Now Is Not the Time to Panic(14)

“Should we use one of yours?” Zeke asked me. He looked really nervous, kind of sweating in the heat. The sun hadn’t even fully set. We were very exposed. But no one cared. We were invisible.

“Yeah, we can use one of mine,” I told him, and I carefully unzipped my backpack. I pulled out a sheet of paper, but another one was stuck to it and came with it, and then I awkwardly tried to get the stray piece of paper to fit back in the backpack but it wasn’t going in. Finally, I gave up, crumpled up the piece of paper, awkwardly shoved it into my pocket, and then took the clean sheet and . . . well, okay. Right at that moment I realized that we had no tape. No way to hang up our art.

“How do I hang it up?” I asked, pressing the picture against the glass like it would just stick somehow.

“Oh, shit,” Zeke whispered, his eyes huge. “Oh, fuck. We gotta abort this mission, I think.”

“Let’s go back to the car,” I said, “and figure this out.”

We both kind of duck-walked very suspiciously back to my car, and I fumbled for my keys to unlock the doors, and we dove into the front seats.

“That was not good,” he admitted.

“We need, like, tape. Nails. Pushpins. Staples. A staple gun,” I told him.

“Where can we get that stuff?” he asked.

“At the Wal-Mart?” I offered. “They have everything, pretty much.”

“Okay, let’s go there,” he said, visibly deflating.

“Should we just try again another time?” I asked.

“No,” he said, so petulant. “We have to do it tonight.”

“Okay. Then let’s go get some supplies.” Why, I wondered, was true art so hard to make? Why did it never turn out quite the way that you envisioned it? Why were Zeke and I doomed to live the life of an artist? But we’d fix it, I decided. We’d go to Wal-Mart. Nothing would stop us.

We instantly separated inside the store, and I bought the staple gun and staples, while Zeke went into another line and bought duct tape and pushpins, which we thought was what criminal masterminds would do. I felt a little giddy, looking over at Zeke, a few cashiers over, and we both smiled, so happy to be closer to our goal. We met up near the entrance, and I noticed the bulletin board that had missing-child posters and various official notices.

I reached into my pocket and produced the crumpled-up copy from earlier in the evening. Zeke look alarmed, instinctively reached out for the paper, but I pulled back. “Right now?” he asked, and I nodded.

I handed my shopping bag to Zeke and smoothed out the paper as best I could, the effect adding some character to the copy, like some old map or something. I took a pushpin from one of the missing-kid posters, a boy named Zachary who had been missing for two years, and tacked up our work in the corner of the bulletin board. We stood there for a second, staring at it, those hands, my words. It felt right. This was the thing about having more than a hundred copies of our poster: we didn’t have to worry too much about placement. If we put up enough of them, the art would do the real work.

“It looks amazing,” I said to Zeke, who nodded. He seemed pretty nervous, constantly looking around to see if anyone noticed us, even though nobody cared.

“Let’s keep doing it,” I said, and we got in the car, speeding back to the square, leaving a piece of ourselves behind, waiting to be discovered.

BY THE TIME I DROPPED OFF ZEKE AND RETURNED TO MY OWN home, we’d put up sixty-three posters, working as quickly as possible, undetected. We stapled them to telephone poles, taped them to the windows of businesses, folded them up and hid them in the aisles of the grocery store. We covered a brick wall behind the movie theater in the square, rows upon rows. We put a few in some random mailboxes on the way to Zeke’s grandmother’s house. And we still had so many. But also, in my head, we didn’t have nearly enough. We needed more. We needed to put up more of them. The whole town. I wished we had an airplane that we could fly over Coalfield, dumping out copy after copy on the unsuspecting citizens below. The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like. It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome. I imagined my wild brothers had felt this so many times that they were numb to it. But for Zeke and me, well-behaved dorks, it was amazing. And we were together. We hadn’t even made out. We were too interested in the copies. Each time we looked at each other, we were holding up another copy of our art, affixing it to the world. It felt important to us. We were important.

And when I dropped off Zeke, too afraid to come inside and meet his mom and grandmother, he kissed me softly on the cheek. “I really like you,” he told me.

“I like you, too,” I replied.

“We can keep doing this?” he asked, meaning, I assumed, everything. The posters, my house, the kissing, Pop-Tarts, skulking around every square inch of the town.

“All summer,” I said.

“Maybe even longer,” he said hopefully, which made me blush. I kissed him on the lips and then he was gone. On the drive back to my house, I left my car running at an empty four-way stop, taped one of the posters to the stop sign, and then ran back to my car, feeling so wild. I drove exactly five miles above the speed limit through residential streets. I felt like I was flying.

I WOKE UP LATER THAT NIGHT BECAUSE MY MOM WAS SHAKING me, and I startled awake. “Jesus, Mom?” I said, my voice scratchy, my head so heavy.