The triplets went outside to shoot baskets, and I stood in the living room, the house now empty. I wanted to tell Zeke what had happened. I felt like if he heard about it from anyone but me, he’d lose his mind. I was still holding my backpack. I opened it and there were four posters left, slightly crumpled. I went out the front door and just kept walking. It took about twenty minutes to walk the four blocks, but I could see the light on in his room. I went to the window, crouching in the bushes. I realized that I could very easily get shot, or reported to the police. I tapped on the window, standing on my tiptoes. And I saw Zeke’s face through the glass, but he couldn’t see me because of the glare. He was just staring out into the dark, his eyes so unfocused. He looked sadder than I’d ever seen him before. “It’s me,” I said, but he didn’t open the window. He just stood there for a few more seconds and then walked away. I tapped again, but he didn’t even come back. I took one of the posters out of my backpack and folded it a few times, made a square, and I wedged it in the little crack of the window where the window meets the frame, sliding it as far as I could into the slit, hoping he’d see it. I waited for five minutes, tapped two more times. Nothing. I didn’t want to be gone when my mom got back home, so I finally gave up. I had three posters left, and I felt like God in the most ridiculous way, like no one in the world knew what I knew, not even Zeke. I picked three random mailboxes and slid the posters into them, pulling up the red flag on each one.

Back home, I crawled into bed, and I didn’t wake up until a little before noon. The whole house was already empty, and I had no idea what else had happened the night before. I didn’t leave the house. I waited and waited and waited for Zeke to show up, like always, but he never came. I went into the garage and spent the rest of the afternoon making more copies of the poster on the Xerox machine. I almost never handled the original copy, was afraid to damage it. But that day I used it to make the first copy, and then I stared at it, looking for anything that I might have missed before, tried to count every single droplet of blood, tried to determine which splotches were mine and which were Zeke’s. I knew the world was going on outside, that things were happening, that large forces were now having to contend with this thing that I had started, but it felt so disconnected from reality.