Free Close Encounters by Jen Michalski

chips into my pockets. Sometimes they offer me clothes, thinking the color schemes I’ve chosen are more out of necessity than a plan. One night I called my parents from this guy’s house on Lombard Street, but I hung up after I heard my mother’s voice. I wondered if they were still together, my parents. I couldn’t imagine, after losing both of their children, that they still would be.
    This girl came up to me one day. I was eating Bar-B-Q-flavored Utz potato chips. I always buy them because the bag is yellow and orange. Usually, I would walk up and down Patterson Park Avenue looking for tricks and looking for Tara, keeping an eye out for the cops and the looney bird. Or else I would be lying in a stupor on a park bench in Patterson Park, seeing glimpses of Tara in the trees. And sometimes myself. Sometimes we are together, and my parents live up there, too. But we can never be together again, the four of us, all of us have been found.
    So the girl comes up to me, she’s young and blonde, and she asks for a chip, says she’s hungry. She’s maybe twelve or thirteen, about Tara’s age, but she’s so wan, so broken and, to be honest, I can’t even remember what Tara looked like. I look at her shoes. They’re pink jellies. I give her the bag, ask her where she’s staying.
    â€œWith my mother over on Bank Street,” she answers, and I ask her to turn around. Because I want to see, want to see how she looks at me. But she doesn’t turn around, she’s suspicious, who the hell is this boy in red and yellow telling her to do shit?
    â€œI lost my sister,” I explain. Last year, maybe six months ago I still had a picture of Tara. It was taken in Ocean City when we were on vacation or something. I think I left it at some guy’s house when I was washing my clothes. When I went back a few days later and knocked on the door, some woman answered. Probably his wife. I told her I had the wrong house and beat it out of there before she called the police.
    â€œOh. Do you want me to help you find her?” The girl asks. She hands me back the bag of chips.
    â€œKeep them.” I push them toward her. “She’s been missing for a long time. Not like five minutes ago. Like four years.”
    â€œOh,” she answers, lighting a cigarette, and I’m almost crying, for my mother, my sister, I don’t know. “She run away or something?”
    â€œNo… I did,” I say, and she stares at the sky. It is not pity or embarrassment; it’s not even boredom, her reaction. It’s as if I said the weather was nice or something. “Your name’s not Tara, is it?”
    â€œNope. It’s Chrissie. Listen, you wanna go with me?”
    â€œGo with you where?”
    â€œLike, go out with me?”
    â€œGo out with you?” I laugh. I had forgotten what laughing sounded like. I laugh so hard I’m crying almost, and everything hurts, the way it does every day, but in a good way today. “You don’t even know me.”
    â€œBut you seem nice. I mean, you let me have your chips.”
    â€œYou’re too young.”
    â€œWell, so are you.”
    â€œMaybe you can be my sister or something.” I compromise, and I’m starting to get itchy, ‘cause I haven’t had anything today. “Listen, you got a couple of dollars? I’ll be your boyfriend if you give me a couple of dollars.”
    Later, it’s evening, and we’re sitting on the bench by the duck pond. The pot we bought has taken the edge off, but I know I’m going to have to get to work soon, walking the beat to get some money, to look for Tara. Chrissie is holding my hand, smoking with the other, and I remember the way Tara and I used to watch cartoons in the den years ago, the soles of our feet touching as we would lie at opposite ends of the couch. I would take my socks off and rub the soles of my feet against