Zeke was waiting outside for me, and we clinked our bottles together. He reached into my bag, grabbed another poster, and folded it into a paper airplane. He waited a few seconds to make sure no one was watching us, and he flicked it toward an empty car in the parking lot whose windows were down. It caught the wind, sailed toward the window, and we held our breath at how perfect it was, and then the paper plane did some weird loop-de-loop and crashed to the ground. Zeke quickly crab-walked over to the paper airplane and chucked it through the open window, into the passenger seat, and we giggled. Zeke grabbed my arm and pulled me closer, and we kissed. But I hadn’t been entirely ready and our teeth clicked together and that made me hiss a little, thinking I’d cracked one of my front teeth. I wanted to try again right away, now that I was expecting it, but I was afraid that I’d still ruin it, like somehow I’d end up biting his nose off.
It was our first kiss in public, which, to my mind, made it official. I didn’t know what was official, what we were announcing. We weren’t dating. He wasn’t my boyfriend, or I didn’t think of him that way, not truly. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, like maybe they could tell us what all of this meant, but we were invisible. We didn’t matter. So I kissed him again. That’s what was official, that we were invisible to everyone in the entire world except each other.
A lady banged the door of the market open and came out with a handful of Little Debbie snack cakes. She was heading right to the car that now had one of our posters in the passenger seat. We hopped into my car and drove off, not looking back to see what would happen.
And the whole summer might have continued in this way. It’s so easy to imagine. We’d hang posters, and people would get tired of the mystery, and we’d settle into the heat. I’d have sex with Zeke, the most painless sex possible, under the covers in my little bed, using the condom my mother had said was nonnegotiable. His mom would finally realize either that she wanted to reconcile with her husband or that she needed a job now that she was a single mom, and they’d move back to Memphis. And I’d hold him in my mind, that one summer. We’d send each other our art, his drawings and my novel. We’d write occasional letters until real life intruded, college applications, new friends. Every other Thanksgiving, he’d come back to Coalfield to see his grandmother and we’d drive around town and maybe we’d even hang up a few of the posters, just to feel that thrill again. We’d make out in my car. We’d graduate from college and he’d end up on one side of the country and I’d be on the other. And I’d publish my novel, and at a bookstore in Denver, Colorado, he’d be in the audience. We’d get coffee and maybe have sex in my hotel room, even though he was married now. I’d write a book about that one summer. He’d leave his wife and seven children, and we’d get married in our late fifties, and we’d frame that first poster and hang it in our living room.
But none of that happened, did it? And I still don’t know if that makes me happy or sad.
THE DAY AFTER WE’D GONE TO THE CREEKSIDE MARKET, BILLY Curtis （everybody in school called him Sunshine Billy Curtis because he was always sunburned） and Brooke Burton didn’t come home from a night out, and their parents called the cops. And at 10 A.M. on Saturday, before the cops had even really started thinking about looking for them, they showed up on the front porch of the Curtis house, disheveled and hungover and looking like shit. And they said something terrible had happened, that they had met the fugitives.
What they told the police, as the two of them stood on the porch, their heads hammering from the alcohol they had been drinking all night, was that they had been walking to go visit some friends and maybe watch a video when a black van pulled up beside them. There was a man and a woman in the front of the van, wearing all black, covered in tattoos. They asked Billy and Brooke to join them, and when Billy asked where they were going, the man said, “To the edge.” And then the back door opened and another man, also wearing all black, jumped out and grabbed Brooke and pulled her into the van. Billy jumped in to save her, and someone in the front knocked him out. They knocked out Brooke, too.
When they woke up, they were at this abandoned house, one they’d never seen before, far from civilization, out in the woods. There were candles everywhere, and the walls were covered in these strange posters that had these menacing hands. The three people, who called themselves the fugitives, were listening to strange, satanic music, and were doing all manner of drugs. They made Brooke and Billy do drugs, like they, I don’t know, shoved them up their noses or blew smoke into their faces? It wasn’t entirely clear. And the intensity of these drugs made Brooke and Billy pass out again. And when they woke up in the morning, the three people were gone. And so Billy and Brooke walked all the way home, constantly worried that the fugitives would come back for them. Each of them had brought a copy of the poster home with them, for evidence.