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?”

“Why would I?” I asked him. “I wrote the line. You drew the picture. That’s how it worked.”