was standing in our living room in the clothes he had worn the day before. That was more troubling to me than getting caught, that my mom had somehow drawn Hobart closer just as he was messing up the one thing that I cared about.

ZEKE SHOWED UP AT MY HOUSE THAT AFTERNOON WITH HIS grandmother’s copy of the newspaper.

“I can’t tell you how much I hate your mom’s boyfriend,” he said, and I instantly clarified that my mom was proudly single, an independent woman, and Hobart was just an acquaintance.

“Well, he’s going to ruin our lives,” Zeke said, and it didn’t sound all that histrionic. I mean, our lives were built around hanging up the poster, putting it everywhere in Coalfield, and Hobart had temporarily derailed that. But I knew, even then, that Zeke was talking about something else. He meant when his real life started again. He was worried that he’d have a juvenile record and he might not get into art school or something like that. His dad might disown him. Adults would be disappointed. There was this tiny little separation between us. We were bound together; we had made something. But now that it was real, that other people noticed, I knew that I had to reach out and hold on to Zeke or it would disappear.

I grabbed my bag, filled with posters, and we got into my car. And we just drove, up and down streets with rows of sad, plain houses with maybe one or two that were nice. You could imagine the town going one way or the other so easily, that the crappy houses would get torn down and new ones put up, or those fancy houses would fall apart, would fade, and then all the houses would be empty. I told Zeke to get out the map from the glove compartment, and he did, reluctantly. He was suddenly treating everything as evidence now. He didn’t say it, but I knew he was thinking about fingerprints, which was laughable to me. We were ghosts. No one could see us. Why did it matter if they found little swirls on a poster? Who cared about fingerprints? Focus on the shantytowns, you morons. Look at that.

And we ticked off spots we’d hit. Some were still there, which was one of the most satisfying feelings you can imagine, but others were gone. I wanted to replace them, but Zeke said it was too soon, that someone might be watching. He had one of the posters in his lap, and he started folding it and refolding it. I thought he was doing origami, that soon he’d be holding a little swan, but he really was just reducing the poster to the smallest possible square that he could, as if, by the force of his anxiety, he could fold the poster so many times that it simply disappeared, ceased to exist. I stopped the car at a car wash and made sure that no one was around.

“Do you feel bad about the poster?” I asked. “Why are you so upset?”

“It’s not the poster. Like, well, you know, I love the poster. I think it’s cool. It’s just, I’m really scared because nobody else seems to understand it.”