I knew that, with the broken windows, the holes in the ceiling, rain and damp and rot would get to the posters soon enough. I knew the next group of teenagers might tear it all down. I knew that it didn’t really mean anything. But I wanted it to be there forever, so that when I was older, when I’d become the person I was going to be, I could come back and it would still be there. So that Zeke, if he ever went back to Memphis, and then went to some university in the Northeast, and then got married and had kids and started to forget about this summer, could come back to this house and it would all be here, and he would remember. And maybe, if we came back at the same time, all those years later, we’d remember each other.

Zeke found an empty but unbroken rum bottle and he rolled up one of our remaining posters and placed it inside the bottle, screwing the cap back on. He went over to the stairs, to a hole in the wall, and he dropped the bottle into it, where it clattered and settled inside the house, hidden away.

He looked at me, and I thought about the broken glass on the ground, how dirty my fingernails were, the cut on my finger that was probably infected now. I thought that if my first time with someone was in this house, I’d regret it. But I was so young. How did I know what I would and would not regret? Maybe I thought that I’d regret everything, that the key to my life was to hide inside my house, never talking to anyone, writing my stories in my notebook, and someday I’d believe that had been the right decision, that I hadn’t ruined myself too quickly. But I wish I’d just done it, right then, ruined everything.

“I have to babysit tonight,” I told him, checking my watch.

“Okay,” he said, looking disappointed. He took the map out of his backpack and searched until he found the geographic location of this abandoned house and made a star with his pen. He held it open and we looked at the stars on the map. Even though Coalfield seemed like the dinkiest place on earth, when we counted the stars, all the open space that was still unmarked, I felt a little overwhelmed. I felt like maybe I wouldn’t be able to sleep until the whole map was a single constellation.

I thought that the saddest thing that could happen was that something inside your head worked so hard to make it into the world and then nothing happened. It just disappeared. Now that I’d put those words into the open air, I needed them to multiply, to reproduce, to cover the world.