THE MIDDLE PART OF TENNESSEE IS SO FLAT, AND WE JUST DROVE and drove, and the sky was a perfect blue, and it felt really good to leave behind a place I’d known my entire life, even if it was just for a few hours. And in our backpacks, the edge was there, on that yellow-tinged paper, and that time in the car, when we were between two places, merely in transit, made me happy. Zeke told me about one of his teachers, a woman in her sixties who had a sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, who would sit in a recliner and almost never moved and called up each student so they could show her their work. She would hold it up to the light, squint, and say, “Almost,” or “Not quite,” or “Good enough,” and then send you back to your desk. He said it was terrible in terms of imparting knowledge, like actual technique or instruction, but he really loved the idea that you could work on something, put everything you had into it, and she was like a Magic 8 Ball, and you just waited to know what your fate would be.

And then we were in Memphis. It was kind of run-down, crazy potholes and a lot of litter, but Zeke was so happy. We immediately got a Huey Burger, and it was so good, even more because Zeke kept going, “Mmmm . . . Oh, I missed Huey’s,” like he’d been away in a war or something. There was this white wall absolutely blasted with graffiti, black Magic Markers, things like Karen & Jim were here 6/7/96 and M-town, baby! I got out one of our posters, but instead, I grabbed a marker and wrote the whole phrase, and then Zeke drew a rough little sketch of the hands. He hesitated and then wrote Zeke and Frankie, and he looked at me, smiling. “They paint over the wall all the time to start fresh. It’ll be gone soon.” I touched the wall, traced our names.

We wandered the zoo, looking at elephants and monkeys, but the animals looked dazed and drugged. We got some Dippin’ Dots, those weird space-age ice cream pellets frozen with liquid nitrogen, and we sat on a bench in Cat Country, watching the tigers stroll around, stretching and staring into space. The stripes looked like liquid if you stared long enough, a kind of Magic Eye poster, and I thought about what would happen if I climbed into their enclosure, tried to touch it. I thought about the tiger dragging me around and around and around by my arm, blood everywhere, and I let the little dots of ice cream dissolve on my tongue.