Bethy Posey, who was crazy pregnant, which I could not imagine in this heat, and who was the same age as me but tiny like a doll, though now with a giant belly, had set up a table where she sold Xeroxes of the original poster. A dollar a copy. She had these customized versions with the word fugitives whited out and you could write your own name in the blank space and hang it up and take a picture of it. Her ex-boyfriend, Danny Hausen, who was training to be a professional wrestler, had done some posters where instead of the beds with the children, he had drawn Bart Simpson or Elmo or the UT Vols symbol.

It was a little like Lollapalooza, this kind of all-day event, but underneath that was this humming sensation, people waiting for something to happen. And so, of course, something occasionally did. Someone set fire to a tree in the square and it burned to nothing before the fire department even got there. Someone saw a black van parked at the Bi-Lo and this whole crew of townspeople beat the absolute shit out of it with baseball bats and hammers, and the cops had to show up to get everyone to disperse. At the public pool, a man kept throwing these fake gold coins at people and talking about how gold seekers were minions of the devil, and Latrell Dunwood tried to drown the guy, and it took six terrified lifeguards to stop him. The Poster Posse crouched in the bed of a jacked-up truck and drove all through the town, threatening to murder anyone who looked even the slightest bit like a fugitive or a gold seeker. The Presbyterian church’s sign read IS GOD SKINNY WITH HUNGER FOR YOU? and Zeke said, “Shouldn’t it say, Are you skinny with hunger for God?” and I was like, “Zeke, please.”

It was absurd.

It’s impossible to overstate how bizarre it was. There are now so many home videos on the internet of that summer, people just aimlessly wandering around, screaming out the phrase that I wrote. Discarded posters were constantly fluttering in the wind, blowing down the streets because people didn’t really care if they stayed up.

It was also thrilling.

Zeke and I would drive all over town. I was spending all my money on gas. And every single poster that I saw, I didn’t even have to think about it. It became a reflex. I just knew. They were mine. Or mine and Zeke’s. What was the difference?

It was also frustrating as hell because it had been our thing, and no one else understood that.