“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.”
“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.”