“No,” he said. “Don’t draw attention to it. We have to be, like—”

“Jake!” I said again, and Jake, who was squinting at me, trying to place me within his world, finally nodded.

“Hey,” he replied.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. A wadded-up poster fell out of his hand and got caught in the wind. “My boss just told me to take ’em down. He’s such a bitch. He called the cops to come look at it, but they said they didn’t care.”

“What are they?” I asked, so innocent. “Can I see one?”

“Frankie—” Zeke said.

Jake came over and showed us one. “It’s kind of cool,” he said. “I think it’s, like, some metal band.”

“Wow,” I replied. “Pretty cool, definitely.”

“I better get back to it,” he finally said, after we all stared at the poster for a few seconds. “You want to keep one?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and I handed the poster to Zeke, who just let it fall into his lap, stricken.

“Bye,” Jake said, and he went back to ripping down the posters. I felt like, soon, we’d have to come right back to this spot and cover that wall again. If we didn’t, I thought I’d burst into flames.

“He said his boss called the police,” Zeke finally said as we drove away, in search of another one of our posters.

“Yeah,” I replied, “but he said the cops didn’t care.”

Zeke thought about this, looked out the window. “They have no idea,” he finally said.

“They’re skinny with hunger for us,” I said, and we both laughed, this weird, wobbly laugh. And we kept driving.

There was an abandoned house where I knew some kids went to smoke pot or drink at night, a place solitary enough that nobody really complained and the cops let it slide. I’d never been, but my brothers were there all the time with their girlfriends, with all those popular, effortless kids who did whatever they wanted. I didn’t hate them. I didn’t want to be them. But I had always been curious about how you could live a life where you never worried about repercussions, never considered that the thing you did rippled out into the world. That part seemed pretty great. So I thought, if Zeke and I couldn’t be there at night, music blaring from a boom box, flashlights clicking on and off, cans of warm beer and crushed-up trucker speed passed around, then we’d put up our posters, force them to look at us.