My brothers were strangely unaffected by the panic. And, truly, my brothers lived for chaos, for anything that let them break or bend or stretch the world around them. They were just bored, or maybe it was more that they were mystified by the poster and it made their heads hurt. They tried to have sex with the college girls who showed up, and I think they probably did. They smoked weed and drank handles of George Dickel and watched the proceedings from afar. They did not even seem to remember that they had stolen a copier a year before, had no desire to participate. It was all beyond them. And I can’t tell you how much this pleased my mother. Whatever was going on in Coalfield, her family was not responsible. The triplets had not done anything, and she dared the authorities to try and accuse them. Of course, she knew that I was weird, and she knew that Zeke and I were driving around all the time when we weren’t hiding in my room, but she never seemed to consider that I had made this thing. She thought I was having sex. She thought I was in love. Under any other circumstances, I would have been so irritated by this, but since people in the fucking Rotary club were now destroying black vans with baseball bats to get at the Satan worshippers inside, I was slightly relieved that I wasn’t suspected.

Zeke’s mom, on the other hand, had barricaded herself in her childhood room, leaving Zeke to watch The Price Is Right with his grandmother, who wildly overestimated the price of everything, in the mornings, and then, after he’d hung out with me all day, he’d watch taped episodes of her favorite show, American Gladiators, with her, both of them uncomfortably marveling at the physiques of the gladiators. “Turbo looks a little like your grandfather as a young man,” she once told him. “Of course, no one wore clothes like the gladiators in those days.”