“Dude, come on,” Charlie said, “Sunshine made this shit up. It’s complete and total, like, what do you call it? Frankie? What do you call it?”

“Fiction?” I guessed.

“Yeah, right. It’s fiction,” Charlie said.

“Well, I’m reporting what the facts are, okay?” Hobart replied, starting to get some traction in the face of skepticism, which is how almost every bad idea gets worse. “I’ve got some disturbing imagery and sloganeering that has suddenly appeared in town. I’ve got two youths reporting that they were abducted by some kind of cult and forced to do drugs. I’ve got . . . well, that’s all I’ve got right now. That’s newsworthy, though.”

“Is it?” my mom asked. I could see on her face that this was one of the moments when she wondered why she sometimes dated this man.

“It is for Coalfield,” Hobart replied.

I finally turned to see Zeke, standing in the doorway, and I had no idea how long he’d been there, but the look on his face made me think that he’d heard Hobart say the words “disturbing imagery.”

“Zeke,” I said quietly, almost to myself, but my mom saw him, too.

“Hey,” Zeke said. “What’s . . . um . . . what’s going on?”

“There’s some kind of weird drug cult in Coalfield,” Andrew said.

“A sex cult,” Charlie offered.

“A satanic sex drug cult,” Brian clarified.

“In Coalfield?” Zeke asked.

“Oh, Zeke,” my mom said, “it’s nothing like that. Don’t be scared.”

“Well, I mean, I’m not scared. It’s just . . . well, it’s the first I’m hearing about this. I’m new to the area, you know? I’m just here for the summer, and so I’m not exactly, like, privy to the news in this town.”

I realized that if Zeke stayed in this room with Hobart for more than five minutes, he would produce hundreds of copies of our poster, pulling them like a magic trick from the pockets of his jean shorts, admitting everything, convincing himself that, somehow, he was the leader of this satanic-drug-sex cult. I knew that he was jumpy, had some anxiety. I had it, too, but I think I’d had a head start on unhappiness, on being disappointed by people who supposedly loved you, and so I had settled into it a little more. I did not feel guilt for the weird things inside of me anymore. I was a fugitive, and I was not ready to be caught yet.

In my room, the door closed, I looked at Zeke for any signs of instability. “Are you okay?” I asked him. He had this faraway look in his eyes, like he was running simulations of how his life was going to turn out.

“Yeah, I mean, of course,” he finally replied. “It’s just . . . well, I don’t like the fact that the police are involved.”