And then I got out a poster and folded it into a triangle. Zeke did the same. We sat on the bench and folded up about twenty posters into little origami. And as we made our way out of the zoo, we left them everywhere, little land mines that wouldn’t hurt anyone, just enough of a detonation to please us.

I ASKED ZEKE IF WE COULD HANG UP MORE POSTERS, AND HE guided us to Overton Park, and we walked through the grass until we reached the Overton Park Shell, this crazy amphitheater that was kind of run down but still beautiful in the way that movies in the forties thought the future would look like. We put up twenty posters as quickly as possible, but the shell was so big that it kind of swallowed up the images, the words. I wished we had brought a thousand of them. I think Zeke could tell I was disappointed. “It works better in Coalfield, you know,” he said, “because it’s such a little place.” And he was right, but it made me sad. I thought about Elvis Presley standing on this stage, singing out the words I’d written, hearing his deep southern accent on the word hunger, and it sounded so good in my head, like I could almost really hear it. But it passed. And it was just me and Zeke, the park wide open, the sun burning my skin.

“We should probably head back to Coalfield,” I said, and he looked disappointed for a second, but then he nodded. He touched my hand and said, “Thanks for doing this with me.”

I nodded, embarrassed. I kissed him and he kissed me back. “You can come visit me all the time when I move back,” he offered. “You know how to get here now.” I hated that he was talking about the time after he left me, when the summer was over. The summer would end, sure, but why couldn’t we pretend that it wouldn’t? Why did everyone want things to move forward, and why did I want to be frozen in a block of ice?

“Well, I don’t know where you live,” I told him.

“Do you want to see it?” he asked.

“Yeah . . . I think so,” I said.

“It’s not that far. Come on,” he said, and we walked back to the car. We drove to an area called Central Gardens, which was very rich and the houses were all old. Some of them looked like castles, lots of stone, and I instantly realized that, even though I had known that Zeke was rich, I hadn’t quite contextualized what that might truly look like. I was suddenly scared to see his house, preferring to think of him on his grandmother’s sofa, a kind of experience that I could at least understand.