Now Is Not the Time to Panic(35)

“We should probably head back to Coalfield,” I said, and he looked disappointed for a second, but then he nodded. He touched my hand and said, “Thanks for doing this with me.”

I nodded, embarrassed. I kissed him and he kissed me back. “You can come visit me all the time when I move back,” he offered. “You know how to get here now.” I hated that he was talking about the time after he left me, when the summer was over. The summer would end, sure, but why couldn’t we pretend that it wouldn’t? Why did everyone want things to move forward, and why did I want to be frozen in a block of ice?

“Well, I don’t know where you live,” I told him.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked.

“Yeah . . . I think so,” I said.

“It’s not that far. Come on,” he said, and we walked back to the car. We drove to an area called Central Gardens, which was very rich and the houses were all old. Some of them looked like castles, lots of stone, and I instantly realized that, even though I had known that Zeke was rich, I hadn’t quite contextualized what that might truly look like. I was suddenly scared to see his house, preferring to think of him on his grandmother’s sofa, a kind of experience that I could at least understand.

“Here it is,” he said, and I parked in front of a house that was, thank god, a little more modest than the ones around it. It was more like a cottage, but it still looked so expensive, this pristine, two-story house with stone pillars holding up the roof of the porch. The front door was a kind of wood that seemed like it was a hundred years old. The yard was expertly maintained, not a single bike or rickety lawn chair on the grass. There was a swing on the porch.

“This is where you lived?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“I live here,” he said, and his eyes were glazed over.

“It’s really nice,” I offered, so embarrassed that he had spent all that time on the bed in my room that had sheets from a garage sale.

“It doesn’t look any different,” he said, more to himself, like he’d thought that, without his mom and him there, the house would collapse in on itself like a Transformer or something to account for their absence.

“This is a really nice house, Zeke,” I said, like I wanted him so badly to say, “It is a really nice house, and I am rich. But I’d rather be with you instead,” but he just kept staring at it. It was three in the afternoon, the sun finally starting to ease up, making it a little more comfortable to breathe. My A/C wasn’t great, and the car was straining, but we just kept idling in front of his house.

“Give me a poster,” he finally said. He was closer to the backpack, but I didn’t want to make it weird, so I twisted around and retrieved one. He folded it in half and got out of the car and walked to the mailbox, putting the poster inside. He came back and sat in the car, his legs shaking a little.

“Do you want to leave?” I asked, but he said, “Give me another one.”

I did, and he said, “Come with me? Please?” and we got out of the car. I grabbed the tape, and we walked onto his porch. He held the poster against the front door, and I tore off two strips of tape, and we affixed the poster to the door of his home. We stepped back to look at it, and he said, “Can you imagine my dad’s face when he sees this?” but I didn’t even know what his dad looked like. But I nodded. “Skinny with hunger for us,” I said, and just then the door swung open and this woman was staring at us. She had a bathrobe on, baby blue, and she was not that much older than us.

“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled, but then she instantly stiffened when she saw Zeke. “Oh god,” she said.

I said, “We’re . . . collecting money for orphans. We’re orphans,” but she was already running out of the entryway.

“Zeke?” I said.

“We better go,” he said, but he hesitated, thinking about taking the poster back, and then a man appeared, wearing only boxers and a T-shirt. “Son?” he said. The woman was peering out from another room.

“Dad?” Zeke said.

“What are you doing here?” his dad said. “Why didn’t you call?” His eyes got a little wild, and he said, “Is your mother here? Did she send you?”

“It’s just me,” Zeke said. “And . . . this is my friend.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Why are you here?” his father said, now getting angry because he was no longer terrified that his wife was about to stab him.

“We went to the zoo,” I offered.

“Who is this?” his father asked.

“I told you,” Zeke said, starting to stutter.

“What is this?” his father asked, nothing but questions, this guy. Nothing about missing his son, no apologies, no explanation for why he was at home with some woman young enough to be his daughter in the middle of the fucking afternoon on a weekday. He grabbed the poster and examined it.

“This is . . . this is what they’ve been talking about on the news. This is everywhere.”

“It’s like . . . graffiti,” Zeke offered.

His father’s eyes widened and he looked at Zeke. He looked down at the poster and then back at his son. “You drew this,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He had moved on to declarative sentences. “You did this.”