When I was done, Zeke snatched the paper away before I could even reread the phrase, and he got to work with all those pens. He had something finished in his head, I knew, because his hand moved so deliberately, even though he couldn’t keep the tremors of excitement from threatening to mess it up. He started by drawing these power lines, stretching across the page like tiny scars, and once he had a sense of scale, he drew these beautiful little shacks, a whole row of them, the roofs falling in. He drew bits of detritus, an old, burned-out car, a pack of wild dogs. And then, out in the open air, he drew four beds, their headboards like Gothic cathedrals, multiple children twisted up in the sheets. Finally, he pushed away from the paper, almost like he’d unplugged himself from the image, and just stared at it. So I stared, too, at the way the drawings touched up against my words, the way our two brains became this one thing. And then, careful to work around the words I’d written, he leaned over the paper and drew two giant, disembodied hands, the fingers withered and jagged, almost glowing, the way he made the shape of them echo across the page. It looked like the hands were reaching for the children in the beds, but they were suspended, never quite able to touch them.

“There,” he finally said. “That’s it.”

“It’s done?” I asked, not quite sure of myself, of us.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But maybe.”

“We made it,” I said, like I couldn’t quite believe it, even though it was just this little piece of paper.

“But nobody will know,” he reminded me. “Just you and me.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“But we have to do something to make it ours,” he said. He reached into his zippered bag of art supplies and got an X-Acto blade, which made me stiffen a little, shift my body away from his, hovering over the blade.

“Blood,” he said, because of course he did. What else did we have, two stupid teenagers, but the blood inside of us?

“Blood?” I replied. Like I said, I wasn’t big on being touched, especially not by sharp objects.

“On the page,” he said. “It’s symbolic, right? Is it a metaphor? Wait, what’s a metaphor?”

“Not blood,” I answered, though what did I know?

“It feels right,” he admitted, rolling the blade between his fingers.