“I think I will,” I told her.

“Well, you’ll remember it,” she said, “but it won’t be as important as it seems right now.”

THINGS MOVED QUICKLY AFTER THAT. AFTER CASEY RATCHET HAD been killed and the uproar that ensued, the police force, with the help of the surrounding counties, would not allow anyone into Coalfield for two weeks. If you did not reside within the town of Coalfield, you could not enter the city limits except for deliveries of necessary items like food and gasoline. The governor of Tennessee declared a state of emergency. By this point there were documented sightings of the poster in every single state in the country, and in at least thirty other countries, and Coalfield was still papered over with them. On TV, ABC News ran a story about the posters. They reported that a man in Denver, Colorado, who had been suffering from terminal cancer had killed himself and left behind a note that consisted only of the lines that I had written earlier that summer. Someone in New York City was wheatpasting huge versions of the poster in Times Square and it had become a game for hipsters to take pictures of them before they were torn down. A woman in Hillsborough, North Carolina, said the lines came from an unpublished novel by her late husband, who had written hundreds of erotic novels under the pen name Dick Paine.

They interviewed our mayor, who said he was still convinced that it was the manifestation of the devil, and that he was hopeful that the strangers in the original black van would be found and brought to justice. Four years later, we’d find out that he had a second family in Knoxville, and that family would move to Coalfield and live with his first family in a weird harmony, and he would be the mayor for years and years after that, until he died of a massive heart attack while sitting in a dunking booth at the county fair.

I CAME HOME AND MY ARM HEALED. MY BROTHERS WERE TENTATIVE around me, kind even. I think they were a little shocked that I had survived something worse than anything they’d lived through. They had not realized that I was also invincible, I guess, and it made them wary of my power, of what I could do to them.

Hobart, who hobbled around on crutches because of his broken leg, both of us recovering, spent a fair amount of time with me while my mom was at work. We would drink huge glasses of sweet tea and take turns reading out loud to each other from Patricia Highsmith novels. I kind of grew to truly like him, how tender and sensitive he was once you got past the bluster of him.