I had no idea who Basquiat was. I’d seen some Keith Haring artwork in a magazine somewhere, but I didn’t think what we’d made looked anything like that, weirdo big-headed dancing figures. It made me a little angry. It was a small thing, but I wanted to know if the professor thought the poster was any good.

In the final paragraph, the reporter quoted Teddie Cowan, the county sheriff, saying, “Now is not the time to panic, but, also, there seem to be dark forces at play, and I will do everything in my power as an upholder of justice to root them out and send them as far from Coalfield as is humanly possible.”

And though I was alone in the house, my family all at work, I could see Zeke in my mind, a true vision of him. He was standing on my front porch, holding a copy of this newspaper in his hand, waiting for me to tell him that everything was okay, that we were not in trouble. And I would tell him that, the minute I opened the door and saw him, his weird mouth, his big eyes. I’d immediately tell him that this was a good thing. We’d made something good. I’d tell him that we were invincible, that nothing bad would ever happen to either one of us. And I’d tell him that the only thing that we could do, because there really was no other choice, was to put up more of the posters. The only way to keep ourselves safe, I would tell him, was to make more of them.

Nine

A HEAT WAVE HAD ROLLED IN, AND I WAS SWEATING CONSTANTLY, from, well, obviously, the actual heat, but also from the wild feeling that things were quickly moving beyond my control. I was trying to figure out how to keep everything from falling apart, to hold on to this thing that I’d made, but that was getting harder and harder. And so I was perpetually red-faced, itchy, my shirts soaked with sweat. My whole mouth felt electric. My stomach hurt all the time, and to deal with it, I just ate more Pop-Tarts and Cheetos Puffs, and that made it worse. I’d written fifty pages of the novel in a week; I could not stop. I needed a story that I could control, that wouldn’t keep going when I stopped writing it.

When I say the posters were everywhere, I mean that we were not the only people in possession of the poster. And I don’t just mean Coalfield, although the town was now covered in the thing that Zeke and I had made, the posters like a swarm of cicadas, sticking to everything.