Now Is Not the Time to Panic(32)

Zeke’s mom, on the other hand, had barricaded herself in her childhood room, leaving Zeke to watch The Price Is Right with his grandmother, who wildly overestimated the price of everything, in the mornings, and then, after he’d hung out with me all day, he’d watch taped episodes of her favorite show, American Gladiators, with her, both of them uncomfortably marveling at the physiques of the gladiators. “Turbo looks a little like your grandfather as a young man,” she once told him. “Of course, no one wore clothes like the gladiators in those days.”

There was this unspoken rule in our relationship that I did not ever go over to his grandmother’s house. I think it was that he was slightly embarrassed of his mom’s catatonic grief and his grandmother’s oblivious passivity, and he much preferred the jumbled, messy nature of my own family, where you could be weird and no one was going to make you feel bad about it, or at least they wouldn’t hold on to it for long. He was always kind of wide-eyed around my brothers and my mom, like he didn’t know families could be like this, and I think he liked that close proximity. Like, if an angry mob came for us, better to be here, where my brothers would at least seriously fuck up some people before they dragged us out of the house. Plus, his mom and grandmother never left the house, and my mom and brothers were almost never around during the day, so it just made more sense to hide in my room and talk about secret fantasies we had for the future.

In my room, both of us propped up in bed, on top of the covers, the fan blowing air that was just slightly cooler than the air outside right into our faces, it felt like we could ignore what was happening in Coalfield just long enough to not feel crazy. I was writing a little story to go along with this drawing that Zeke had done of a black van that had this sludgy purple liquid spilling out of the open side door. The story was about a guy, a bizarro Timothy McVeigh, who crammed vans full of dark magic, incantations, and left them in front of TV stations to unsettle the airwaves. And Zeke was drawing the cover to the novel that I was trying to finish, hoping that the professional font and the image of my evil Nancy Drew would spur me to the end of the story.

So much of my happiness of that summer was the smell of Zeke, kind of sweaty and a little like mothballs, and the sound of his pencils and pens scraping so softly against the paper. There were times when he didn’t even feel real, exactly, like his body wasn’t tangible to me, but there were these smells and sounds that reassured me that he was near, and I believed in them so much more than in his skin and bones, wrapped up in extra-large T-shirts and ragged, stone-washed jeans. I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.

And yes, that is lovely, and yes, I was a very repressed and strange girl who had never really connected with another human being, so I’m probably being overly poetic, because I also distinctly remember moments when I thought, I’m going to die in Coalfield. The summer will never end, and I will never leave, and no matter how many posters we hang up, I’ll never get out of here. And there were times when I thought, Zeke, goddammit, get me the fuck out of here, but I was so scared that when he left, he would forget me. All he knew was me in Coalfield. So we had to leave, just for a second, I thought. There were so few spots on our map of Coalfield that weren’t blasted with stars, the strangest constellations, and now that other people were doing it, too, maybe if we drove just a few hours in any direction, we’d find a spot that was pristine, that did not know about the edge, was so unprepared for it that we’d transform that new place before it had time to resist.

“We could go to Memphis,” he offered. “I could show you around.”

“Just you and me?” I asked. That felt like the most relationshippy thing in our brief time together, though I am now remembering that we did a weird blood pact and, you know, we were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture. But that was all so strange, even the kissing, so outside of, like, corsages and airbrushed T-shirts with your names on them. This felt like the most normal thing a couple could do, spend a day in the city, and it was somehow more terrifying to me than blood. “We can put up the posters all over Memphis,” I said, just to bring things back into a world that I understood.

“Yeah, that would be fun. We could go by my school and hang them up,” Zeke said, and now I could see him starting to vibrate a little with the possibilities. “We can go to the zoo! We can get a Huey Burger. Maybe we could see a Memphis Chicks game. Have you ever been to Graceland?”

“You want to put up posters in Graceland?” I asked. I thought that if there was one place in the entire world where devotees would kill you for desecrating the sanctity of a holy space, it would be the mansion where Elvis played racquetball.

“No! Well, maybe. That would be pretty cool. I just mean, we can do the posters, absolutely, but I can also just show you around and we can do some fun stuff.”

“Okay, yeah . . . I’m good with that. Rad.”

“The thing is . . . ,” he said, frowning.

“Yeah?”

“My mom would kill herself if she knew I was going to Memphis,” he finally said.

“Do you have to tell her?” I asked.