“It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if I stayed,” he replied. “I would have liked to see you again. But I think I needed to go. I think that summer was all we could have.”
Whether or not it was psychotic, whether it meant that I had deep-seated issues and had fixated so heavily on a single summer that my whole life was wrapped around it, I didn’t care. I needed it. I would never disown it. It was mine.
I looked at Zeke, that beautiful boy. And I realized that this was Ben. This was Ben and he wasn’t a kid. And I remembered that, before that one summer, he was also Ben. And he’d made a whole life without me. That thing we’d created together. I guess it was mine alone now.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I’ll say I did all of it.”
“Thank you,” Zeke said.
It was not how I had expected it to go, or maybe it was not how I had dreamed it might go. I don’t know exactly what I had hoped. You hold on to something for twenty years, the expectations and possibilities bend and twist alongside your actual life. I knew I didn’t want him to be in love with me. I didn’t want to run away with him, to completely undo the life I’d spent so long making, the life that I truly loved. I guess I’d hoped that we’d say the phrase together, maybe a hundred times? Maybe a thousand? I feel like if we’d sat on the porch swing and repeated the line a thousand times, it would have satisfied me, but who knows? Maybe after all that, hours later, I would have said, “Maybe another thousand times?” But I could see now that if I even asked him to say it one time, to even say the edge, he might turn into smoke. But here’s the thing. I was going to do just what he asked. So I needed something. And because I hadn’t anticipated this, I didn’t know what to ask for.
Zeke went to get us a muffin, and then he sat on the sofa with me while we ate. We talked about what came after that summer, the immediate aftermath. I told him about the car crash, about Randolph Avery （and how his letters had given it all away）， and my broken arm and that year after. I told him about Hobart and my mom falling in love and then him dying. I told him about the school where I ended up going, about leaving Coalfield for the first time really. And falling in love with Aaron, and writing my books, and having Junie.
He told me about art school, about running, which he said was good to combat the weight he’d gain from the medications, but it also sometimes became so obsessive that it was worse for him than his freakouts. It was a fine line, he said, how deeply he let himself become obsessed with something, learning when to pull back. He ran only two marathons a year, no more and no less. That was the sweet spot. He talked about the squirrels in the park near his house, how he could get them to climb into his lap and sit with him. He seemed happy, and I was overjoyed, sincerely, to know this. I hadn’t ruined him. He hadn’t ruined me. We’d stayed alive in this world. I didn’t want that to change.
I liked hearing Zeke talk, could hear that specific timbre of his voice, the way it got a little squeaky, and I was happy to see his teeth, his nervous tics, but it was hard to believe from our normal conversation that we were the two people who had made that poster.
I wanted to tell him how I still had the original poster, our blood on it. I wanted to say how I’d put up a poster in pretty much every town I’d ever visited. I wanted to tell him that so much of my brain was filled with the specific details of that summer, how much he lived inside of me. But I didn’t want to make him anxious. I didn’t want to hurt him. Really and truly, I didn’t. I didn’t need him to do another blood pact. Did I want it? I did. I wanted it just so that I could feel that thread that connected me to the past. Is that why we do anything in this life? To feel it vibrate along the line that starts at birth and ends way way way after we die? I didn’t know. And I wasn’t going to figure it out in his childhood home, sleep-deprived, wrung out, a fugitive. What could I ask him? What could he give me?
“Zeke?” I finally said.
“Yeah, Frankie?” he replied.
“Could you do something for me?”
“Do you want me to say it?” he guessed. “You want me to say the phrase?”
“I don’t know. I did. But I honestly think it might be bad. You have to teach me how to draw it.”
“The poster?” he asked.
I nodded. “If I say I made it, then I have to draw it.”
“Have you not tried before?” he asked, confused. “You seem, you know, pretty obsessed with it. You never tried to draw it yourself?”