So much of my happiness of that summer was the smell of Zeke, kind of sweaty and a little like mothballs, and the sound of his pencils and pens scraping so softly against the paper. There were times when he didn’t even feel real, exactly, like his body wasn’t tangible to me, but there were these smells and sounds that reassured me that he was near, and I believed in them so much more than in his skin and bones, wrapped up in extra-large T-shirts and ragged, stone-washed jeans. I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.
And yes, that is lovely, and yes, I was a very repressed and strange girl who had never really connected with another human being, so I’m probably being overly poetic, because I also distinctly remember moments when I thought, I’m going to die in Coalfield. The summer will never end, and I will never leave, and no matter how many posters we hang up, I’ll never get out of here. And there were times when I thought, Zeke, goddammit, get me the fuck out of here, but I was so scared that when he left, he would forget me. All he knew was me in Coalfield. So we had to leave, just for a second, I thought. There were so few spots on our map of Coalfield that weren’t blasted with stars, the strangest constellations, and now that other people were doing it, too, maybe if we drove just a few hours in any direction, we’d find a spot that was pristine, that did not know about the edge, was so unprepared for it that we’d transform that new place before it had time to resist.
“We could go to Memphis,” he offered. “I could show you around.”
“Just you and me?” I asked. That felt like the most relationshippy thing in our brief time together, though I am now remembering that we did a weird blood pact and, you know, we were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture. But that was all so strange, even the kissing, so outside of, like, corsages and airbrushed T-shirts with your names on them. This felt like the most normal thing a couple could do, spend a day in the city, and it was somehow more terrifying to me than blood. “We can put up the posters all over Memphis,” I said, just to bring things back into a world that I understood.
“Yeah, that would be fun. We could go by my school and hang them up,” Zeke said, and now I could see him starting to vibrate a little with the possibilities. “We can go to the zoo! We can get a Huey Burger. Maybe we could see a Memphis Chicks game. Have you ever been to Graceland?”
“You want to put up posters in Graceland?” I asked. I thought that if there was one place in the entire world where devotees would kill you for desecrating the sanctity of a holy space, it would be the mansion where Elvis played racquetball.
“No! Well, maybe. That would be pretty cool. I just mean, we can do the posters, absolutely, but I can also just show you around and we can do some fun stuff.”
“Okay, yeah . . . I’m good with that. Rad.”
“The thing is . . . ,” he said, frowning.
“Yeah?”
“My mom would kill herself if she knew I was going to Memphis,” he finally said.
“Do you have to tell her?” I asked.
“Are you going to tell your mom?”
“I am definitely going to tell my mom,” I said. Aside from what I’d done this summer, I was a very good girl. I never wanted my mom to worry about me. She had been screwed over, so why would I make it worse for her?
“Well, I think I won’t tell her, and as long as we don’t die on the drive to Memphis, it should be okay.”
“How many posters should we bring?” I asked.
“Fifty?” he said, but I could tell he was thinking about that Huey Burger or whatever the hell it was called. He wanted to show off how cool Memphis already was, not bring what we’d made in Coalfield to it. But do you think I cared about that?
“Let’s bring a hundred,” I replied. “Just to be safe.”
I ASKED MY MOM THAT EVENING, AFTER THE BOYS HAD GONE out to meet up with friends. I’d made some brownies from a mix, because I knew she liked sweets, and we were watching Jackson Browne on VH1 Storytellers, a singer she loved so much, she had taped it earlier in the summer and would watch it while she drank a beer at the end of the day. Right after “Doctor My Eyes,” her favorite song, I asked her if I could go with Zeke to Memphis.