Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

I 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 maybe that would bring him back.

But, honestly, no one in the pre-internet (or pre-internet-as-I-know-it-now) era could really get any consensus on who was responsible, and without deeper research, the origin was no longer important. It was just a thing that existed in the world now, and there was nothing that would change that.

Because when I met him, he was kind of a doofus and not that interesting to me as a romantic partner. He had been into teeth even when he was in college, and that seemed like something I didn’t want to get involved in.

my two front teeth had been badly repaired by a very inexpensive dentist who was not particularly good. And he acknowledged how bad the repair job was and said that someday, when he was a dentist, he would fix my messed-up teeth, free of charge, and so, you can see how unromantic that was,

The triplets had dropped out of college and then worked in kitchens for years and now co-owned a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, one that made modern twists on southern dishes, and it had appeared in tons of magazines, on the Food Network, and it kept them so busy that I almost never saw them.

None of them had married, no children, just three feral boys constantly beating each other up and dating all manner of hip women with tattoos and getting drunk in between appearances on the Today show

They were really into jujitsu now, woodworking, dipping a little into doomsday prep. It was like they made a world unto themselves and they were stunned whenever they saw...

The class was done, and I spent the rest of the semester sitting on his sofa every Tuesday and Thursday, the one reserved for entertaining, and I would do my homework and study, and he would either read or nap, and sometimes we would drink tea and he would talk about literature, admitting that he understood very little of it, and he was kind and lovely. At the end of the year, he told me that his grandson’s wife was a literary agent for a boutique agency in New York, and he had sent her the book,

As Frances Eleanor Budge, I had written four of those books featuring Evie Fastabend causing chaos throughout the town of Running Hollow, both loving and hating her father and sister (their mother long dead).

all bestsellers, and lots of girls dressed up like Evie Fastabend for Halloween, and, well, again, it was deeply strange to watch this thing I had made in my room in Coalfield that summer spread out into the world.

Oh, thank god. The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it, how she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward, just so she didn’t leave us in her dust.

“You didn’t kill them, sweetie. You made a thing. And people went absolutely crazy, and they did strange things and some people died. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you had maybe written it in a diary and that was that, but it’s okay. It was beautiful, and then somebody else, the rest of the world, made it not beautiful.”

He had grown into his features and now looked kind of handsome instead of goofy, which saddened me a little, honestly. He looked like he was one of two things: a man who made coffee tables from reclaimed driftwood and sold them for three grand, or a man who was very, very suspicious of the circumstances of 9/11. I

I waited for permission, because I wouldn’t come in if Zeke said no. I mean, I would later throw a rock through their window with a message that explained everything, but I would not go into their house without Zeke’s okay.

“It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if I stayed,” he replied. “I would have liked to see you again. But I think I needed to go. I think that summer was all we could have.”

I knew that I’d now have to talk to Mazzy Brower, and I’d have to let her really examine the poster. And I’d have to drive back to Coalfield and I would take her to all those places on the map, which I still had, and we would see how many of them were still around.

I’d tell her a version of the story that would become the truth, and I would still get to keep the real thing, what I’d made that summer, a secret. I was keeping it for me and Zeke, but really it was for me. It was just for me.