Now Is Not the Time to Panic(26)

I had no idea who Basquiat was. I’d seen some Keith Haring artwork in a magazine somewhere, but I didn’t think what we’d made looked anything like that, weirdo big-headed dancing figures. It made me a little angry. It was a small thing, but I wanted to know if the professor thought the poster was any good.

In the final paragraph, the reporter quoted Teddie Cowan, the county sheriff, saying, “Now is not the time to panic, but, also, there seem to be dark forces at play, and I will do everything in my power as an upholder of justice to root them out and send them as far from Coalfield as is humanly possible.”

And though I was alone in the house, my family all at work, I could see Zeke in my mind, a true vision of him. He was standing on my front porch, holding a copy of this newspaper in his hand, waiting for me to tell him that everything was okay, that we were not in trouble. And I would tell him that, the minute I opened the door and saw him, his weird mouth, his big eyes. I’d immediately tell him that this was a good thing. We’d made something good. I’d tell him that we were invincible, that nothing bad would ever happen to either one of us. And I’d tell him that the only thing that we could do, because there really was no other choice, was to put up more of the posters. The only way to keep ourselves safe, I would tell him, was to make more of them.





Nine


A HEAT WAVE HAD ROLLED IN, AND I WAS SWEATING CONSTANTLY, from, well, obviously, the actual heat, but also from the wild feeling that things were quickly moving beyond my control. I was trying to figure out how to keep everything from falling apart, to hold on to this thing that I’d made, but that was getting harder and harder. And so I was perpetually red-faced, itchy, my shirts soaked with sweat. My whole mouth felt electric. My stomach hurt all the time, and to deal with it, I just ate more Pop-Tarts and Cheetos Puffs, and that made it worse. I’d written fifty pages of the novel in a week; I could not stop. I needed a story that I could control, that wouldn’t keep going when I stopped writing it.

When I say the posters were everywhere, I mean that we were not the only people in possession of the poster. And I don’t just mean Coalfield, although the town was now covered in the thing that Zeke and I had made, the posters like a swarm of cicadas, sticking to everything.

We were eating dinner one night, watching channel 4, and the host, who had come back to Tennessee after serving as the sidekick for, I shit you not, Pat Sajak’s disaster of a talk show, was talking about the poster. And my mom said, “Oh my god, I cannot believe this. Hobart is going to be . . . just the worst.”

The host mentioned Coalfield, and there was some footage of our town, the square, our poster, but then there were videos of the streets of Nashville, a row of the posters flapping in the wind. And I noticed, even from that distance, that it wasn’t really our poster. First, it was on bright orange paper, which I thought made it look spooky in a silly way, like Halloween. But, also, the hands were different, less detailed. The whole poster lacked detail. It looked, honestly, like shit. Some reporter on the street was now holding one of the posters up for the camera, which focused on it, and the second half of the phrase read, “we are the New Fugitives,” and I thought, What the hell is that?

“That’s not right,” I said out loud, and my mom looked at me.

“What’s not right?” she asked.

“It’s just . . . I mean, the line is different from the ones in Coalfield.”

“Oh,” she said, squinting at the TV. “It looks right to me. Gold seekers? Shantytown?”

“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers—”

“No, I know, Frankie,” she said, but I just kept going, “—we are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

“Okay,” my mom said.

“Skinny with hunger,” Andrew said, already on his third bowl of Hamburger Helper. “Skinny with hunger. I like that. Skinny with hunger.”

“I do, too,” I said, not even looking over at him, “but that said new fugitives, and . . . well, that’s not what the poster says.”

“Well, that’s what that poster says,” Charlie offered.

“Yeah . . . ,” I replied, not sure how to explain. Or, no, I knew how to explain, but I also knew that I couldn’t really do it.

AND IT WAS STRANGE, BUT AS I STARTED TO GET MAD, ZEKE seemed lighter, more calm. To his mind, the fact that there was at least one other person in Coalfield putting up the posters made it easier for us to deny our involvement. Even if we got caught, we were just stupid kids trying to imitate what we’d seen. We were so impressionable. So stupid. So desperate. We just wanted to be cool because we were so uncool, and you’re not going to call our parents are you, Officer?

Needless to say, I did not care for this at all. I would not let that happen. But if it meant that Zeke’s teeth weren’t constantly chattering while we sat next to each other, if it meant that he stopped thinking that he’d actually seen a black van drive by, then I guessed it was okay. It let me keep doing what I needed to do. And it made him a little more excited about what we’d made together, that other people liked it.

Zeke and I sat in my car, the windows down, still baking, our sweat crystallizing, and I watched as he used all his different pencils, and he drew those hands, over and over. I loved watching the quick little movements, that singular moment when you realized what the lines were amounting to. And how, from that moment on, no matter what you did, no matter how you turned your head, you couldn’t unsee it. For some reason, it was a magic trick that I never got tired of. As soon as he was finished, I’d ask him to do it again, and he’d simply flip to the next page in his sketchbook. It wasn’t automatic, it wasn’t rote. Each time, he thought about it, considered what he was doing, and I would sit and wait, trying to pinpoint the second that my eyes could see what I knew was coming. It was July. The summer wasn’t going to last forever. Or maybe it would. I had no idea.