The Garage Xerox Copier Symbol in Now Is Not the Time to Panic
The Copier's Origins: Stolen, Broken, Abandoned
The garage Xerox copier enters the story as a piece of stolen, broken, and abandoned machinery. Frankie's triplet brothers pried open a lock at the high school's storage building and hauled the machine home, along with boxes of toner and stacks of paper, thinking it might be worth something. Instead, they used it to produce roughly three hundred photocopies of their own buttocks, which they taped across Frankie's bedroom walls. The machine broke under the weight of their repeated sitting, and the brothers spent a day arguing about which of them had ruined it before covering it with a tarp and forgetting it.
The copier's backstory matters because it establishes the machine as a symbol of neglect and dysfunction before it becomes anything else. It sits in a garage filled with boxes of junk stacked to the ceiling—stuff Frankie's father didn't bother to take when he left and her mother never threw out. The copier is part of a landscape of abandonment: the father's departure, the mother's refusal to enter the garage, the brothers' careless destruction. When Frankie shows Zeke the machine, she frames it as a discovery: she had forgotten it existed until that very afternoon.
From Junk to Instrument: Zeke's Repair
Zeke's repair of the copier is the first collaborative act between the two teenagers. While Frankie's brothers gave up on the machine, Zeke works through a checklist of possible issues, whispering to himself as he goes. He finds a crumpled piece of paper jammed inside—a photocopy of one of the brothers' buttocks, folded like an accordion. The image is absurd, but the repair itself transforms the machine's meaning. It becomes something functional, something the two of them can use.
The copier's repair also establishes Zeke's role in their partnership. Frankie notes that this doesn't make Zeke a genius, but it does make him smarter than her brothers, the only boys she spends time around. The copier becomes a test of sorts—a way for Frankie to measure Zeke against the careless boys she grew up with. He passes.
The Copier as Site of Intimacy and Experimentation
The copier quickly becomes a playground for the two teenagers' creative experiments. They place objects on the glass and watch as the machine distorts them, making them seem unreal. They drag a photo of Cher across the glass, producing a smeared, melting image. They press their faces against the glass, producing images that look like two dead people pulled into a black hole. They don't know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol; they think they've invented something new.
The copier is also the site of Frankie's first kiss. During a face-copying session, she inches forward and kisses Zeke while the machine hums and the light streams past them. The kiss is framed as art—she tells him it felt like a nice way to do it, like art. The resulting copy shows their faces smashed together, ugly and beautiful at the same time. The copier thus becomes a space where intimacy and creativity are inseparable.
Mass Reproduction and the Loss of Control
The copier's most significant function comes when Frankie and Zeke create their poster. They draw an image of giant hands reaching toward children in beds, add their own blood to the paper, and then feed it through the machine. The reproduction process is described in escalating increments: ten copies, then ten more, then fifty, then a hundred. Frankie wants a million of them now. The act of copying feels like alchemy, like all those brooms in Fantasia.
But the copier's power to reproduce also becomes the source of the novel's central anxiety. When Frankie and Zeke discover a poster on a change machine at a car wash that isn't theirs—printed on nicer paper, with a pristine white color—they realize someone else has copied their work. The machine's logic of reproduction has escaped their control. Zeke worries about credit; Frankie tries to rationalize it, asking whether it's stealing to make a copy of something when they themselves made copies.
This moment marks a shift in the copier's symbolic meaning. It was once a tool for private creation; now it represents the uncontrollable spread of their creation into the world. The copier's very function—making copies—becomes a threat.
The Copier and the Novel's Themes
The copier connects to several of the novel's central themes. It embodies the unintended consequences of creative expression: Frankie and Zeke make something they love, and it spirals into a town-wide panic. It also speaks to authorship and anonymity—the copier makes it possible for anyone to reproduce the poster, blurring the line between creator and copyist. And it is inseparable from collaborative creation as connection: the copier is where Frankie and Zeke first work together, where they kiss, and where they make the poster that binds them for decades.
For Frankie, the copier represents a claim to agency. She declares that she is claiming it, that it is hers now—then corrects herself: ours. The shift from mine to ours captures the speed with which the machine becomes shared territory. For Zeke, the copier is a means of proving himself and of building something with Frankie. Their partnership is forged in the garage, around the machine.
The copier also connects to the burden of secrecy. After making the posters, Frankie and Zeke cover the machine again, piling junk on top so no one will know what they've been doing. The copier must be hidden, just as their authorship must be hidden. And it connects to the persistence of memory: the original poster, which Zeke tells Frankie to keep for the rest of her life, becomes a physical object that carries the memory of their summer together.
Study Questions
1. Why does Frankie claim the copier as hers, then immediately revise to ours? What does this reveal about her relationship with Zeke?
Frankie's claim comes after she has shown Zeke the machine and he has expressed interest in it. The shift from mine to ours in a single sentence captures the speed with which their partnership forms. The copier is the first thing they share, and it becomes the foundation for everything that follows—the experiments, the kiss, the poster. Frankie, who has been isolated and lonely, is claiming not just a machine but a collaborator.
2. How does the copier's function as a reproduction machine connect to the theme of authorship and anonymity?
The copier makes it possible for Frankie and Zeke to create the poster without anyone knowing who made it. But it also makes it possible for anyone else to copy the poster, as they discover when they find an unauthorized version on nicer paper. The copier thus raises questions about what authorship means when reproduction is so easy. Frankie's rationalization—wondering whether copying is stealing when they themselves made copies—suggests that the copier has blurred the line between creator and copyist.
3. What does the discovery of the unauthorized copy reveal about the limits of control?
Frankie and Zeke believe they control their creation. They decide how many copies to make, where to put them, and who gets to know about them. The unauthorized copy shatters this illusion. Someone else has taken their work and reproduced it, on better paper, without their knowledge. The copier's logic—that anything can be copied—has turned against them. This moment foreshadows the larger loss of control that follows, as the poster spreads and the town panics.
4. How does the copier serve as both a site of intimacy and a source of anxiety?
The copier is where Frankie and Zeke first kiss, where they make their first collaborative art, and where they create the poster that binds them. It is a space of closeness and creation. But it is also the source of their anxiety. The copier's ability to reproduce the poster means the poster can spread beyond their control. The same machine that enables their intimacy also enables their exposure. This tension—between creation and loss of control—runs through the entire novel, from the garage experiments to the discovery of the unauthorized copy to the Coalfield Panic of 1996 that Mazzy Brower investigates decades later.