Now Is Not the Time to Panic(47)

“This is the one?”

“And that’s my blood,” I said, pointing to the stars.

“Your blood?” she said, her eyes widening. I nodded.

She looked at the poster, the first time that anyone except me had looked at this poster in twenty years. I thought it might melt other people’s faces off, blind them, turn them into statues. But the archival polyester must have been protecting other humans from disaster, I imagined.

Mazzy leaned back against the hard curve of the bench, looked up at the ceiling. And then she smiled. She smiled, all her beautiful teeth, nothing like mine, nothing like Zeke’s, and she touched my hand. “This is amazing,” she finally said.

“I’m scared,” I said. “It’s . . . it’s just very complicated.”

“You said the same thing on the phone that day. You said it was complicated. What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” I replied. “I mean . . . it’s complicated. I can’t quite explain it all.”

“Did someone else make it with you? Did you have help? Your brothers, maybe?”

“My brothers?” I said, snorting involuntarily with laughter. “Not my brothers, no way.” I thought about my brothers. The triplets had dropped out of college and then worked in kitchens for years and now co-owned a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, one that made modern twists on southern dishes, and it had appeared in tons of magazines, on the Food Network, and it kept them so busy that I almost never saw them. None of them had married, no children, just three feral boys constantly beating each other up and dating all manner of hip women with tattoos and getting drunk in between appearances on the Today show making saltine cracker toffee or Cheerwine barbecue sauce. They were really into jujitsu now, woodworking, dipping a little into doomsday prep. It was like they made a world unto themselves and they were stunned whenever they saw me, the one who was and wasn’t a part of them.

No, definitely not the triplets.

“Who, then?” she asked.

I looked around. The lunch rush was over; the dining room of the Krystal was totally empty except for us. It was the longest I’d sat in a fast-food restaurant since I was a teenager.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I want to write about this, Frankie,” she told me. “I mean, I am going to write about it. An article for the New Yorker. You can imagine that they are very interested in the story, but no one knows anything yet. Just me. And you. And . . . well, anyone else who knows. But I need you to talk to me about it. I need your help to make sense of it.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I told her. “Like, seriously, are you kidding me? Do you think I had any idea what would happen? It makes no sense.”

“I think it can,” she said. “If you let me help you.”

“I need some time to tell people. I need—fuck—I need to tell my husband. I need to tell my mom. I just . . . I need a little time to figure things out.”

“But then you’ll talk to me?” she asked. “You’ll come forward?”

“Okay,” I finally said. “Okay, yes. I did it. I’ll tell people that I did it.”

She handed me a card. “This is my email and my phone. I know you already have it, but here, if you think of anything, write it down or call me. If you go anywhere and you need me to come with you, I will come with you.”

I imagined this woman I’d just met coming with me to sit on a couch next to my mom while I said, “I made that thing that made a lot of people lose their minds and also inadvertently caused a few people we knew to die,” and my mom going, “Oh, sweetie, we’ll need to talk about that, but does your friend here want, like, something to drink? Or some sandwiches? Does she want pizza? Frankie? Frankie? Are you listening? Does your friend want pizza?”

Mazzy stared at me for a second. “Could I have your cell phone number? I’ve only ever called your home phone. It’s just so we can stay in touch.” I had a feeling that she suspected I might immediately get on a plane to some random country and she’d be left with an article that no one wanted to publish. I think she was very smart to suspect that.

I looked at her card and used my phone to send a text to her, and she nodded and then added me to her contacts. We stood up. I still had a Corn Pup left to eat, and I was about to reach for it when Mazzy asked, “Where did it come from?”

I was looking at the mini corn dog, distracted, but then tried to focus. “The poster?” I asked.

“The words, yeah, that phrase,” she said. “Where did it come from?”

“Me,” I said, not sure what else to say.

She looked at me for a few seconds, and I knew she was repeating the phrase in her head. I could hear every single syllable inside her mind, the entire utterance, because I knew what it sounded like so clearly.

“Let’s talk soon,” she said, and I agreed, and as soon as she left, I dipped the corn dog in mustard and ate it in two bites.





Fourteen


AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I GOT A SCHOLARSHIP AND ENDED UP AT a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, which is where I met Aaron. And I made friends. I felt myself expand into those open spaces, to hang out with people who had been like me in high school and now were surprised that, holy shit, they could revise themselves into someone who was a little cooler. I was an English major and sometimes I shocked my professors by having read some of the books already. They were impressed, and that made them give me a little extra attention, and that made me feel so grown-up that I decided I’d devote my four years to doing whatever they said.