I handed my shopping bag to Zeke and smoothed out the paper as best I could, the effect adding some character to the copy, like some old map or something. I took a pushpin from one of the missing-kid posters, a boy named Zachary who had been missing for two years, and tacked up our work in the corner of the bulletin board. We stood there for a second, staring at it, those hands, my words. It felt right. This was the thing about having more than a hundred copies of our poster: we didn’t have to worry too much about placement. If we put up enough of them, the art would do the real work.

“It looks amazing,” I said to Zeke, who nodded. He seemed pretty nervous, constantly looking around to see if anyone noticed us, even though nobody cared.

“Let’s keep doing it,” I said, and we got in the car, speeding back to the square, leaving a piece of ourselves behind, waiting to be discovered.

BY THE TIME I DROPPED OFF ZEKE AND RETURNED TO MY OWN home, we’d put up sixty-three posters, working as quickly as possible, undetected. We stapled them to telephone poles, taped them to the windows of businesses, folded them up and hid them in the aisles of the grocery store. We covered a brick wall behind the movie theater in the square, rows upon rows. We put a few in some random mailboxes on the way to Zeke’s grandmother’s house. And we still had so many. But also, in my head, we didn’t have nearly enough. We needed more. We needed to put up more of them. The whole town. I wished we had an airplane that we could fly over Coalfield, dumping out copy after copy on the unsuspecting citizens below. The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like. It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome. I imagined my wild brothers had felt this so many times that they were numb to it. But for Zeke and me, well-behaved dorks, it was amazing. And we were together. We hadn’t even made out. We were too interested in the copies. Each time we looked at each other, we were holding up another copy of our art, affixing it to the world. It felt important to us. We were important.

And when I dropped off Zeke, too afraid to come inside and meet his mom and grandmother, he kissed me softly on the cheek. “I really like you,” he told me.

“I like you, too,” I replied.

“We can keep doing this?” he asked, meaning, I assumed, everything. The posters, my house, the kissing, Pop-Tarts, skulking around every square inch of the town.

“All summer,” I said.