Now Is Not the Time to Panic(28)

Zeke drew so much that he was already on his fifth notebook of the summer. The novel, somehow, had opened up. All I had to figure out was if my character would get away with it. I mean, of course she would get away with it, but I needed to figure out how spectacular the final crime would be. Zeke and I had only really known each other for a month and a half, but that initial little burst of physicality had burned off, and it made us more comfortable with each other. It wasn’t weird to spend hours with just our knees touching. We never did anything else, like I never put my hand in his pants. He never touched my boob, and I think I would have died if he had. It was like we got the kissing out of the way, decided that was probably as good as it got before things got gross and weird and sad, and we just talked, nonstop, and enjoyed the fact that the other person was listening.

Zeke said that his mom had been talking to a lawyer in Memphis, a divorce lawyer, and she had mailed his mom a big envelope full of papers. Zeke’s mom hadn’t opened the envelope yet, but it was on the dresser in her room.

“So she’s gonna leave him?” I asked Zeke.

He shrugged. “Maybe? I mean, if she signs the papers, I guess so.”

“I’m sorry, and I know it sucks, but I’m kind of jealous of your mom. I wish my mom had been able to do that, to shove a big stack of papers right in my dad’s face and be like hit the bricks, motherfucker. I think she’d be happier. We’d all be happier. He still would have left. He’d still have that other kid. But it would have been so sweet.”

“I really don’t want her to do it,” Zeke admitted.

“I know. I mean, I want her to do it, but I know why you wouldn’t.”

“He hasn’t called once,” he said. “Or, no, I mean, I think he’s calling, but he hasn’t asked to talk to me.”

“What an idiot. But, like, if your mom leaves him, will you guys stay here?”

“I don’t know. My mom hasn’t said anything about it. She doesn’t say anything. She just plays music and stares at the wall.”

“If you stayed, you’d be in school with me. Nothing would have to end, you know?”

“Yeah,” he replied, but I could tell that it made him sad to think about it. I mean, who would want to go to school at Coalfield High?

“I don’t really have friends,” I finally said.

“I know,” he replied. “You’ve told me. I mean, I have some friends.”

We were quiet for a minute, and then he added, “Even if I go back to Memphis, we’ll still be friends, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hope so.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, LYLE TAWWATER DIED. HE FELL OFF THE water tower, where he had been climbing the ladder in order to put up posters at the top. Hobart told us about it, because he had been there when the police responded to a call from someone who found Lyle while they were walking their dog that morning. He said Lyle was folded up, broken, and there were about a dozen copies of the poster scattered around him. Hobart was as sad as I’d ever seen him. “That poor kid,” he finally said.

“It’s awful,” my mom said, softening to him, holding his hand.

“If I hadn’t written that stupid article,” he said, but my mom shushed him. I could feel all these strange emotions swirling around inside of me, no way of expressing them in public, and so I went to my room. In the bottom of my sock drawer, I retrieved the poster that Lyle had made, the one my brother had taken. I loved it, truly. Lyle was dead. I was sixteen, you know? Everything about me was in constant flux, nothing had settled, and I felt so strange inside my body. But I was capable of guilt. Like Hobart, I wondered if I’d killed Lyle. I mean, I felt certain that I had, if you sat down and mapped it out. And every time I thought about it, that I was responsible for someone’s death, I immediately pushed the thought away, tried to hide it under everything else that was inside of me.

I didn’t really believe in a god, but I believed in penance, in reconciliation. And I knew what I needed to do was to stop hanging up my poster. And maybe that was why it hurt when I pushed Lyle out of my mind, because I wasn’t going to stop, and it pretty much solidified the fact that I was a bad person. I was a bad person and I wasn’t even trying to fight it.

I held the poster up to the light. Maybe my penance would be to make a hundred copies of it, to keep posting it, for Lyle, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t my poster. It didn’t have any power over me.

I had to fold Lyle and his sister into our own poster, to put up twice as many. I wondered how many people could fit inside of our poster. Our poster. Me and Zeke. If I died, I really hoped Zeke would keep making them. If he died, I knew for a fact that I would. That’s maybe what made me so sad about Lyle. His sister was in that hospital bed, far away from him; he had been alone when it happened. It was better, I decided, to have someone else.

IT ONLY GOT WORSE. THAT WEIRD DAD MILITIA, THE POSTER Posse, were constantly drunk, standing over the faint little fire that was burning on the sidewalk, and one of the men, Mr. Brewer, who worked in the sporting goods section of Wal-Mart, saw a black blur move quickly across the street, and he raised his shotgun and it went off, what they had taught us in the mandatory hunter safety course in eighth grade was an accidental discharge. He ended up shooting Mr. Henley, the auto shop teacher at the vocational school, right in the face. And though he didn’t die, Mr. Henley spent the rest of the summer in the hospital and lost his right eye. Worse, two of the other men, one a deacon at the Presbyterian church, fired several rounds in the direction of where Mr. Brewer had shouted that he saw the dark figure. One of the bullets went through a window of the house across the street and grazed an elderly woman’s neck. If the police hadn’t already been on the scene, watching over the men to make sure they didn’t burn down the whole block, she would have bled to death.