It was the greatest thing that I’d ever written. I knew it right then. And I’d never write anything that good again. It sounded so perfect to my ears.

Zeke and I crouched down on the hard floor of the garage, said the phrase again, and then again, and then again, until it became a code. It became a code for everything that we’d ever want. It became a code that, if we met up again in fifty years, we could say this exact phrase, and we’d know. We’d know who we were.

“Can I kiss you?” Zeke asked, and I wished that he had not asked. But I also liked that he’d asked, had not taken advantage of me in that moment.

“You can kiss me,” I said, and so we kissed, and I felt the tiniest little tip of his tongue touch my teeth and it made me shiver. And the whole time we kissed, I kept thinking Wearefugitiveswearefugitiveswearefugitives, and I knew that the law, whatever the fuck that was, was skinny with hunger for us.

Five

MY MOM WOULD BE HOME AT FIVE. THE TRIPLETS, NO IDEA, though I could count on them to be as scarce as possible while they huffed glue or had sex with girls in abandoned factories. It felt like a bomb was set to go off, and we had to defuse it without a manual. Or maybe we were building a bomb. Who knows. It felt like something was at stake, that’s what I’m trying to say. I wanted to keep kissing Zeke, but the thrill of making something was competing. We had the words. Our code. The edge. Fugitives. The law. But we had to make it look nice.

Zeke had all these cool, expensive art pens and pencils, Pentel and Micron and some kind of Japanese brush pen, but I grabbed a black Crayola marker and got to work. It was a lot of words to fit on a piece of paper, so I had to make the letters small enough to leave space for Zeke’s artwork, but I wanted the writing to be bold enough that you could clearly read it. Over my shoulder, Zeke whispered the next letter, F . . . u . . . g . . . i, and I liked the feel of his breath on my neck, but I kept my hand steady.