Now Is Not the Time to Panic(13)

“So,” my mom asked Zeke. “What brings you to Coalfield?”

“Well,” Zeke began, looking at me as if we’d rehearsed an answer earlier today, “we’re here just, like, visiting my grandmother. My mom grew up in Coalfield.”

“Oh, really?” my mom replied, getting somewhere. “What’s her name?”

“Cydney,” Zeke replied. “Cydney Hudson when she lived in Coalfield.”

“Oh!” my mom shouted, her eyes so big. “I know Cydney! She was a few years behind me in school. She was, what’s the word, like some kind of kid genius.”

“A prodigy?” Zeke offered.

“Exactly. A musical prodigy.”

“That’s right,” Zeke said. “Or, I mean, that’s what my mom tells me.” He turned to me and just said, “Violin.”

“She got this fancy scholarship to Juilliard, I remember,” my mom continued. “I haven’t seen her since.”

“That’s her,” Zeke replied.

“Is she famous?” my mom asked him, seeming a little starstruck. “I mean, in classical music circles?”

“No,” Zeke said. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh,” my mom said, looking so disappointed. “It was such a big deal when she got that scholarship. I remember the paper wrote a big article about it. And she was a prodigy. I haven’t thought of her a lot, but when I did, I figured she was in New York, playing concerts for, like, the prime minister of Japan or something.”

“Well, no,” Zeke said, taking his mother’s artistic failures very well, I have to say. “My mom said everyone at Juilliard was a prodigy. She got a job at the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and then she met my dad and they got married and, I guess, I mean, you know, she had me.”

“Well . . . that’s great,” my mom said. “Tell her that Carrie Neal says hello.”

“Are you guys boyfriend and girlfriend?” Andrew interrupted, pointing the tip of his slice of pizza at Zeke in a way that only my brothers could make look threatening.

“No!” I interjected, reaching my hand out ineffectually toward Zeke, like we’d stopped short in the car and I was protecting him.

“No?” my mom asked, looking a little amused. “Is that right?”

“Well,” Zeke said, looking down at his empty plate, “I mean, it’s complicated, right?”

I wanted him to shut up, not to give my brothers anything that they could use against me, but he kept going. “I’m just here for the summer, so that’s . . . you know, a temporary . . . kind of a nonpermanent situation.”

“Nonpermanent does not sound encouraging,” my mother offered.

“We’re friends,” I finally said. “We’re FRIENDS.”

“Good friends,” Zeke offered, and I nodded to him like, Yeah, duh, but also like, Shut up, my brothers will try to ruin me.

“Well, I for one think it’s great that Frankie has found such a good friend for the summer.”

“Frankie has no friends,” Brian told Zeke, like maybe he was stupid and didn’t understand how weird I was.

“Well,” Zeke said, now reaching across the table for another slice of pizza, “I feel, like, honored, then,” and I blushed so hard that the triplets all made the same satisfied expression, their job done, before they went back to destroying the rest of the pizza.

After we’d washed the dishes, I told my mom that Zeke and I were going to get some ice cream at the Dairy Queen and then I’d take Zeke home. She shook Zeke’s hand and said he seemed like a fine young man, and Zeke seemed stricken but did his best to smile. Both of us reached for our backpacks, the copies of our art hidden inside them, and we were gone.

And I can’t quite explain it, the weirdness of this feeling, when we stepped out of the house for the first time in many, many hours. We were outside, in the open air, and the copies were with us. Everything felt so much bigger, more important. It was, honestly, a little hard to breathe.

“Are you ready to do this?” Zeke asked, so tenderly, a kind boy.

“I guess so,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if I was.

“Where should we go?” he asked me, and I was like, what? “Where should we hang these copies?” he continued. “I’m not from here, so I don’t know the best place for, like, optimal exposure.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess, like, maybe the square? It’s got a movie theater and ice cream shop. The courthouse is in the center of it if we wanted to be, like, I don’t know, political about it.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Let’s go to the square.”

We got in my car, and we didn’t say another word for the twelve minutes that it took to get to the town square. There were a fair number of teenagers milling around the entrance to the movie theater, and it suddenly occurred to me how embarrassing it would be for somebody I knew to see me hang up this picture.

“Maybe,” I offered, “over there, where that insurance company is?” It was dark, closed for the night, a sign for a Boy Scouts raffle hanging in the window.

“Yeah,” Zeke replied. “That’s cool.”

So we stepped out of my car, our backpacks slung over our shoulders, and we normally, so normally it doesn’t even need to be mentioned, walked over to the entrance of the insurance company.