Free The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks

pronounced ridge above his brow, all of which made it tempting to surmise he had some Neanderthal DNA floating around in him. Combine his general, hulking appearance with the last name Lungford, and it didn’t take long for his nickname to originate or stick.
    The rumor was Lunky had played defensive end on his college football team—probably at one of those jock schools that had majors like “Personal Communications”—and that the sports department had hired him without much vetting, mostly with the intention of having him bat cleanup for their softball team.
    But for reasons that were still unclear, sports promptly shipped him over to news, where he wasn’t considered much of a value-add, either. His byline had, so far, been suspiciously absent from the newspaper. From what I gathered, people tried not to talk to him. So he hung around the newsroom, all day and halfway into the night—long after most of the other interns had gone home—with apparently nothing to do.
    As I approached him, sitting in a chair that looked too small for him, alone in the raft of desks where we stick the interns, I actually felt sorry for him. Poor Lunky, dim, dull, and friendless, was reading a thin paperback that more or less disappeared in his massive hands. I couldn’t tell what was on the cover, but it was about the size and shape of a comic book.
    “Hi, Kevin,” I said. “I’m Carter Ross. We’ve been assigned to work on a story together.”
    He held up a finger, as if he didn’t want to break his concentration from the exploits of the Green Lantern. I watched him read for a second—at least I couldn’t see his lips moving—then he finally looked up.
    “Sorry, I just got to a good part,” he said, then turned his attention back to his reading. “Listen to this: ‘The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep?’”
    I felt my head cocking to one side.
    “What … What are you reading?”
    “Emerson.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Emerson.”
    “As in Ralph Waldo?”
    “Of course,” Lunky said. “I actually started out with Thoreau—he was going to be my ‘summer beach read,’ if you will. But I just wasn’t getting the most out of my Thoreau because I wasn’t as current as I wanted to be on my Emerson. Trying to understand Thoreau without being solid with Emerson would be like”—he paused, groping for the right analogy—“trying to make sense of a baby without having ever met its mother.”
    “Uhh,” I said, mostly because it expressed the sum total of my knowledge about the subject. As an English major at Amherst, I should probably have been a little more conversant on all things transcendental. But I put in more hours at the student newspaper than I ever spent in the stacks. I usually just tried to fake my way through these kinds of discussions.
    “This is some incredible stuff,” he continued, fanning back pages in what I now recognized was no comic book. “Check this out, ‘… why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields.’”
    Lunky leaned back, blown away. “ There is more wool and flax in the fields! Can you imagine writing that in 1836? The nerve it took.”
    His eyes were fixed on some far-off point, his thoughts weighted with profundity.
    “Kevin, I thought you … played football in college.”
    “Huh? Oh yeah.”
    “Where did you go to school again?”
    “Princeton.”
    Oh. Yeah. A real football factory, that place.
    “I finished my undergraduate degree in the spring,” he said. “I’m actually starting my Ph.D. in English there in the fall. I’m planning to write my dissertation on Philip Roth. He grew up here in Newark, you know.”
    “Yeah, I, uh, knew that.”
    “I visited his boyhood home yesterday—81