Free Strays by Matthew Krause

particular summer, everyone else had somehow persuaded their parents to drive them to Wichita to the second Star Wars movie.  At the pool the boys played Han Solo or Luke Skywalker and girls played Princess Leia, and there was splashing and dunking and the chance slick friction of moist skin wrestling in the water, hormones arriving and bodies changing.  Kyle could have entered the pool.  He could have gone on pretending that he was one of them and swum deep and grabbed a pair of peri-pubescent female legs and wrestled and made her scream. 
    But he did not know how the game was played.  He had not seen the movie.
    Summer ended in August, and Kyle entered the seventh grade and moved from Wilson Elementary to the Junior High building.  There had been little time to adapt.  The Junior High took in students from all five Landes grade schools, and suddenly Kyle’s social circle had been increased by 250%.  It was a time to establish boundaries and cliques, to find your people, to determine where you stood on the social ladder.  It was the seventh grade, and it would take the better part of a year to determine whether you were “cool” or a “loser.”  By mid-autumn, the margins were starting to materialize.
    Kyle had been toward the bottom, of course.  Perhaps, as he long suspected, it was because he was the last one to see the movie, and by the first week in November, he still hadn’t seen it. 
    But the second week in November was special. 
    On November 1st, the banner had been hung off the colorful marquee of the Landes Theater: EMPIRE STRIKES BACK COMING NOV. 12 .  At last the second Star Wars movie would be there , right there in Landes, and since downtown was walking distance from Kyle’s house, it would be no problem for him to finally see this movie for himself.  It still took a bit of howling and gnashing of teeth to get permission, of course, and Dad had even laughed a bit at Kyle’s fixation, chiding him with “it’s only a movie” again, but in the end, Dad finally gave in, allowing Kyle the two o’clock matinee that Sunday after church. 
    Kyle had squirmed at church that day, squirmed at the table during the midday meal until at last his parents unlocked his cage.  He ran all the way to the Landes Theater, past Mrs. Forman’s house (the one that looked like it was haunted), through Gortner Park, across the parking lot between Pinoak and Amurcork Avenues, crossing Main in the middle of the block to get to his destination.  He had gone to the theater expecting an absolutely amazing experience, and he was not disappointed.  Snow monsters and Imperial walkers and asteroid fields and lightsaber duels … it boggled the mind.  Sure, the movie kind of left you hanging—at the end the Empire was still at large and Han Solo was now encased in carbonite to be delivered to Jabba the Hut—but at least by the time the third movie would roll around Kyle would be fifteen, and it would be harder for Dad to refuse him.
    That was what he hoped, anyway.
    As the final credits rolled, Kyle walked out onto the street that fine Sunday afternoon, unseasonably warm for November.  He thought about space and far-off places.  He thought about how he would probably never see them—he had no doubt he would grow old and die in this little town.  In the end he thought about heroes.  It would be nice to be a hero, he thought, and he wondered which kind of hero he liked more.  Roguish Han Solo with cool blaster in hand and an even cooler Wookie for a sidekick, both of them were adept at mowing down armies of stormtroopers.  Or headstrong Luke Skywalker, vacillating between fiery and enlightened, but nothing to be messed with once he flicked on that lightsaber.  Kyle couldn’t decide which was better, shooting stormtroopers or having a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader.  Sure, Vader turned out to be Luke’s father, but hell, how cool would that be, having a Dark Lord as your dad instead of the goofy,