Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

My daughter was banging away. I felt dizzy. There was a pizza in the oven. My husband was finally fixing the latch on a window in our bedroom, which we’d been meaning to fix for four solid months. Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet. It didn’t know to just stop, to freeze, because nothing was going to be the same.

The triplets, my brothers, were perfect for the greased watermelon contest, because they were eighteen and already giant. They were nearly feral, possessing a kind of strength that wasn’t just physical but a psychosis that made them impervious to pain, which they tested out on each other all the time.

But they didn’t take part, either, because they used this time while everyone else was hypnotized by the watermelon to steal money and snacks from unattended bags.

Who touches a girl’s elbow and then gets shy? “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m new. I just moved here. I don’t know anybody. I’ve been watching you. It looks like you don’t know anybody, either.” “I know everyone,” I said, gesturing to the entire congregation of poolgoers. “I know them all. I just don’t like them.”

I had a really plain face. I convinced myself, at the right angle, that even though I was plain, it was temporary and soon I’d be pretty. I told myself that I definitely wasn’t ugly. My brothers, however, said I was ugly. Whatever. I cared so much, but I put a lot of effort into not caring. I was punk rock. Maybe it was better to be ugly if the alternative was to be plain.

we just sat on the sofa and watched horror movies on VHS, eating Pop-Tarts, which felt so far away from what I thought sex might be that it seemed safe.

But I was sixteen. I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.

Sometimes, when I get really stressed, I just kind of lose myself? Like I go into some trance, my ears start ringing. I feel kind of fuzzy and hot. And I can kind of be . . . destructive, I guess. Not often, right? But sometimes. Anyways, my mom says that I jumped on my dad and tried to claw his eyes out and some of my dad’s employees had to drag me off of him and hold me down. Like, they sat on me for a pretty long time. They said I was speaking in tongues or something.”

Was this how love worked? You shared something personal, stood close to each other? I wasn’t attracted to him. I didn’t know him. All I knew was that we both had dads who sucked. All I knew was that we were both alone.

“I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.

And that was it. That was going to be our summer. If something happened to me, it would happen to him. The next few months opened up, turned shimmery in the heat. We’d make something. So, we were friends now.

I kept it inside of me, and that weirdness and sadness vibrated all the time, and maybe I’d just been waiting for someone who wanted me.

That was how it worked. If you couldn’t see it, if you pushed it into a dark corner, it didn’t exist. But here it was.

he gently, little by little, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, folded like an accordion, as if the copier had done origami, and then he handed the sheet to me. I smoothed it out. It was the ass of one of my stupid brothers.

It worked. I knew this didn’t make Zeke a genius, but it did make him smarter than my brothers, the only boys I spent time around, so I felt like I’d made a good choice for the summer.

We were teenagers in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. We didn’t know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol or anything like that. We thought we’d made it up. And I guess, for us, we had.

It’s what, I imagined, art looked like. Ugly and beautiful at the same time.

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

“My mouth tastes like blood,” I admitted. “It’s okay,” he told me. So I let him kiss me. And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this moment, my finger bleeding, this boy’s beautiful and messed-up mouth on mine, a work of art between us. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine.

Zeke didn’t need anything, his blood already dried up, but he still put a little bandage on his finger. I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I’d be the one with a scar.

She had no patience for people who might complicate her life or create more work for her, was always rolling her eyes at how stupid everyone else was. She made checklists that no one else ever checked. She frowned a lot. I was slightly afraid of her, even though I knew that she loved me.

And though I knew the divorce had messed her up, it had also seemed to relax her, like the bad thing had finally happened and she didn’t have to keep waiting for it. She chilled out.

One by one, like a Xerox had spit them out, the triplets trudged into the house, each of them reeking of weed and french fry grease.

“I really like you,” he told me. “I like you, too,” I replied. “We can keep doing this?” he asked, meaning, I assumed, everything. The posters, my house, the kissing, Pop-Tarts, skulking around every square inch of the town. “All summer,” I said.

“Maybe even longer,” he said hopefully, which made me blush. I kissed him on the lips and then he was gone.

I thought about my mom, after my dad left us. For months, she had this stunned expression, like every five seconds she realized, once again, that this was all real, that she wasn’t dreaming. And then one night at the dinner table I noticed that her shoulders weren’t up around her ears, that her body was relaxed.

I’d never felt particularly connected to Coalfield; I mean, I felt anchored to it, like the years I’d spent here would make it harder for me to live anywhere else, but I never felt shaped by

Zeke told me that his grandmother had heard about the posters at her Bible study meeting the night before. Some old lady had found one and brought it to the meeting. “They all think it’s got something to do with the devil,” Zeke said. “Devil worship, something like that.”

“Well, now, the police are saying it’s a credible threat, okay? And, you know, I’ve been looking at those posters all over town, and it feels like maybe the beginnings of what you might call psychological terrorism. That’s the angle right now.”

But we made it, right? We made the poster. So we can still control it, I think.” “I don’t think that’s how art works,” he said, unsure of himself,

“I guess I kind of thought that we didn’t want anyone else to understand it, right? Like, it’s just us. We’re the only ones who know what it is.”

“I mean, yeah,” he continued, “but, like, I kind of wanted other people to not understand it in ways that they assumed a really cool artist had made it. I didn’t want them to not understand it in a way that they think we’re devil worshippers who abduct kids.”

I was trying to figure out how to keep everything from falling apart, to hold on to this thing that I’d made, but that was getting harder and harder. And so I was perpetually red-faced, itchy, my shirts soaked with sweat. My whole mouth felt electric. My stomach hurt all the time, and to deal with it, I just ate more Pop-Tarts and Cheetos Puffs, and that made it worse. I’d written fifty pages of the novel in a week; I could not stop. I needed a story that I could control,

I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was. Every single thing that you loved became a source of both intense obsession and possible shame. Everything was a secret.

We were so young. It didn’t seem that impossible to us, to jump on a plane, meet up in some run-down park with a single swing and a broken jungle gym, in our sixties, and dig up this time capsule, just so we could say, “We made that. It looks just like I remember.” And then we’d bury it, leave it for someone else to find.

one night I’d had a nightmare and stumbled into the triplets’ room and asked all three of them to let me sleep with them until Charlie, finally, let me crawl into his little twin bed. How in the morning, Andrew and Brian made fun of Charlie, and how he had slammed their heads together like Moe in the Three Stooges, and how I felt charmed by this, the first time my brothers’ violence felt sweet to me.

“No, it doesn’t have to be if we didn’t exist, Frankie. You know, right? The big thing was that we made the poster. If we hadn’t made the poster, he would still be alive.” “Yes,” I admitted. “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 know. I don’t think we have to take all the blame. But we have to take some of it. We really do.” “I’ll take it,” I said. “But that’s as far as I can go with it. I’ll accept it, but I can’t change it.”

AND IT SPREAD. IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN TO ANYONE WHO DIDN’T grow up in the time before the internet how impossible this actually was, and for it to even reach me at that time meant that it was probably five times as prevalent as what I was hearing on the news or reading in the papers.

The only evidence is that I’m still here. And the poster is still here. And I know because I still have the original poster, with my blood and Zeke’s blood on it. And if I start to lose a sense of myself, if I start to drift outside my life, I take the original poster and I make a copy on the scanner/copier/printer in my own private office, and I go somewhere, anywhere in the entire world, and I hang it up.

The Presbyterian church’s sign read IS GOD SKINNY WITH HUNGER FOR YOU? and Zeke said, “Shouldn’t it say, Are you skinny with hunger for God?” and I was like, “Zeke, please.” It was absurd.

I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. 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.

“Just you and me?” I asked. That felt like the most relationshippy thing in our brief time together, though I am now remembering that we did a weird blood pact and, you know, we were responsible for one of the weirdest mysteries in American pop culture.

“Here’s the thing, sweetie. If you love something, you can’t think too much about what went into making it or the circumstances around it. You just have to, I don’t know, love the thing as it is. And then it’s just for you, right?”

I don’t know why I said this all the time, that things that were just slightly confusing were philosophical. Also, I want to say that in college or in grad school, I never took a single philosophy class. But I still say this sometimes when I get anxious about a thing I don’t understand.

To be a teenager, it takes very little to think that someone else might actually know who you are, even as you spend all your time thinking that no one understands you. It’s such a lovely feeling.

I wanted to know what my future was, because in that moment, I could not imagine a future at all. I could not imagine how in the world I would keep this secret for the rest of my life. But I knew I would. And even then, sixteen years old, I knew that I would hate every person in my life who loved me, who took care of me, who helped me find a way to whatever life I would have, because I could never tell them who I was, what I’d done.

“You are going to have such an amazing life, Frankie,” he told me. “If this is how it starts? It’s almost breathtaking how good your life will be.”

you are the most beautiful and wonderful and strangest person I have ever met. You are the most amazing person in the world. And you just have to live long enough to make the rest of the world understand that, okay? You have to stay alive.” “I’ll try, Mom,” I said, and I started crying again.

“I guess I just mean that sometimes your mom says that things will be better for you in the future. And I think they will, Frankie. I think you’re really smart and I think you’ll do fine. But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”

But I knew, more than that, he was ashamed that he’d hurt me, had done something awful. If he didn’t check on me or apologize for what he’d done, he could pretend it hadn’t happened.