Now Is Not the Time to Panic(53)

“I did not put it behind me, though,” I admitted, and then I started crying. “I think about it every day. I say it every day, three or four times a day.”

“Well, you’re still alive. You made it. It’s okay,” my mom said, and now she was crying.

“Did Hobart know?” I asked. It suddenly seemed important.

“He had no clue, sweetie,” she said. “You think Hobart, god rest his beautiful soul, would have figured it out? My god, no. Just me.”

“And it’s okay?” I asked.

“What’s okay?” she replied.

“If I tell people now. Well, I mean this lady is going to tell people, and it’s going to come out. I want to know that it’s okay with you. You’re still here in Coalfield. I worry people might hate you.”

“Hate me?” she said. “It was twenty years ago, and I was a single mom raising four insane children. No, it’s fine. I get some leeway on this.”

“People got killed, though,” I said.

“You didn’t kill them, sweetie. You made a thing. And people went absolutely crazy, and they did strange things and some people died. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you had maybe written it in a diary and that was that, but it’s okay. It was beautiful, and then somebody else, the rest of the world, made it not beautiful.”

“You’ll be okay?” I asked.

“I’m the grandmother who wears Air Jordans, sweetie. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. Will you be okay?”

“Who knows?” I answered. “Aaron is so confused. Junie won’t understand and won’t care, but maybe later she’ll wonder. I don’t . . . I mean, I don’t really know anyone else. I have friends, and they’ll be super polite about it and a little weirded out, but I just really want you and Aaron and Junie, the only people I love, honestly, to not be hurt because I made this thing.”

“Again, when you were sixteen, sweetie. It’s fine. It’s okay.” She looked at me for a few seconds. “I honestly thought we’d never talk about this. I figured we would both die without ever telling anyone.”

“That was the plan!” I said, and then I remembered. “Oh, you know who else knew? Mr. Avery.”

“Randolph Avery? What in the world? How?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Actually, do you think it would be weird if I talked to his sister?”

“Yes, sweetie. Really, deeply, truly weird. Not good. She is very, very, very old.”

“It’s just . . . I need to look for something in that house. It’s mine. You know, from that summer? It’s my backpack. He kept it for me after he found out about the posters. I want to see if it’s still there.”

“That’s just the worst idea I’ve ever heard, Frankie. My god, are you okay?”

“I think I’m gonna go over there,” I said. “I don’t think I can stop myself. I need to find it.”

“Frankie? I am begging you not to go over there. This is insane. Plus, she has a live-in nurse, who is there all the time. Okay, now, remember how I said that you weren’t responsible for the deaths of all those people? And, okay, Frankie, it’s probably—if you work out to encompass the whole world—it’s probably a lot of people who died. And that is not on you! But, if you kill Ms. Avery because you’re trying to get some backpack from twenty years ago, then that will be your fault.”

“Okay, I understa—”

“And what does it matter? You said the lady already knows. She’s gonna write the article, right? What does it matter if you get that backpack?”

“I don’t know . . . ,” I said, but I kind of knew, really very strongly knew. I wanted more proof. If I was going to take credit for it, I wanted more evidence. It was a strange thing, to have hidden it for so long, and now I was starting to get paranoid that no one would really believe me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But really I was thinking that maybe I could get Mazzy to visit with Ms. Avery, and maybe she could get the backpack. I had to calm myself down. I’d so quickly gone from terror over being discovered to intense anxiety that it would all make me look like an idiot, a fake. I decided I wanted some of those Little Debbie snack cakes, and my mom brought over two boxes, Star Crunch and Oatmeal Creme Pies, and I ate two of each very quickly, and for some reason this made my mom smile.

“You always loved junk,” she said, “Pop-Tarts and Zingers and Little Debbie.”

“Well, the house was full of it,” I said.

“And now you barely let Junie have any,” she said.

“If Junie ate a Zinger,” I said, “she would shoot into the air and explode like a firework. She would destroy Bowling Green like she was Godzilla.”

“Sweetie?” she asked me. The snack cakes had calmed me down, forced me to breathe, to chew, and it felt like I was sixteen again, sitting in our living room. When I looked at her, she said, “What about Zeke?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have to find him. I have to tell him.”

I’d been putting this off for so long, didn’t know what to say, how much to say. As soon as I got to college, got my first email account, the first time I’d really been able to surf the internet on my own, I looked for him. But I didn’t know his name. I knew his middle name was Zeke, but it was something he was trying out for the summer, or at least that’s what he had told me. I had no idea if he would still be using that name or, if he was trying to erase all evidence of that summer in Coalfield, if he was going by his first name, which I had never asked for and he had never told me. I sometimes wondered if I’d even misremembered his last name, if it was indeed Brown. And the internet wasn’t as all-knowing back then, so typing in Zeke Brown and Memphis was not going to get you very far.