He thought about it for a second. “I mean, yeah,” he continued, “but, like, I kind of wanted other people to not understand it in ways that they assumed a really cool artist had made it. I didn’t want them to not understand it in a way that they think we’re devil worshippers who abduct kids.”

“But it’s not that. Whatever they think, we know what it really is,” I told him.

“I’m just—” he said, but then started staring out the window. I thought maybe a police cruiser had pulled into the parking lot, but the coast was clear.

“Here, just, like, give me that poster,” I said, and I took the folded-up poster he was still holding. I smoothed it out on my lap. “I’m just going to hang this up. We’ll feel a ton better if you can see me hang it up and, you know, we don’t get arrested on the spot. And then maybe I’ll put up a few more. There’s a lot in the bag, and we’ll just see where that takes us.”

“There’s one up,” he said, now pointing at the change machine built into the brick wall at the front of the unmanned car wash station.

“Well, like, we can put up more,” I said. “That’s no big deal. Or somewhere else. Whatever.”

He grabbed the map and held it up for me. “We never put a poster here,” he said.

“Yeah, no, I think we did,” I said.

“No, we never put one here,” he said, pointing at the spot on the map, pristine, unmarked.

“Maybe I did?” I offered.

“Did you?” he asked, his voice cracking just a bit.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. Maybe in my sleep?”

“Frankie, seriously, did you put up that poster?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

We both got out of the car and walked over to the change machine. The edge is a shantytown. The hands. Our blood, speckles of it. It was our poster. I stared at it. But it wasn’t our poster. I pulled it off the machine, and I noticed immediately that the paper was not the crappy discount copy paper we had in the garage. It was nicer. Fancier. A little more weight and heft. The color was pristine white, too, not the yellow tint of our posters. We walked back to my car, and I checked it against the copy I’d taken from Zeke.

“Oh, well, okay, that’s . . . it’s not ours,” I finally said.

“Then whose is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Somebody took one of our posters and made more copies, I guess.”

“They made copies?”

“I guess, Zeke! Jesus, I don’t know.”