I leaned into him, reached for his backpack. I got out his notebook, all those strange little drawings. “What are you—” he said, but I just shook my head. He made an ineffectual gesture toward the notebook, trying to protect it, but I carried it over to my desk. I reached into the drawer and produced what I had of my novel. I slammed it down on the bed, which was also really ineffectual, not the sound that I’d hoped for.

“This is my novel,” I said.

“I know,” he replied.

“Read it,” I said. “I’m going to let you read it.”

“Okay,” he said. “Do you want, like, suggestions, or—”

“I do not want comments or suggestions, no,” I replied. “Just read it. And I’m going to look at your drawings.”

“You’ve seen most of them already,” he said. “And you’ve told me a lot about your book.”

“We’ll do this for maybe an hour, and then we’ll decide what to do next,” I told him.

I lay down on the bed, and Zeke scooted over to me. I looked at a drawing of a landscape, but drawn in sections, like an ant farm, and in one of the underground tunnels, there was a fire burning.

“I like this,” I said. “This is new.”

“Thank you. This is a really good first line,” he said.

“Thank you.”

And we lay like that, absorbing the thing that mattered to the other person. And then I said, “Zeke? It’s okay, all right?”

“Okay, I believe you.”

After a second, Zeke added, “Please don’t say the line. Just not right now. I know it. I think about it all the time. You don’t have to tell me.”

“Okay,” I said.

And that hour in the room, the two of us almost touching, the thing we made beginning to fully assemble itself, to spread out into the world, was the happiest I have maybe ever been in my entire life.

THE FRONT-PAGE HEADLINE OF THE NEXT DAY’S EDITION OF THE Coalfield Ledger read EVIL COMES TO COALFIELD. My mom yelled at Hobart, and he said that he’d originally had a question mark at the end, but the editor changed it. “If it’s interrogative, you know, it’s really not that irresponsible,” he said. When I rolled my eyes, he said, “And, by the way, sometimes it’s the role of the journalist to be provocative.”

“At the Coalfield Ledger?” my mom shouted.