“What do you mean, he’s going to write about it?” I asked. “What is there to say?”

“Well, you know, it’s kind of a mystery, all these posters spread out across the town. He figures it’s a bunch of teenagers just messing around, but he said it’s pretty sophisticated. He says he’s pretty sure that the quote is by a French poet named Rimbaud. He thinks the art is from some underground comic.”

“Rimbaud?” I said. “Leonardo DiCaprio played him in that movie.”

“Well, there you go,” my mom said, satisfied. “Teenagers love Leo, so they probably started reading a bunch of Rimbaud.”

“That’s not what teenagers do, Mom,” Charlie said.

“Well, it’s all just a theory right now,” my mom said, already moving on, so happy that her boys weren’t responsible.

I looked over at the triplets, all three of them mouthing the words on the poster, their hands hovering just above the drawings. “What are all these dots?” Andrew asked.

“Stars,” I said. “They look like stars.”

Mazzy Brower

MAZZY CALLED ME AGAIN, THIS TIME WHILE I WAS ALONE IN THE house, folding laundry, always folding laundry, my daughter going through four pairs of socks a day, stripping them off and tossing them behind the sofa, under the bed, and I was forever washing them, drying them, rolling them into balls, placing them in her dresser, until she would do it all over again. The phone rang, and, like an idiot, I picked up.

“Frankie?” she said, getting my name right.

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thank you.”

“Just wait. I want to talk for just a few seconds.”

“I don’t want to talk, though,” I said.

“But you answered the phone, right? Do you think maybe you wanted me to call you again? Do you think maybe it might be good to talk to someone about it?”

“First, I did not want you to call again. Second, it would not be good to talk to someone about it. Third . . .”

“Yes?”

“I actually don’t have a third thing. I am just very afraid of you and this story.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this, though,” she continued. “I know parts of the story, but you know all of it. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I want to get a sense of how this came to be. I want to know how you did it. Why you did it. And what you think about it now.”

“I don’t know how to answer any of that,” I told her.

“I think you do,” she said. “I think maybe this is something you think about a lot.”

“Well . . . yes. That’s true. But I still don’t know how I’d answer any of those questions.”

“That’s okay. I’d just love to meet, to talk, one-on-one. Off the record at first, even. Whatever you want.”