Eric appeared amazed, but I felt relieved when he didn’t laugh. He professed to be interested in unexplained phenomena as well, especially parapsychology. “I’m telepathic,” he told me. “Well, slightly.” He could prove it by a test: I would concentrate and close my eyes; he would transmit a message, just by staring at my head. I did as he instructed, but didn’t hear any inner voice. “What message did you receive?” Eric asked.

I ventured a guess. “Urn, the weather sure is nice today?”

He winced. “Oh, forget it.”

Outside, cars drag raced through the trailer court’s cul-de-sac. When the noise quieted, Eric asked further questions about the aliens. I mentioned the dreams I’d had; my recent inklings that something more lurked beneath them. When I finished, Eric promised to prepare Neil for our upcoming meeting by informing him about my UFO suspicions. “No, you don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Yes I do. I’ll send him a letter.”

“Hmm.” I imagined Neil McCormick’s fingers tearing at Eric’s envelope, the same fingers I’d dreamed gripping mine. I saw him reading, pausing over the words about me, and then, as he gradually remembered, closing his eyes and smiling.

One morning, the telephone woke me, and minutes later my mother appeared in my bedroom doorway. “It’s Avalyn,” she said. I hadn’t seen Avalyn since that night on my bed, the night of her failed attempt at whatever she was attempting. I’d only spoken to her twice that month. In many ways, I missed her. But an inner voice held me back, instructing to put my Avalyn visits on hiatus until I discovered more about Neil and our past together. “Tell her I’m asleep,” I said.

My mother grabbed the upstairs extension. “I’m afraid he’s still in bed. All that studying makes him sleepy.” Something-possibly triumph-soured her voice. “Bye-bye.”

Just as I began dozing off, the phone rang again. I knew it wouldn’t be Avalyn, so I answered. It was Eric, asking if I wanted to “go hunt watermelons.” That sounded odd. I hadn’t eaten watermelon in years, due to the simple fact that they had overpopulated my childhood. After my father had left, the field beside our house had become just that: a field. It was no longer a venerated patch of land for growing that sticky-sweet fruit; no longer a place where my father spent summer and autumn hours planting, cultivating, and ultimately picking.

Still, when Eric asked, it piqued my interest. I brushed aside papers scribbled with notes for my upcoming psychology exam. “They won’t be ripe anymore,” I guaranteed. “It’s nearly November.” Then he told me we would go along as guests of Ellen McCormick. Neil’s mother. The person closest to him, the woman I still hadn’t met. “What time should I be there?” I asked.

Now that I had unlimited use of the Toyota, I could come and go as I pleased. I hedged telling my mother the truth, tapping a knuckle on my psychology book to indicate I planned to study at the library. My mother seemed to like Eric slightly more than she had Avalyn; nevertheless, the day after she met him, she’d referred to him as “weird” and “morose,” claiming she believed he “carried some secret in all that depression.” I didn’t care what she thought; he was my friend. I stepped out the door, waving good-bye.

It was jacket-wearing weather, and the road from Little River to Hutchinson had changed color, everything now a dull, deerskin brown. When I pulled into the trailer court and knocked on the door, Eric’s grandma answered. She and her husband gave me the same polite “hello” and “how are you” I’d grown accustomed to. Eric emerged from the hallway, dressed in black, fiddling with a limp, spotted banana peel. “Hey, man,” he said. I followed him to his cramped bedroom, selected a tape by a band I’d never heard, and popped it into the stereo.

“We’re meeting Neil’s mom in an hour,” Eric told me. “Don’t be shocked, but I think we’ll be trespassing through someone’s pasture. Neil’s mom found some field on the west side of town, and it’s full of melons and pumpkins. She wants to make watermelon-rind pickles. She hopes the owners don’t mind if she borrows some melons.”

Eric’s grandpa knocked and entered with a plate of brownies. I sat on the opposite end of Eric’s futon, positioned the brownies between us, then asked, “Why’d she invite me? She doesn’t even know me.”

“Actually, it was my idea to invite you. When she called, I suggested it. She and I became friends, sort of, when Neil was still around. Strange, I guess.” Eric licked the corner of a brownie, testing it, then took a bite. Clumps of hair poked in awkward, three-quarter-inch angles from his head, uncombed from last night’s sleep, his haircut identical to a band member’s on the poster behind him. “Honesty time. I sort of fell in love with Neil. Wasn’t reciprocated, though. Hope that doesn’t freak you out. Anyway, I think Neil’s mom knows that. Could be she feels sorry for me. Could be she’s like us, she doesn’t really have anyone to hang out with. Especially now, with Neil in New York.”

So that was it, I thought. Eric had fallen in love with Neil. “Is Neil-” I couldn’t think of how to finish.

“Yes, he’s a queer,” Eric said. That sounded too harsh, a word I remembered hearing my father say, a scowl engraved into his face, whenever he described the women players on certain softball teams he drove into Hutchinson to watch. It dawned on me that my father, back when he lived with us, had always frequented tournaments at Sun Center, the same softball complex where, according to Eric, Neil had been employed as a scorekeeper.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Before we meet Mrs. McCormick, I’d love it if you could take me to Sun Center. To see where Neil worked.”

Eric grinned, revealing something almost mean in the angle of his mouth. “Gotcha. I’ll show you Sun Center. And then I’ll show you where he really worked.”

We left the bedroom. Eric handed the plate back to his grandpa. “These were scrumptious.” He didn’t bother informing his grandparents where we were going.

Sun Center had closed, the summer’s tournaments finished. Eric stopped the car at the padlocked gate. Ahead of us, a sign read KANSAS’S LARGEST HAVEN FOR SOFTBALL FUN. He clucked his tongue at it. “Sorry. Looks like we can’t get in.” I surveyed the place. The only signs of life were some sparrows, a hunchbacked groundskeeper sprinklering brown plants, and two children who’d somehow managed to climb the fence and now seesawed in the complex’s playground.

“See those press boxes above the bleachers?” I looked to where his finger pointed. “That’s where Neil sat, hour after hour, blabbing on and on about this and that nonsense. You know, ‘Preston the batter, Lackey on deck.’ That sort of stuff.” I tried to imagine Neil sitting there, his face behind the glass, watching every move the players made. All I could envision was the boy’s face in the Little League photo. I saw Avalyn smashing that picture against her knee; next, the prepubescent Avalyn from “World of Mystery,’ her pigtails shooting behind her.

“We had sex up there once,” Eric said. He paused and looked at me, the expression on his face now flushed and dithery, his eyes gone glassy. “Oh, sorry. I’m not trying to shock you. That stuff’s over with anyway.” He backed away from the gate and stomped the accelerator. Dust and dead leaves spun behind the car in a brown cyclone. The kids on the seesaw watched us leave, shaking their middle fingers.

Eric checked the dashboard clock. “This thing’s fifteen minutes slow,” he said, “so we should be meeting Neil’s mom in about ten minutes. Enough time to show you Carey Park.”

We drove east, then south. My parents had taken me to Carey Park once or twice, years back. I remembered playgrounds, softball diamonds, a golf course, a fishing pond, and a minizoo where ostriches, gazelles, and a dusty-bearded buffalo lazed under cottonwood trees. “The animals aren’t there anymore,” Eric said. “Losers from high school were poisoning them, so the city called it quits on the zoo.”