We were eating dinner one night, watching channel 4, and the host, who had come back to Tennessee after serving as the sidekick for, I shit you not, Pat Sajak’s disaster of a talk show, was talking about the poster. And my mom said, “Oh my god, I cannot believe this. Hobart is going to be . . . just the worst.”

The host mentioned Coalfield, and there was some footage of our town, the square, our poster, but then there were videos of the streets of Nashville, a row of the posters flapping in the wind. And I noticed, even from that distance, that it wasn’t really our poster. First, it was on bright orange paper, which I thought made it look spooky in a silly way, like Halloween. But, also, the hands were different, less detailed. The whole poster lacked detail. It looked, honestly, like shit. Some reporter on the street was now holding one of the posters up for the camera, which focused on it, and the second half of the phrase read, “we are the New Fugitives,” and I thought, What the hell is that?

“That’s not right,” I said out loud, and my mom looked at me.

“What’s not right?” she asked.

“It’s just . . . I mean, the line is different from the ones in Coalfield.”

“Oh,” she said, squinting at the TV. “It looks right to me. Gold seekers? Shantytown?”

“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers—”

“No, I know, Frankie,” she said, but I just kept going, “—we are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

“Okay,” my mom said.

“Skinny with hunger,” Andrew said, already on his third bowl of Hamburger Helper. “Skinny with hunger. I like that. Skinny with hunger.”

“I do, too,” I said, not even looking over at him, “but that said new fugitives, and . . . well, that’s not what the poster says.”

“Well, that’s what that poster says,” Charlie offered.

“Yeah . . . ,” I replied, not sure how to explain. Or, no, I knew how to explain, but I also knew that I couldn’t really do it.

AND IT WAS STRANGE, BUT AS I STARTED TO GET MAD, ZEKE seemed lighter, more calm. To his mind, the fact that there was at least one other person in Coalfield putting up the posters made it easier for us to deny our involvement. Even if we got caught, we were just stupid kids trying to imitate what we’d seen. We were so impressionable. So stupid. So desperate. We just wanted to be cool because we were so uncool, and you’re not going to call our parents are you, Officer?