And then, these little flashes, I’d hear the phrase, my words, in someone else’s voice in my head. Maybe Zeke’s? Not mine. And I’d lock up, feel trapped, and I would say the line, in my own voice, in my head, and it would calm me. It was mine. I had made it. And I wouldn’t let anyone else take it from me. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. It had not finished. I was still a fugitive. We were still fugitives. And I would live the rest of my life certain of this. And I cannot tell you how happy it made me.

Part II

We Are Fugitives, and the Law Is Skinny with Hunger for Us

FALL 2017

Thirteen

JUST TWO WEEKS AFTER MAZZY BROWER HAD FIRST COLD-CALLED my house and ruined my life, I was sitting in a booth at the Krystal in a town thirty minutes from where I lived, in Bowling Green. I’d dropped Junie off at school, gone home, and paced the house for three straight hours, the cat meowing and pacing right alongside me, occasionally getting caught between my feet, making me yell out curses. And then I’d texted my husband, who was at this point in the day deep inside the mouths of people we knew very well, cleaning and fixing their teeth, and I told him that I was going to meet someone who wanted to interview me about my writing. It was not an odd thing to assert, because I had written some books that were very popular, and because people sometimes talked to me, and so it was an easy lie.

Because, the thing is, I had never told my husband that I was responsible for the Coalfield Panic of 1996. I did not tell him that the T-shirt I sometimes wore, which I’d ordered from a very expensive clothing store in Toronto, had the exact phrase that I had written when I was sixteen.