“Okay, you’re from Memphis, so I get it, but this is Coalfield and the cops are idiots, okay? They think three random headbangers grabbed Sunshine Billy Curtis and his girlfriend and made them do drugs.”

“Yeah, I get it. But, like, that’s worse. Them being so stupid is what’s scary because now it’s this whole thing.”

“We wanted it to be a thing, though, right?”

“Not a thing that ended up with you and me in jail,” he said. “I wanted it to be more like a thing where somebody puts the poster on a skateboard deck in a few years.”

“Well, that’s better, yeah. That is more what I’d wanted, too. But we made it, right? We made the poster. So we can still control it, I think.”

“I don’t think that’s how art works,” he said, unsure of himself, which was disconcerting because, even though Zeke had always been kind of nervous, he’d always seemed really self-assured about what he thought he knew about the world.

“Okay, well, maybe we take a day or two off. We wait and see what happens,” I said.

“A day?” he said, almost shouting.

“Or two, okay? I said a day or two.”

“And then what?” he asked.

“We keep putting up the posters,” I said, like, duh, of course that’s what we do.

“I don’t want to get arrested for a fucking poster,” Zeke said, starting to shake a little.

It stung me a little to hear him talk about the poster like that. Like, I know that I was the crazier one, the more broken one, but that summer, what I’d written, what Zeke had drawn, what we’d bled all over, it was the most important thing in the world to me. I would have gone to jail for the poster. I think I would have killed someone if they tried to keep me from putting up the poster. Because if it stopped, what was next? Zeke would leave. I’d never see him again. I’d go back to school, invisible, sad. My dad would never come back. My brothers would all move away. My mom would marry Hobart. It wasn’t really that bad, I know. It was life. But I didn’t want life right then. I wanted the summer, that poster. I wanted the edge, the shantytown, the gold seekers. I had said it. I said we are fugitives. I had meant it, even though I didn’t know what it meant. And now, maybe, we were. I wanted Zeke to understand. The hands that he had drawn, hovering over the children, never actually touched them, couldn’t reach them. How could he not see that?