Now Is Not the Time to Panic(10)

“About what?” I asked, almost crying now.

“About Coalfield. About this town. About your life. About your stupid fucking dad. About whatever you want.”

I picked up a pencil and took a deep breath, like I was trying to suck up every word in the English language. And I started tapping the paper, making these tiny little dots. Tap-tap-tap-tap and I just kept tapping. And I tried. I thought about the sun, how bright it was outside, how hot the world was getting, how pretty soon the world would overheat and we’d all die. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I thought about my half sister, Frances, and how I could take all my baby teeth, which I’d kept in a plastic baggie, and drive to my dad’s house and give them to her, like a gift. I thought about Zeke’s weird, crooked little mouth. I thought about the book I was writing, the girl criminal mastermind. Her name was Evie Fastabend. She was always calling her hideout, this little abandoned shack in the woods, the edge. It was her code name for when she wanted to do crimes. I need to go to the edge, she’d announce, and then she’d ride her bike to the woods, to this rickety shed, where she had a gun wrapped up in an old T-shirt. The edge, I thought. The edge. The edge. The edge. The edge.

And then I wrote. The edge is a shantytown—and I took another deep breath, realized I hadn’t been breathing that whole time. My vision got all fuzzy. Zeke touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I was already writing more—filled with gold seekers.

Zeke looked over my shoulder at the paper. “That’s . . . okay, that’s kind of cool,” he said. “I like that.”

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, I wrote. There was this little voice in my head, and it was telling me what to write down. And I knew that this little voice, this tiny, insistent voice, was not God and it wasn’t some muse and it wasn’t anyone in the world except for me. This voice was my voice. This voice was my voice and no one else’s voice, and I could hear it so clearly. And it wasn’t finished.

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

And then the voice was gone. It went way, way back inside me. And I didn’t know if it would ever come back. And I finally read what was on the paper. “We are fugitives,” I said to Zeke, smiling. I was starting to laugh, a little hiccup of a laugh. “We are fugitives?” I asked him.

“And the law is skinny with hunger for us,” he said, smiling. It didn’t make a bit of sense. It meant nothing. But Zeke understood. That was all that mattered to me.

It was the greatest thing that I’d ever written. I knew it right then. And I’d never write anything that good again. It sounded so perfect to my ears.

Zeke and I crouched down on the hard floor of the garage, said the phrase again, and then again, and then again, until it became a code. It became a code for everything that we’d ever want. It became a code that, if we met up again in fifty years, we could say this exact phrase, and we’d know. We’d know who we were.

“Can I kiss you?” Zeke asked, and I wished that he had not asked. But I also liked that he’d asked, had not taken advantage of me in that moment.

“You can kiss me,” I said, and so we kissed, and I felt the tiniest little tip of his tongue touch my teeth and it made me shiver. And the whole time we kissed, I kept thinking Wearefugitiveswearefugitiveswearefugitives, and I knew that the law, whatever the fuck that was, was skinny with hunger for us.





Five


MY MOM WOULD BE HOME AT FIVE. THE TRIPLETS, NO IDEA, though I could count on them to be as scarce as possible while they huffed glue or had sex with girls in abandoned factories. It felt like a bomb was set to go off, and we had to defuse it without a manual. Or maybe we were building a bomb. Who knows. It felt like something was at stake, that’s what I’m trying to say. I wanted to keep kissing Zeke, but the thrill of making something was competing. We had the words. Our code. The edge. Fugitives. The law. But we had to make it look nice.

Zeke had all these cool, expensive art pens and pencils, Pentel and Micron and some kind of Japanese brush pen, but I grabbed a black Crayola marker and got to work. It was a lot of words to fit on a piece of paper, so I had to make the letters small enough to leave space for Zeke’s artwork, but I wanted the writing to be bold enough that you could clearly read it. Over my shoulder, Zeke whispered the next letter, F . . . u . . . g . . . i, and I liked the feel of his breath on my neck, but I kept my hand steady.

When I was done, Zeke snatched the paper away before I could even reread the phrase, and he got to work with all those pens. He had something finished in his head, I knew, because his hand moved so deliberately, even though he couldn’t keep the tremors of excitement from threatening to mess it up. He started by drawing these power lines, stretching across the page like tiny scars, and once he had a sense of scale, he drew these beautiful little shacks, a whole row of them, the roofs falling in. He drew bits of detritus, an old, burned-out car, a pack of wild dogs. And then, out in the open air, he drew four beds, their headboards like Gothic cathedrals, multiple children twisted up in the sheets. Finally, he pushed away from the paper, almost like he’d unplugged himself from the image, and just stared at it. So I stared, too, at the way the drawings touched up against my words, the way our two brains became this one thing. And then, careful to work around the words I’d written, he leaned over the paper and drew two giant, disembodied hands, the fingers withered and jagged, almost glowing, the way he made the shape of them echo across the page. It looked like the hands were reaching for the children in the beds, but they were suspended, never quite able to touch them.