Avalyn stood in the room’s center. I couldn’t remember anyone beyond my immediate family being there before. She surveyed my bookcase from top to bottom shelf, fingering titles, hmming or aahing occasionally. She ran her hand along the knobs of wood on my bedpost, then faced the wall. “I didn’t like that film,” she said, indicating my Capricorn One poster. She turned to Angry Red Planet. “And that, I never saw.”
I stretched out on one end of my bed; Avalyn took the other. “Your mother doesn’t care much for me,” she said. “We are very different people. She thinks I’m stealing you away, I can tell.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” I forced a smile, as if it were no big deal.
“I had a boyfriend in high school once,” Avalyn said. The sentence came out of nowhere, scaring me a little. “I wasn’t so fat then. On our second date he brought me home late, and while I was getting out of the car my father appeared from the darkness, clamped his hand on the boy’s arm, and told him if it happened again he’d personally blow his head clean off. So much for my love life.”
From where I sat, I could see out the open window. Wasps dipped and spun from their muddy roof nest, threatening to fly inside. Down the hill, random lights in Little River’s kitchens and porches and rec rooms flickered on and off. The ballpark’s lights created a halo over the entire town. I remembered times when Deborah and I watched the players running bases, catching fly balls, sliding into home. I wondered if the boy from Little League still played ball somewhere; if he lived close enough to contact.
I reached under my bed for the framed photograph. “This is what I need to show you.” Avalyn scanned the fifteen Little Leaguers to find me; when she saw my face, she tapped her finger against the glass. “Oh, don’t look at him,” I said, and I swaddled her finger with my hand to guide it toward the top row. “Here he is: the one from sleep.”
Avalyn stared at him, glanced up at me, and stared at him again. “So he’s your man. Yes, he could well be one of us.” Minutes passed without a word, and I wondered what she’d say next. Then, without warning, Avalyn lifted the framed picture and slammed it, hard, against her knee. The glass splintered. She brought it down again, the frame’s corner striking the spot where the tracking device’s scar curled across her skin. Glass shards tumbled onto my mattress and fell to the floor.
“What-” I began. “Why?”
“Shush.” Avalyn brushed the glass away with her hand, unconcerned with cuts. She extracted the photograph from its frame, shook off excess splinters and glass dust, and held it to her face. “Oh, Brian,” she said. “It’s just as I thought.”
She handed me the eight-by-ten, back side facing up. Printed there, in blue ink across the white, was a list of names:
(Top row, l to r): C. Bailey, M. Wright, O. Schrag, M. Varney, D. Porter, J. Ensminger, G. Hodgson, N. McCormick, Coach J. Heider. (Bottom row, l to r): V. Martin, J. Thieszen, B. Lackey, B. Connery, E. Ellison, T. Ellison, S. Berg.
Our names. My name, “B. Lackey.” And the kid’s name. “I can’t believe this,” I said. “I should have thought of this.” I didn’t care about the others; my mind had speedily linked the boy at the end of the top row with “N. McCormick.” I said the name aloud; said it again. It was the one the aliens kept secure in their confidential files, the one they’d logged alongside “B. Lackey.”
“And now we have to find him,” Avalyn said, reading my mind.
She reached into her dress pocket. “By the way, I almost forgot.” She centered something in my open palm. It was the hair ball from that night on her farm, the red and white and black fur she’d pulled from the barbed wire fence. “I wanted you to have this,” she said. “Whether it’s the little calf’s fur or not, it’s proof that he was alive, that he was a living, breathing thing before they came for him.” Avalyn closed my fingers into a fist around the hair ball and moved closer to me. “We always need proof. To remember something’s happened.”
She began unbuttoning her dress then, fiddling with one after the other until she’d reached her waistline and the dress had bunched around her stomach. She wore a T-shirt underneath, a shirt that had once been black but had faded to a dark gray. The front sported a cracked and flaky iron-on transfer of her favorite band, their caricatured faces pouting and snarling.
“Kiss,” I said, and before the word had fallen from my lips she pressed against me, leaning into my body, my head twisting against the pillow. She muttered something like, “I thought you’d never ask,” and as she spoke she jammed her mouth against mine. Our teeth clacked together. She thrust her tongue inside my open mouth, and somehow I recognized it, as if her tongue had dwelled there before, long ago. But I didn’t know how to kiss back. I kept my mouth as still as possible, waiting for her to stop.
She pulled away and winced. “Ouch.” The muscle of her palm had snagged on a stray glass shard. I leaned toward her to examine it, but she pushed me back, untucking my shirt to maneuver her hand inside. She touched my chest, feeling the tiny blond hairs around my belly button, moving up to tickle the scattering of hair between my ribs. Her hand leaked a residue of blood, and it left a dark red grin beneath my right nipple. Her finger erased the smudge; flicked the nipple. “I really want to make you feel good, Brian.” When she said my name, my face went hot.
Avalyn slid the shirt from her shoulders. Her body’s top half exposed, she lay down on me, her head on my chest, her breasts brushing my stomach. Something was horrifying about it: Avalyn, cowering against me, suddenly pitiful in the way her weight bunched together, the white flesh folding into itself, the skin terraced and scalloped and ridged. But even more horrifying was the body she lay upon: my scrawny arms, the uneven tan from the days I’d spent mowing lawns, the zits in a scarlet constellation on my chest.
I tried to concentrate on something else-the new name I’d learned, the upcoming days that would be filled in pursuit of N. McCormick-but, as desperately as I tried, I couldn’t detach myself from what was happening. I was hard. Avalyn snaked her bleeding hand into my jeans, not bothering to unbuckle or unzip.
Before she even touched me, I realized what would happen. It was as if I’d known this for years, that I knew the secret to the reason I’d never approached anything remotely resembling sex: it would take me back to something I didn’t want, a memory that had hovered for years, hidden, in my head. Her hand clamped around me, one finger gingerly tracing a line up my penis, stopping at the tip. I felt as though a part of me were vanishing. I felt the same trapped feeling I’d felt only days before, that night in her pasture.
“I can’t,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Brian,” Avalyn said, and although her lips moved, I heard another voice entirely.
It will feel good, the voice said. The kid’s voice. Yes, the voice of N. McCormick.
Open your eyes, it will feel good.
Something was spinning. My head had become a confused Ferris wheel, winding and twirling out of control. I had cried in Avalyn’s pasture, but I would not cry again. Out the window, the wasps still buzzed and dipped from their nest, peering in at us with their rainbowy eyes. B. Lackey, they murmured. N. McCormick. I gripped Avalyn’s wrist and pulled her arm from my jeans.
She went limp. “I’m sorry.” This time, the voice was hers, not the kid’s. I wanted to tell her no, don’t be sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. But I couldn’t speak. She rose from the bed, wriggling into the arms of her dress. I could see the red trickle forming a line from her palm to her wrist. One of the wasps had flown into the open window; it twirled in intoxicated circles against the ceiling. “I’m so sorry,” Avalyn said.