“Okay,” he said. “I think I can do this. Here, come to my room.” He turned to the kitchen. “Mom? Dad? I’m taking Frankie to my room.”

“Okay,” they said in unison, and their ease made me think that they had dealt with much worse. I mean, I had been responsible for much worse, but I was still grateful that they let us go into his room.

His room was crazy neat, and the walls were covered with framed pages of old comic books.

“It’s, like, the one thing I spend money on,” he admitted. “These are original works by guys like Wally Wood and Johnny Craig.”

“They’re really cool,” I said.

He had a desk with some of his projects stacked up, but he moved them out of the way. I got out my phone and pulled up a picture of the poster. He looked at it for a second, like he was admiring the work of one of those pages on his walls. Like he hadn’t made it. He kind of smiled, and then he nodded. He got out some paper and pens. “Okay, yeah,” he said. I was a little shocked that it didn’t unsettle him more; I wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen it. I wondered if ever, in his whole life, he had seen one of the posters that I had hung up after that summer.

I took a pen and wrote the phrase, just like before. I took another blank page and did the same thing. It looked exactly like the original. It was so easy to do.

“Now show me,” I told him.

It was such a relief when he eased up, gave in. He stared at the page. I saw him reading the phrase, remembering the rhythm, like a prayer. And then he started drawing those lines, so delicate and yet a little rough, primitive, the way he bore down sometimes without meaning to, and I copied him as best I could. After about twenty minutes, constantly looking back at the poster for guidance, he had most of it sketched out. I loved watching his hands, the way he seemed, with each new consideration, to wave his fingertips across what I’d written, like he was reminding himself of its presence on the page.

“The buildings,” he told me, looking at mine, “are too small. You need to, like, connect them, but make them bigger. And, like, here, make the windows like this, just—” and he leaned over me and showed me on my own page. I copied him, feeling the image come together the way I’d hoped it would.