“Well, he’s going to ruin our lives,” Zeke said, and it didn’t sound all that histrionic. I mean, our lives were built around hanging up the poster, putting it everywhere in Coalfield, and Hobart had temporarily derailed that. But I knew, even then, that Zeke was talking about something else. He meant when his real life started again. He was worried that he’d have a juvenile record and he might not get into art school or something like that. His dad might disown him. Adults would be disappointed. There was this tiny little separation between us. We were bound together; we had made something. But now that it was real, that other people noticed, I knew that I had to reach out and hold on to Zeke or it would disappear.

I grabbed my bag, filled with posters, and we got into my car. And we just drove, up and down streets with rows of sad, plain houses with maybe one or two that were nice. You could imagine the town going one way or the other so easily, that the crappy houses would get torn down and new ones put up, or those fancy houses would fall apart, would fade, and then all the houses would be empty. I told Zeke to get out the map from the glove compartment, and he did, reluctantly. He was suddenly treating everything as evidence now. He didn’t say it, but I knew he was thinking about fingerprints, which was laughable to me. We were ghosts. No one could see us. Why did it matter if they found little swirls on a poster? Who cared about fingerprints? Focus on the shantytowns, you morons. Look at that.

And we ticked off spots we’d hit. Some were still there, which was one of the most satisfying feelings you can imagine, but others were gone. I wanted to replace them, but Zeke said it was too soon, that someone might be watching. He had one of the posters in his lap, and he started folding it and refolding it. I thought he was doing origami, that soon he’d be holding a little swan, but he really was just reducing the poster to the smallest possible square that he could, as if, by the force of his anxiety, he could fold the poster so many times that it simply disappeared, ceased to exist. I stopped the car at a car wash and made sure that no one was around.

“Do you feel bad about the poster?” I asked. “Why are you so upset?”

“It’s not the poster. Like, well, you know, I love the poster. I think it’s cool. It’s just, I’m really scared because nobody else seems to understand it.”

“I guess I kind of thought that we didn’t want anyone else to understand it, right? Like, it’s just us. We’re the only ones who know what it is.”