Now Is Not the Time to Panic(9)

“Mom, it’s just—” I started, but just gave up. I knew she wasn’t really upset. She wasn’t that kind of mom.

“My mom is . . . she’s kind of preoccupied right now,” Zeke said. “I don’t think she’ll mind.”

“Then it’s settled,” my mom said. “I just came home to pick up something, and then I have to get back to work. I guess . . . I guess I’ll see you when I come back.”

“Nice to meet you,” Zeke said. He finally put the library card back in his wallet and Velcroed it shut.

And then she was gone. And it was just me and Zeke.

“Maybe we should make art,” he said, just like that, like art was cookies or microwave popcorn. Like if anything was going to keep us from having sex, from doing something we’d regret, it would be art.

“Okay,” I said, still flushed, still tasting celery, “let’s make art.”

We knelt on the floor in my musty garage, baking, making copies of anything that seemed interesting. I’d found a photo of my mom and dad and I used scissors to make a jagged separation between them, cutting the photo in half. I pasted them to the edges of a piece of copy paper, and then Zeke drew all these little designs in the gap between them, snakes wrapped around knives, lightning bolts, a fist punching out of a grave. Then we put it on the copy machine and looked at the black-and-white image it spat out. It made me sad. I wondered if that was kind of the purpose of art, maybe, to make you see things that you knew but couldn’t say out loud.

“This isn’t bad,” Zeke said. “This is pretty cool.”

“I kind of want to throw it away,” I said. “I think I’d feel awful if my mom ever saw this.”

“I think maybe art is supposed to make your family uncomfortable,” he offered.

“Well, I guess I’m not quite an artist yet,” I said, “because I don’t want her to see it.” I crumpled up the original and the copy and tossed them into the garbage can.

We sat on the cement floor, not sure what to do. I wanted to make out again, but I felt weird asking. Zeke was thinking about something, and so I waited to hear what he’d figured out.

“The problem,” he said, “is that this is all so private. We’re just making this stuff and because we’re sitting in your garage, it doesn’t feel like art. It’s like something you’d put in your journal and no one would ever see it except you.”

“Well, there’s no museum or art gallery in town,” I said. “So we couldn’t show it off even if we wanted to.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “In Memphis, there are graffiti artists and they just make any space into a gallery. They, like, climb up onto a building and put up a tag and then disappear before anyone sees them. And it’s pretty cool. Sometimes a tag stays up for a long time, if the city can’t be bothered to paint over it or blast it off.”

“I don’t know how to do graffiti,” I said.

“Well, I don’t either, but we can do something like that, right? We’ve got the copier, right? We can make the tag beforehand and then post it up later. It’ll be faster, and it will be harder for anyone to catch us.”

“Why would anyone want to catch us?” I asked. “Is it illegal to put up posters?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a legal gray area. I mean, it’s not permanent, so maybe not. But, honestly, it would be better if it was a secret.”

“So . . . wait . . . now you don’t want anyone to know that we made the art?”

“I guess not. It’s just you and me. No one else will ever know. We’ll put up all this art, maybe hide it all over town, and people will be like, Who made this cool shit, and we’ll be like, Wow, damn, I don’t know. Someone pretty cool, I bet, and we’ll walk away and kind of whistle and keep our hands in our pockets.”

“Well,” I finally said, trying to understand. “I guess so.”

“So now we need a tag,” he said.

“What should it be?” I asked.

“Something messed up. Something really weird. Like, a mystery or a riddle that no one can solve. And it’ll drive the whole town crazy.”

“How do we do that?” I asked.

“You’re a writer, right?” he said, smiling, getting jittery, excited. “You write something really strange, and then I’ll illustrate around it. And we’ll make, like, twenty copies. And hang them up in town.”

“What do I write?” I asked, still not getting it.

“Anything!” he said. “Something really weird. Like, it doesn’t mean anything but it also, like, kind of means something.”

“That sounds hard,” I admitted.

“No,” he said, and now he was really amped up. His eyes were twinkling like some kind of cartoon, so black that light was sparkling off his pupils. “Don’t even think about it. Just write something.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. I felt like I couldn’t match his enthusiasm and I was a failure because of it. “I can’t just write something.”

“Yes, you can,” he said. “You’re an amazing writer. Just—here—” He grabbed a piece of paper and put it in front of me. “Just write whatever comes to you.”