Apollo cracked a smile. “Clayton County doesn’t track graffiti. I’ve checked. ClayPo doesn’t even have Windows 7 yet. And no one thinks of what we did as graffiti other than us and maybe some intern at Jacobin. So even if Jerry’s mom turns us in, which she won’t because we put a dead black boy on a racist mountain, what would she tell them? ‘My son’s old friends sprayed a giant C on his grave.’ I think we’re covered. Instead of sweating that, how about we look at some of these goofy-ass hashtags?”

Zed still felt uneasy, but looking at hashtags sounded fun. She scooted over as Apollo grabbed an iPad from under his pillow and queued up Twitter, joining her on the floor. Most of the jokes were forgettable, as ephemeral as the weak laughs they drew, but Zed enjoyed scrolling through them, watching people make sense of the world by making fun of it. #FireandBrimStoneMountain was the top trending topic, but the real jokes were at #IHadaBeam, which featured endless images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spewing lasers upon national monuments. It was wack that humor was people’s default reaction, Zed felt, but she understood its appeal. Laughter was like that brief moment of silence when you drove under a bridge during rain; it placed you outside of time even as it sped you through it.

Apollo gravitated toward the conspiracy tweets, the ones with ideas too nebulous to coagulate into hashtags. “The aliens are here bro. Future and Ciara were the first sign. I swear,” tweeted one user. “2013: no braves. 2014: snowstorm. 2015: floods. 2016: Donald Glover is cool. 2017: falcons lose and bridge collapses. 2018: Childish Gambino making trap now, da fuck?. Stay woke,” read another tweet. Apollo really got a kick out of that one, sprawling out on his floor as the laughter dispersed across his body. Zed snapped a photograph of him with her phone, studying it afterward. It was a keeper.

“Honestly, this isn’t making me feel better,” she confessed, standing up, her dress sliding back down to her ankles. Apollo flashed her a look from the floor, his eyebrows hoisted by concern. “I shouldn’t have even come,” she continued, stepping toward the door. Silent, Apollo remained on the carpet as she quickly left the room, closing the door. Her footsteps were muted as she slogged down the stairs in socks, but the eventual tap of her boots on the foyer was clear, undulating throughout the still house before terminating with a thud from the front door. On her way home, she examined her new photo. Softly illuminated by the dull flicker of his screens, Apollo looked blissful. Pocketing her phone, Zed wished she could say the same for herself.

Sol tensed in response to the creaking porch. She didn’t recognize those footsteps. Bounding across her living room in three inaudible strides, she entered the kitchen and armed herself with a knife. The sharp scent of the onions she’d cut for breakfast lingered on its blade. The footsteps halted a few feet from the door, their echo drowning in the drone of the cicadas outside. Sol dropped to an alert crouch, the knife gripped tightly in her left hand. The unknown visitor exhaled deeply. It was a man. Sol remained in place, waiting for his next move.