There was this unspoken rule in our relationship that I did not ever go over to his grandmother’s house. I think it was that he was slightly embarrassed of his mom’s catatonic grief and his grandmother’s oblivious passivity, and he much preferred the jumbled, messy nature of my own family, where you could be weird and no one was going to make you feel bad about it, or at least they wouldn’t hold on to it for long. He was always kind of wide-eyed around my brothers and my mom, like he didn’t know families could be like this, and I think he liked that close proximity. Like, if an angry mob came for us, better to be here, where my brothers would at least seriously fuck up some people before they dragged us out of the house. Plus, his mom and grandmother never left the house, and my mom and brothers were almost never around during the day, so it just made more sense to hide in my room and talk about secret fantasies we had for the future.

In my room, both of us propped up in bed, on top of the covers, the fan blowing air that was just slightly cooler than the air outside right into our faces, it felt like we could ignore what was happening in Coalfield just long enough to not feel crazy. I was writing a little story to go along with this drawing that Zeke had done of a black van that had this sludgy purple liquid spilling out of the open side door. The story was about a guy, a bizarro Timothy McVeigh, who crammed vans full of dark magic, incantations, and left them in front of TV stations to unsettle the airwaves. And Zeke was drawing the cover to the novel that I was trying to finish, hoping that the professional font and the image of my evil Nancy Drew would spur me to the end of the story.

So much of my happiness of that summer was the smell of Zeke, kind of sweaty and a little like mothballs, and the sound of his pencils and pens scraping so softly against the paper. There were times when he didn’t even feel real, exactly, like his body wasn’t tangible to me, but there were these smells and sounds that reassured me that he was near, and I believed in them so much more than in his skin and bones, wrapped up in extra-large T-shirts and ragged, stone-washed jeans. I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.