At a traffic light, two heavy-metallers looked over from their car. “Skinhead,” one of them barked. The word was so different from faggot or freak. I could get used to it.

I drove to North Monroe, anticipating Neil’s mom’s reaction to my hair, hopeful she would accompany me to thrift stores. A car sat in the ditch, a Toyota, the sun’s glare ricocheting off its windshield. But the Impala was nowhere to be seen. I figured Mrs. McCormick was at work. I rang the doorbell anyway; heard the spooky echo from inside, like a child’s voice calling across an empty canyon. I doubted she’d locked the door, but I didn’t try opening it.

“You’re probably having the time of your life,” I said aloud to the nonexistent Neil. And then, telepathically: Come back.

There was no way I could steal from the United Methodist Thrift without Neil. I couldn’t do a lot of things without him. I walked back to the car, and as I did I noticed someone watching me. A figure lounged in the Toyota’s driver’s seat, a blond kid whose eyes approached a bugging-out-of-his-head wideness. I recalled the stories Neil had told about his neighbors: how they were morons, how they had eavesdropped and spied on him and his mom since the day they’d moved in.

I started the car. In the mirror, I saw him getting out, stepping toward me. For a millisecond I panicked, half-remembering a story about a young drifter-murderer who crept up on victims in their cars, unsheathing his foot-long butcher knife, ripping it across their throats before they had the chance to scream… No, this kid looked as harmless as a baby beagle.

He stood beside the Gremlin, contemplating me. His stare was benign, not the kind I was used to from strangers. Sweat stained his too-tight shirt, his glasses disorganized his face, and the zit above his lip looked ready to burst. Still, something about him was cute. “Are you N. McCormick?” he asked.

“N.?” I almost laughed. “Neil?” Then I did laugh. “No. I’m certainly not Neil McCormick. He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“So it’s Neil,” he said, then said the name again. He seemed briefly excited; in seconds, that excitement fizzled, altered, became something close to disappointment. “Doesn’t live here. I’ve visited nearly all the McCormicks listed in the phone book, trying to find him. It’s taken all week. I’ve spent too much money on gas.”

That sounded illicit. I leaned out the car window, inspecting him head-to-toe. “Who are you, the FBI?”

“I used to know Neil,” he said. “At least, I think I did. But weird things happened to us, he and I together, and I need him now. To help me remember.” He blinked twice nervously, a gesture that made him seem close to tears. He was holding something, twisting and twirling it in his fingers. It was an unsightly ball of red and black hair, and it resembled a chunky mouse. He pocketed it. “Do you have any clue how I could get in touch with him?”

“Yes,” I said. If he was interested, I could tell him a lot. And perhaps he could tell me something about Neil, could answer some of the million questions that had sprouted in my head during the past few months. I held out my hand. “I’m a friend of Neil’s. Eric Preston.”

He shook it. “Brian Lackey,” he said.

We looked away, toward the McCormick house. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a very long time.

Amazing things were happening. Summer fizzled, depositing its remains in swirling piles of leaves, sap that trickled from trees, and skeletal tumbleweeds that bounced through our town’s streets. The air smelled of ripening squash and melon. The nights became longer and cooler. I spent them lazing on my bed, my gaze directed out the window, watching migrating birds that scattered the sky. A family of possums took up residence in the trees beside our house. The cicadas buzzed their autumn lullabies; in the mornings, as I mowed my designated lawns for the final times that year, I’d find their crispy yellow shells fastened to trees, signposts, the frames of Little River’s decks and porches.

Gradually, my alien dreams ceased. Other dreams replaced them, these more brief and unsophisticated, new crystal-clear scenarios into which the eight-year-old Neil McCormick sometimes figured. I abandoned my dream log beneath my bed.

A certain sentence rang through my sleep, one spoken by Neil McCormick, seven words that I first remembered on the night Avalyn had been inside my room. Open your eyes, it will feel good.

College began in September. I enrolled, bought books, and studied. My mother surprised me by pulling into the driveway in a used Mustang she’d bargained from a lot in Hutchinson. The Toyota became my hand-me-down. I drove to school in the mornings and returned in the evenings, the routine falling into place.

Things went as expected; my courses, however, were easier than I’d predicted. And my psychology, calculus, meteorology, and English classes interested me less than did my growing friendship with Eric Preston. Since I’d met him, we’d been spending the steamy afternoons by frequenting the dollar-fifty matinees at the Flag Theater or listening to tapes in his room. I fibbed to my mother and claimed he was a friend from school I studied with. Initially I’d thought him strange, insisting we had nothing in common. But I realized that was wrong-I was no doubt just as strange. Besides, had I ever had a real friend before? Avalyn, perhaps, but she was thirteen years my senior. And as the days pitched forward, as my uncertainty about the UFOs and aliens grew, I wanted to divorce myself from my obsession with Avalyn. Although still preoccupied with the need to discover the solution to my missing time, I was no longer so certain the answer emanated from the spaceship I’d seen hovering over my house. The only thing I now knew was that somehow, Neil McCormick had my answer. And Eric Preston would lead me to him.

One night, not long after we’d met, Eric and I sat in his room and told each other about our lives. He outlined his childhood in Modesto, California, describing what he called “a completely normal life” until he started high school-when, he said, he “hung out with a wild crowd,” began “committing little crimes and taking cheap drugs,” and “came to the conclusion” he was gay. “A queer. A full-fledged fag.” He watched me when he said that, waiting for my reaction.

“Doesn’t bother me,” I said.

Eric continued. “Ultimately, I was knocked senseless by my parents’ car accident.” At that point, his face thawed slightly. “So here I am, in Kansas, with my dead dad’s parents.” His eyes closed and opened in slow motion. “Reborn.”

My turn. My childhood seemed tame when compared to his. I hadn’t taken drugs, hadn’t committed crimes, and was about as versed in sex as I was in sign language or acupuncture. So I made things brief, supplying little details: as a kid, I loved to capture grasshoppers and dragonflies in mayonnaise jars. Once my sister, Deborah, her friend Breeze, and I had tromped through an overgrown field to search for sandhill plums, only to be plagued with poison ivy the following day. My father never really liked me. In high school, I’d snagged second prize in a state-wide math contest…

Ultimately I cast anchor on what I knew Eric wanted to hear: why I’d chosen to seek out Neil McCormick. I chronicled the central mystery of my life, my obsession. I explained why I thought something important, even profound, remained hidden in the empty cracks from my eight-year-old summer; that Halloween two years later. And I ended by telling him about my interest in Avalyn. I hesitated; although no longer certain the UFO belief was truth, at least I considered that story intriguing or out of the ordinary. So I told Eric about the slight possibility that Neil and I were the victims of an abduction.