Now Is Not the Time to Panic(43)

“Okay,” I said. I kind of wanted to hug him. I thought for a split second about telling him that I made the poster, but I knew I wouldn’t. But the fact that I considered it made me realize that he could marry my mom and I’d be happy about it.

MY MOM MADE ME GO ON LONG WALKS THROUGH THE NEIGHBORHOOD, to clear my head after so long in the house, and I would wave to Mr. Avery and he would wave back. And every time we made it back to our front door, my mom would hug me and say, “You’re going to be okay, sweetie.”

I never heard a word from Zeke. I knew there were so many reasons that he wouldn’t contact me. He was terrified of the poster and what might happen if anyone found out. But I knew, more than that, he was ashamed that he’d hurt me, had done something awful. If he didn’t check on me or apologize for what he’d done, he could pretend it hadn’t happened.

In my head, I kept thinking about how he had pushed me away when I’d needed him, had pushed me down the freaking stairs, and maybe it was my own blindness, but I didn’t believe it was on purpose. I know that I was making excuses for him, trying to ignore all the ways that his rage had pushed his life into bad places. I was protecting him because I guess I thought he needed it. And if I protected the person who hurt me, who had broken me, then I was stronger than he was and I was stronger than anyone who might try to hurt us more. And maybe that would bring him back.

I’d made the decision that I would forgive him, and I wouldn’t apologize for that. And I’m not apologizing now. But after he left, I just wanted him to talk to me, to reach out, and I really believed it would go back to the way it was. But I couldn’t be the one to call for him. It had to be him, I thought. And he wasn’t going to do it.

It killed me. And even though I was getting better, I felt like I was dying. Coalfield felt empty. It felt lonelier than it had before the summer began, and it made me hate him a little because of it.

THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE TO DO, SO I WROTE THE NOVEL, finished it, and I made sure that my character, the evil genius, got away with it, that no one ever discovered what she’d done, what she was still doing, what she would never stop doing. She was invincible. She was a fugitive, goddammit, and the law was so skinny with hunger for her. I gave it to my mom, maybe to show her that I was getting better, or maybe because I had no one else who could acknowledge what I’d done. She loved it. “This is what you were doing all summer?” she asked, and I nodded, yes, of course, this and only this, and here is the proof of my last few months. She showed it to Hobart, who also loved it, and it made me feel, for the first time, that maybe it was dumb to be embarrassed about weird things if you were really good at them. Or not good. If they made you happy.

Of course, I kept putting up the poster. For the first one after the accident, I folded it up into a little bird, and I walked by myself in the morning heat to put the poster right in Zeke’s grandmother’s mailbox. After I shut the lid, I looked in the window, and I could see her on her sofa, watching TV, all alone. I left before she could see me, but I hoped that she’d find it, call Zeke’s mother, and she and Zeke would drive right back to Coalfield. But nothing happened, or nothing happened that made any difference to me. Maybe I terrified the absolute shit out of Zeke’s grandmother. I have no idea. Nothing reached me.

Sometimes, when I was alone, I’d go into the garage and make copies of the poster, using the original one. I had been the one who kept it. It was mine, the least that Zeke could do after he made me nearly die. I had the real one, the first one, and all of the power that was inside of it. Our blood, those stars in the sky. I’d make five copies at a time, just enough to make me feel like it was still mine.

My arm was in a cast when school started, but I didn’t ask anyone to sign it. No one asked, either; it’s not like I spent hours each day refusing the long line of well-wishers, armed with Sharpies, who wanted to leave a mark on me. In some ways, it made me more invisible, because people saw the cast, steered clear, and weren’t even sure who the arm belonged to. I slid folded posters through the slits of random lockers. A few kids who wore their T-shirts of my poster to school, the bootleg ones they bought from Action Graphix, had to go back home and change and they were kind of legendary in those first few weeks of school.

One girl, Jenny Gudger, who I honestly had not noticed, either, wore the shirt three times and was suspended for a week. When she came back, I started sitting with her at lunch, and we’d sometimes talk about the poster. She’d been at camp most of the summer, so I liked telling her a version of what happened, pretending I was a bystander, an observer, and it was good practice, to know about the panic but not tell everything. And maybe we would have become friends, real friends, but before Christmas break, she got pregnant and her parents sent her to Atlanta to live with her aunt. I started skipping lunch and hanging out in the library instead, working on applications for college, planning my future. That was my plan, to imagine the future.

For the most part, the panic had subsided. It was like the epicenter of the disaster, where we were recovering, but the ripples of it, the seismic activity, were still reverberating farther and farther out into the world. But, honestly, no one in the pre-internet (or pre-internet-as-I-know-it-now) era could really get any consensus on who was responsible, and without deeper research, the origin was no longer important. It was just a thing that existed in the world now, and there was nothing that would change that.