Now Is Not the Time to Panic(42)

“Oh, sweetie, just hearing you say it makes me feel a little sick,” she told me. “And Zeke seems like a sweet boy, but, god, Frankie, don’t ever kill yourself over a boy. Or anything! There’s nothing worth killing yourself over. Your dad left me and started a whole new family. But I wouldn’t kill myself over that.”

“Mom,” I said, suddenly so tired, “I don’t want to talk about Dad right now.”

“Of course not, sweetie,” she said. She started to choke up, her eyes welling with tears. “I just . . . you are the most beautiful and wonderful and strangest person I have ever met. You are the most amazing person in the world. And you just have to live long enough to make the rest of the world understand that, okay? You have to stay alive.”

“I’ll try, Mom,” I said, and I started crying again.

“In ten years,” she said, “when you’re out of Coalfield and you’re successful and happy, you won’t even remember this summer, sweetie.”

“I think I will,” I told her.

“Well, you’ll remember it,” she said, “but it won’t be as important as it seems right now.”

THINGS MOVED QUICKLY AFTER THAT. AFTER CASEY RATCHET HAD been killed and the uproar that ensued, the police force, with the help of the surrounding counties, would not allow anyone into Coalfield for two weeks. If you did not reside within the town of Coalfield, you could not enter the city limits except for deliveries of necessary items like food and gasoline. The governor of Tennessee declared a state of emergency. By this point there were documented sightings of the poster in every single state in the country, and in at least thirty other countries, and Coalfield was still papered over with them. On TV, ABC News ran a story about the posters. They reported that a man in Denver, Colorado, who had been suffering from terminal cancer had killed himself and left behind a note that consisted only of the lines that I had written earlier that summer. Someone in New York City was wheatpasting huge versions of the poster in Times Square and it had become a game for hipsters to take pictures of them before they were torn down. A woman in Hillsborough, North Carolina, said the lines came from an unpublished novel by her late husband, who had written hundreds of erotic novels under the pen name Dick Paine.

They interviewed our mayor, who said he was still convinced that it was the manifestation of the devil, and that he was hopeful that the strangers in the original black van would be found and brought to justice. Four years later, we’d find out that he had a second family in Knoxville, and that family would move to Coalfield and live with his first family in a weird harmony, and he would be the mayor for years and years after that, until he died of a massive heart attack while sitting in a dunking booth at the county fair.

I CAME HOME AND MY ARM HEALED. MY BROTHERS WERE TENTATIVE around me, kind even. I think they were a little shocked that I had survived something worse than anything they’d lived through. They had not realized that I was also invincible, I guess, and it made them wary of my power, of what I could do to them.

Hobart, who hobbled around on crutches because of his broken leg, both of us recovering, spent a fair amount of time with me while my mom was at work. We would drink huge glasses of sweet tea and take turns reading out loud to each other from Patricia Highsmith novels. I kind of grew to truly like him, how tender and sensitive he was once you got past the bluster of him.

He had quit the job with the newspaper and was unemployed, had basically moved in with us. I would read the classifieds section of the newspaper with him and circle jobs that looked interesting. One of them was to be a delivery driver for Schwan’s, and Hobart applied and they sent back a catalog of their food. We’d spend a lot of time looking at ugly pictures of chicken Kiev and ice cream bars. We started checking for interesting sales, and we’d drive a few towns over to buy a bunch of VHS tapes of rare movies, ones I’d never even heard of but Hobart said were brilliant. He said he might open a video store in Coalfield, one with hard-to-find cult classics, and later on that is what he ended up doing, and even though it didn’t make much money, he kind of became famous among collectors and film buffs, all those weird people on internet forums. He had a knack for finding stuff. He was generally clueless, but he was good at this.

One afternoon, after I’d read a section of This Sweet Sickness, we were making peanut butter sandwiches, and Hobart said, “I hated being a teenager.”

“I don’t hate it,” I said, feeling a little affronted.

“Well, I did,” he told me, looking so sad. “Not because I thought something better was coming. I just never felt right inside my own body.”

“I feel that sometimes,” I admitted.

“And then I got older, and, guess what? I still never felt right inside my body. I don’t think I ever will. I kind of flamed out everywhere I went, always got a little less than what I thought I’d get. But I guess that’s okay. I think maybe it’s necessary to feel like you’re not quite settled, or maybe for some people it’s necessary.”

“Even if you do feel settled,” I suggested, “something could happen to ruin it.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he said, laughing. “I guess I just mean that sometimes your mom says that things will be better for you in the future. And I think they will, Frankie. I think you’re really smart and I think you’ll do fine. But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”