“I mean, I think so? Yes. I, like, wasn’t sure when I was in Memphis, but now that I’m here this summer, in Coalfield? You know, looking around? I’m pretty sure we’re rich.”

Zeke was the kind of rich that I could tolerate, someone who didn’t seem to know what that money could do for him. Maybe at a private school in Memphis, your mom a violin prodigy, the levels of wealth and privilege were such that it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. All that mattered to me, besides the fact that he could buy me four corn dogs if I asked, was that if things really got bad, if we got caught, his money might get us out of a jam.

As we drank our Ocean Waters, these horrible and wonderful blue coconut sodas served in an insulated cup so huge that if you drank all of it at once, you would fall into a coma from the sugar, Zeke and I talked about what we always talked about, trying to remember little bits of our past, trying to adequately explain ourselves to another person. I told him about my stocking that we hung up at Christmas, how the triplets’ had little nutcrackers on them, blue and red and green, but mine was this angel who looked dead, its eyes closed and hands folded over its heart. Zeke told me about a mouse that he’d found in the backyard when he was six, injured by a stray cat, and how he’d kept it in his room and tried to feed it, until his mom found it dead under his pillow the next day. It was like, we had covered the big narratives, the ways our families had fallen apart, how we felt so different from everyone else, how desperately we wanted to make something important, and what was left was the actual stuff that mattered, that one night I’d had a nightmare and stumbled into the triplets’ room and asked all three of them to let me sleep with them until Charlie, finally, let me crawl into his little twin bed. How in the morning, Andrew and Brian made fun of Charlie, and how he had slammed their heads together like Moe in the Three Stooges, and how I felt charmed by this, the first time my brothers’ violence felt sweet to me.

And once we’d exhausted those stories for the present moment, wanting to space them out, hold on to them, we talked about the posters. “I was thinking about this last night,” Zeke said. “Like, even if we stopped at this point, what would it matter?”

“It would matter a ton,” I said, “to me.”