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.
“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.