“And what does it matter? You said the lady already knows. She’s gonna write the article, right? What does it matter if you get that backpack?”

“I don’t know . . . ,” I said, but I kind of knew, really very strongly knew. I wanted more proof. If I was going to take credit for it, I wanted more evidence. It was a strange thing, to have hidden it for so long, and now I was starting to get paranoid that no one would really believe me.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” But really I was thinking that maybe I could get Mazzy to visit with Ms. Avery, and maybe she could get the backpack. I had to calm myself down. I’d so quickly gone from terror over being discovered to intense anxiety that it would all make me look like an idiot, a fake. I decided I wanted some of those Little Debbie snack cakes, and my mom brought over two boxes, Star Crunch and Oatmeal Creme Pies, and I ate two of each very quickly, and for some reason this made my mom smile.

“You always loved junk,” she said, “Pop-Tarts and Zingers and Little Debbie.”

“Well, the house was full of it,” I said.

“And now you barely let Junie have any,” she said.

“If Junie ate a Zinger,” I said, “she would shoot into the air and explode like a firework. She would destroy Bowling Green like she was Godzilla.”

“Sweetie?” she asked me. The snack cakes had calmed me down, forced me to breathe, to chew, and it felt like I was sixteen again, sitting in our living room. When I looked at her, she said, “What about Zeke?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I have to find him. I have to tell him.”

I’d been putting this off for so long, didn’t know what to say, how much to say. As soon as I got to college, got my first email account, the first time I’d really been able to surf the internet on my own, I looked for him. But I didn’t know his name. I knew his middle name was Zeke, but it was something he was trying out for the summer, or at least that’s what he had told me. I had no idea if he would still be using that name or, if he was trying to erase all evidence of that summer in Coalfield, if he was going by his first name, which I had never asked for and he had never told me. I sometimes wondered if I’d even misremembered his last name, if it was indeed Brown. And the internet wasn’t as all-knowing back then, so typing in Zeke Brown and Memphis was not going to get you very far.