And the whole summer might have continued in this way. It’s so easy to imagine. We’d hang posters, and people would get tired of the mystery, and we’d settle into the heat. I’d have sex with Zeke, the most painless sex possible, under the covers in my little bed, using the condom my mother had said was nonnegotiable. His mom would finally realize either that she wanted to reconcile with her husband or that she needed a job now that she was a single mom, and they’d move back to Memphis. And I’d hold him in my mind, that one summer. We’d send each other our art, his drawings and my novel. We’d write occasional letters until real life intruded, college applications, new friends. Every other Thanksgiving, he’d come back to Coalfield to see his grandmother and we’d drive around town and maybe we’d even hang up a few of the posters, just to feel that thrill again. We’d make out in my car. We’d graduate from college and he’d end up on one side of the country and I’d be on the other. And I’d publish my novel, and at a bookstore in Denver, Colorado, he’d be in the audience. We’d get coffee and maybe have sex in my hotel room, even though he was married now. I’d write a book about that one summer. He’d leave his wife and seven children, and we’d get married in our late fifties, and we’d frame that first poster and hang it in our living room.

But none of that happened, did it? And I still don’t know if that makes me happy or sad.

THE DAY AFTER WE’D GONE TO THE CREEKSIDE MARKET, BILLY Curtis (everybody in school called him Sunshine Billy Curtis because he was always sunburned) and Brooke Burton didn’t come home from a night out, and their parents called the cops. And at 10 A.M. on Saturday, before the cops had even really started thinking about looking for them, they showed up on the front porch of the Curtis house, disheveled and hungover and looking like shit. And they said something terrible had happened, that they had met the fugitives.