“And then I go into my room and draw,” Zeke continued. “I was working on this design. I was kind of thinking that maybe we should make another poster.”
“Another one?” I said, stiffening.
“Yeah, like keep it going but also change things up a little. Like, can you think of something else you want to say on the poster?”
“No,” I replied, feeling a little sad. “I already said it.”
“I thought I could draw, like, a big wolf standing on a pile of bones. I sketched it out. Here, let me show you.”
He got out his notebook and it was exactly like he explained, a big wolf on a pile of bones, but it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel the same.
“I just . . . I don’t want to do another one,” I finally said, after he pointed to the wolf, like I hadn’t seen it, like I didn’t realize that the figure on top of the bones was a big fucking wolf.
“You don’t ever want to make anything else?” he said, and I could feel him slipping away from me a little, and I needed to pull him back.
“I want to make stuff forever, for as long as I live. But I want our poster to be the only one we make. It’s special. It’s the first one we made. It’s perfect, right? It’s perfect. It has our blood on it.”
“We could bleed on this,” he said, pointing to the wolf again.
“Do you know what I mean, Zeke?” I asked, and the whole world depended on what he said. I got one of the copies of our poster, and I held it out for him. “This is what the world gets. If we do more, lots of different designs, new words, we’ll lose it. It just goes away. It’s like . . . I don’t know . . . ordinary. Do you know what I mean?”
He looked at the poster, and I watched as his lips formed the words that I had written. He smiled. And then he nodded and looked up at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. Okay. Just this. Only this.”
“Only this,” I said, and we walked into the garage, over to the copier, to make more.
Seven
OVER THE NEXT FOUR DAYS, HERE ARE A FEW OF THE PLACES IN Coalfield where we put the posters: on the bulletin board of the public library; folded up in forty-six random books in the stacks of the library; on the inside door of the stalls in the men’s and women’s bathrooms of the Golden Gallon gas station; on the back of every box of Cookie Crisp cereal in the Kroger; all over the gazebo in Marcia Crooks Park; the back wall of the movie theater （again）; in the mailboxes of 270 residences in town; on the dumpster behind the Hardee’s; in the pocket of someone’s jeans in an unlocked locker at the public pool; across the entire front window of the hair salon that had gone out of business a few months earlier; in the comment box of the Wendy’s; in a shoebox for a pair of size 6 sneakers at Payless; taped to the flagpole in front of Coalfield High School; in an envelope without a return address, mailed to the Coalfield Ledger; on the car windshield of a pastor who tried to get sex ed abolished from the high school curriculum; on the bulletin board of Spinners Tapes and CDs, which sold glass pipes and incense and was glowing inside from black lights; under a bunch of Dilly Bars in the freezer of the Dairy Queen; on the gravestone of the last Confederate soldier in Coalfield.
On the map, there were so many stars, it made me dizzy to look at it.
There were so many stars that, now, other people couldn’t help but notice. They couldn’t help but see the image, the words, and wonder, “What is this?”
I was upstairs in my room, writing my novel. It was weird, but having made the poster, having put it up everywhere, I felt like something had been unlocked in my brain. I couldn’t stop writing the novel about the evil Nancy Drew. I was now at the point where her sister, Tess, the dumb girl detective, stumbles onto a piece of evidence that their father, the police chief, had previously ignored, a piece of evidence that Evie had accidentally left behind and that could incriminate her. And now Evie was trying to convince her sister that the evidence didn’t mean anything, was worthless, that it would waste everyone’s time. Evie was reaching out for the evidence, waiting for Tess to give it up, Evie’s hand just hovering there, inches from Tess’s own hand, so close that they could shock each other with just the slightest charge. And what was weird, as I wrote, trying to get it all down, was that I really didn’t know if Tess would give it to her.
And then my brothers clomped into the house, and it broke my concentration. I realized how hungry I was, and sometimes the triplets brought home leftover burgers, cold fries, so I went downstairs to see if they had anything, even though I knew it would make me sick. Zeke was out grocery shopping with his grandmother, and he had promised to see if the posters were still stuck to the boxes of Cookie Crisp.