I imagined Lyle, still living with his mom, sitting in his room and making more than a dozen copies of this poster by hand. It didn’t make me sad for some reason. I mean, Lyle had always made me sad, to have ruined your life and the life of the person you loved most in the world because you took a turn too fast. But this felt like a kind of grace. I wondered how many he would have to hang for his sister to awaken from her coma. Whatever the number, however unlikely, it seemed worth trying.

And Zeke and I saw this girl, Madeline, hanging posters without any real fear of being caught, just stapling them to trees in the park. Madeline had been a cheerleader in junior high but then, I don’t know exactly why because I wasn’t aware of the complex negotiations required to be popular, she’d quit and started hanging out with the theater kids. She wasn’t a goth, not really, because I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what that was. I mean, she listened to Nine Inch Nails. She wore a lot of black eyeliner. We didn’t know what to call that, but we just knew that Madeline was suddenly not the Madeline who had been the sturdy base of the pyramid during pep rallies. She was transformed.

I can’t quite articulate how, in so many ways, Coalfield controlled how the outside world came to you. Like, you never really knew about punk until you heard Green Day on the radio, long after they were popular, and if you loved that, maybe you started doing a little work. I mean, we did not even have MTV in our cable package. You had to buy a Spin or Rolling Stone, and you started to work backward, learning about the Sex Pistols. And once you knew those two bands, you had to work harder to fill in the middle, and if you were lucky, somebody’s cousin had given them a tape of Minor Threat and they gave you a dub of it. Or you went to Spinners and just looked endlessly at the used cassette tapes until you picked one that had an interesting cover, and maybe you just happened to buy Black Flag’s My War. But, no matter what, you were never quite experiencing anything in a linear way. And you were always kind of embarrassed because you knew other people, people in Nashville or Atlanta (who could even conceive of New York City), knew all of this, in the exact order it was meant to be consumed, and so you didn’t really talk about it. You kept it all locked up inside of you and suddenly you were sending cash in envelopes to record labels you read about in MRR and you got a 7" record of some punk band in Wisconsin that would never record another song.