When I stepped into the living room, my brothers were sitting on the sofa, leaning over the coffee table, staring at a copy of the poster. My poster.
“What’s . . . what’s that?” I asked, my voice sticking in my throat, like it hurt to ask.
“What does it look like, dum-dum?” Andrew said.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Well, neither do we,” Andrew said.
“They’re all over town,” Charlie said. “I found a bunch of them taped up to the dumpster.”
“And Jenna said her parents got one in their mailbox,” Brian said.
“It’s kind of fucked up,” Andrew said.
“It seems like something you guys would do,” I finally said.
“Yeah, I know,” Charlie replied. “But we didn’t.”
“What. Is. IT?” Brian said, clearly frustrated, like the poster was infecting his brain.
“Like, is it a band?” Charlie said. “Fugitives? That’s a stupid fucking name for a band.”
“Look at those goddamn hands!” Brian shouted.
Just then my mom came home from work. She was holding one of the posters. “Boys,” she said, the poster flapping around in her hand like an unruly bird, “did you do this?”
“NO!” all three of my brothers shouted in unison.
“Oh, thank god,” my mom replied, sagging against the door for a second. “Hobart is writing an article about it.”
Hobart was a guy who worked at the local newspaper. My mom pretended that he was only a friend, but we all knew that they’d been dating in secret, off and on for the last four months. My mom would feel overwhelmed or worry they were getting too close, say they couldn’t see each other, and then they’d end up at Gilly’s Bar and Grill, dancing to the J. Geils Band on the jukebox. They had known each other in high school, though they hadn’t been romantic, but I think my mom needed someone who wasn’t my dad, like maybe the complete opposite. Hobart had this scruffy, unkempt beard and wore Hawaiian shirts and talked about the movie Billy Jack all the time. He was like if Lester Bangs wrote about Fourth of July cake contests instead of the Stooges. And I was happy that there was a guy, even if he was a little embarrassing to me, that my mom could look at and think, Maybe you’ll be better than the last guy. Hobart seemed like a good dude to start with. And now he was going to write about our poster.
“What do you mean, he’s going to write about it?” I asked. “What is there to say?”
“Well, you know, it’s kind of a mystery, all these posters spread out across the town. He figures it’s a bunch of teenagers just messing around, but he said it’s pretty sophisticated. He says he’s pretty sure that the quote is by a French poet named Rimbaud. He thinks the art is from some underground comic.”
“Rimbaud?” I said. “Leonardo DiCaprio played him in that movie.”
“Well, there you go,” my mom said, satisfied. “Teenagers love Leo, so they probably started reading a bunch of Rimbaud.”
“That’s not what teenagers do, Mom,” Charlie said.
“Well, it’s all just a theory right now,” my mom said, already moving on, so happy that her boys weren’t responsible.
I looked over at the triplets, all three of them mouthing the words on the poster, their hands hovering just above the drawings. “What are all these dots?” Andrew asked.
“Stars,” I said. “They look like stars.”
Mazzy Brower
MAZZY CALLED ME AGAIN, THIS TIME WHILE I WAS ALONE IN THE house, folding laundry, always folding laundry, my daughter going through four pairs of socks a day, stripping them off and tossing them behind the sofa, under the bed, and I was forever washing them, drying them, rolling them into balls, placing them in her dresser, until she would do it all over again. The phone rang, and, like an idiot, I picked up.
“Frankie?” she said, getting my name right.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thank you.”
“Just wait. I want to talk for just a few seconds.”
“I don’t want to talk, though,” I said.
“But you answered the phone, right? Do you think maybe you wanted me to call you again? Do you think maybe it might be good to talk to someone about it?”
“First, I did not want you to call again. Second, it would not be good to talk to someone about it. Third . . .”
“Yes?”
“I actually don’t have a third thing. I am just very afraid of you and this story.”