Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

“It’s always better to be bored with someone else,”

You had to choose sides. And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you.

“let’s make art.”

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I’d be the one with a scar.

She made checklists that no one else ever checked.

“Everyone thinks it’s from something,” I said. “Everything is, kinda, from something,” he replied.

So I kissed him again. That’s what was official, that we were invisible to everyone in the entire world except each other.

I’d write a book about that one summer. He’d leave his wife and seven children, and we’d get married in our late fifties, and we’d frame that first poster and hang it in our living room.

I wasn’t going to stop, and it pretty much solidified the fact that I was a bad person. I was a bad person and I wasn’t even trying to fight it.

“I know. But, it’s not just us. If his sister hadn’t gotten hurt. If she’d recovered. If those idiots hadn’t lied about being abducted by Satan worshippers. If the news hadn’t talked about it.”

“I think I’m just trying to figure out how I could have made this thing and still be a good person. Like, my intentions were good, right?”

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.

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.

hated that he was talking about the time after he left me, when the summer was over.

This was the end of something that had mattered so much to me, for such an intensely short amount of time, and it was ending, and I was going to be all alone when whatever was next finally came for me.

was protecting him because I guess I thought he needed it. And if I protected the person who hurt me, who had broken me, then I was stronger than he was and I was stronger than anyone who might try to hurt us more.

And it was nearly impossible for Henry to have many lasting relationships with men in the area, so he was hers more than he was someone else’s.

But I guess the other thing is that I had built that life over another life, this secret life, this secret thing, and I had told myself that this would all work as long as I kept my life on top of that secret, if I weighed it down so it stayed deep inside of me.

And this is when it hit me, the rest of our lives. I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life, not just right now, but forever. Days would go by sometimes when he was the only adult I talked to in real life, and I realized that part of why I didn’t care about the rest of the world was because he gave me what I needed. And maybe I had ruined

was just my entire life cracking open.

Again and again. I waited for the phone to ring, for Zeke to come find me, now that I’d found him. But the phone was so quiet. The house was so quiet.

I wanted to say, “I missed you,” but it wasn’t really true, I was now realizing. I missed teenage Zeke. This guy was a stranger. He was the person I had to talk to in order to get Zeke back.

“That summer is why I’m who I am,”

I wanted to tell him that so much of my brain was filled with the specific details of that

Is that why we do anything in this life? To feel it vibrate along the line that starts at birth and ends way way way after we die? I didn’t know.