When we were done making copies, we covered up the Xerox machine again, put the junk on top of it so no one would know what we’d been doing. We gathered up our stuff and went back into the house. Zeke counted out sixty for him and sixty for me, and we put them inside our backpacks. Pretty soon my mom would be home, my brothers. And they would have no idea what we’d done. They’d think that maybe we had sex, those idiots, those dumbos. They wouldn’t know what we’d brought into this world.

“What about the original?” I asked, holding it up.

“You keep it,” he said, maybe the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me in my life. I had hoped for this, did not want it to be out of my possession.

“Yeah,” he went on. “You have the copier, right? So you keep the original. But be careful. Don’t lose it. Don’t let anyone find it. Ever. For the rest of your life, you have to keep it, okay?”

“I will,” I said, as serious as I’d ever been about anything.

“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers,” he told me.

“We are fugitives,” I said, smiling, “and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

And then we just stood in my living room, not sure what to do next. In our heads, we were both saying the words, over and over, until we had them memorized. We sat there, the words rolling on a loop, again and again, until they didn’t mean anything, again and again, until they meant something, again and again, until they meant everything.

Okay, yes, we were going insane, maybe. We’d kissed and our prudish brains couldn’t handle it, so we invented some mantra that would unlock the mysteries of the universe. We’d created meaning where there was none, but, I don’t know, isn’t that art? Or at least I think it’s the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them. But I didn’t have any theories then. I just had those words, those little kids in their beds and those giant hands reaching out for them. Meaning would have to come later.

MY MOM SHOWED UP WITH FOUR LARGE PIZZAS FROM TWINS, A rare treat, and I could see that she was trying to impress Zeke. I didn’t want to tell her that Zeke was from Memphis, a real city, and pizza wouldn’t impress him. But, honestly, Zeke looked pretty goddamned psyched to eat pizza.

“How’s the art coming along?” she asked as she breezed into the kitchen.