“If I hadn’t written that stupid article,” he said, but my mom shushed him. I could feel all these strange emotions swirling around inside of me, no way of expressing them in public, and so I went to my room. In the bottom of my sock drawer, I retrieved the poster that Lyle had made, the one my brother had taken. I loved it, truly. Lyle was dead. I was sixteen, you know? Everything about me was in constant flux, nothing had settled, and I felt so strange inside my body. But I was capable of guilt. Like Hobart, I wondered if I’d killed Lyle. I mean, I felt certain that I had, if you sat down and mapped it out. And every time I thought about it, that I was responsible for someone’s death, I immediately pushed the thought away, tried to hide it under everything else that was inside of me.

I didn’t really believe in a god, but I believed in penance, in reconciliation. And I knew what I needed to do was to stop hanging up my poster. And maybe that was why it hurt when I pushed Lyle out of my mind, because I wasn’t going to stop, and it pretty much solidified the fact that I was a bad person. I was a bad person and I wasn’t even trying to fight it.

I held the poster up to the light. Maybe my penance would be to make a hundred copies of it, to keep posting it, for Lyle, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t my poster. It didn’t have any power over me.

I had to fold Lyle and his sister into our own poster, to put up twice as many. I wondered how many people could fit inside of our poster. Our poster. Me and Zeke. If I died, I really hoped Zeke would keep making them. If he died, I knew for a fact that I would. That’s maybe what made me so sad about Lyle. His sister was in that hospital bed, far away from him; he had been alone when it happened. It was better, I decided, to have someone else.