It was like this for me with books. After I’d read every single Nancy Drew book twice, I found The Chocolate War in the school library, and I told the librarian that I liked it and so she gave me The Outsiders. And then my mom gave me Flannery O’Connor, and I started grabbing anything I could find and I had no idea what other people thought was good or what was important. And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was. Every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.

Madeline saw me staring at her, and she just smiled. I don’t think she even knew who I was. But she made devil horns with her right hand and mouthed the words We are fugitives, and I nodded.

Zeke asked, “Who is that?”

I shook my head. “Just some dumb girl,” I replied, and we drove to find a place that had a hidden spot that would accept what we’d made.

And we did find places. We did not stop. Zeke really got into taking empty two-liter Coke bottles and painting them gold and then making these lovely illustrations of wolves and flowers and intricate patterns with his fancy paint pens. We’d roll up one of the posters and slide it into the bottle and seal it up. Then we’d bury them around town, like time capsules. Each one we marked on the map with a little drawing of an hourglass. And each one was a different length of time. We’d open this one in five years. This one in ten. This one in twenty. Forty. Fifty. We were so young. It didn’t seem that impossible to us, to jump on a plane, meet up in some run-down park with a single swing and a broken jungle gym, in our sixties, and dig up this time capsule, just so we could say, “We made that. It looks just like I remember.” And then we’d bury it, leave it for someone else to find.