Free Close Encounters by Jen Michalski Page A

Tara’s.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she would giggle, lifting her legs straight up .
    â€œI’m branding you,” I answered. “Hey, do you see that dog on TV, Scooby Doo?”
    â€œWhat dog?” she answered, cocking her head toward the right and staring at the light and pixelation .
    Chrissie squeezes my hand, and I’m crying, and I’m sure she thinks I’m a nut. If the looney bird drove by just now, I would climb in and fall asleep. I would run my hand along my mother’s corduroys and know her, just by the touch. Touch is all we’ve ever known, our family. Everything out here, it’s just so deceiving. Maybe I am just really high and actually lying on my bed at home, and it’s only been three minutes, not three years. Not a lifetime, a lifetime without touch. When Chrissie has to go home because of curfew, I scrape together my last few dollars for the subway uptown, maybe up to North Charles Street, home. But, inside the station, I sit on the bench and watch the trains slow down and speed up, appearing, disappearing, moving people deep underneath the city to new locations, an elaborate, methodical system of disappearing. One minute they’re here, and the next minute, they’re not.

THE WEIGHT
    IT WAS A STUPID NAME, John Boy, but they called him it because they were just kids, high school kids, not very clever or sophisticated. His real name was Gavin, but no one seemed to remember that. No one seemed to remember how Gavin came to attend Galveston High, either—he did not come up through elementary and middle school with them. Yet, somehow, in high school, there he was—his rich auburn hair longish, rakish—not like the close-cropped cuts that were popular for the boys. And he lived out in the old farmhouse on Whipple Tree Road, a structure that stood vacant for many years, dilapidated, dusty, and mysterious, only to be inhabited a few years ago by Gavin and his equally mysterious family.
    Ava supposed it was the farmhouse that contributed to Gavin’s nickname, along with the pairs of worn Levis and white t-shirts he wore to school day after day. Strangest of all were his shoes—sometimes he appeared in scuffed, round-toed cowboy boats, and other days, he wore moccasins. Never expensive sneakers, the staple of every American boy. These days, when everyone shopped at the mall and tried to cloak their small-town roots as much as possible, Gavin was an anomaly, a throwback, a weirdo.
    A John Boy.
    Ava was not crude. Sure, she smiled when the boys snickered at Gavin or talked about him behind his back, but she never engaged in such teasing herself. She had a reputation as a popular student and daughter of the local doctor to protect.
    Naturally, when Mr. Trebelhorn, their physics teacher, suggested that Gavin tutor her in physics for the last quarter, Ava was hesitant. Surely, Gavin was one of the smartest boys in their class, but could she afford his company in their senior year? He had received heavy ridicule in the parking lot that morning when his truck, an ancient Ford, broke down in front of her boyfriend Lenny Chrisman’s Trans-Am.
    â€œWhen you gonna sell that piece of shit for parts?” Lenny had snickered while Gavin calmly tooled under the hood, his white t-shirt smudged with grease. “Tell you what, John Boy, I’ll give you a nickel for the whole thing.”
    Gavin had been late for first period and, his clothes now smeared with black, had been asked to go home and change. Ava’s humiliation for him was complete when she spotted him, through the window of Mrs. Barlow’s Spanish class, halfway down the road, again tinkering under the hood of his broken-down truck.
    While Gavin seemed completely immune to his daily servings of ridicule, even the act of feeling sorry for Gavin burdened Ava with sorrow she could not bear. She decided she just could not go through with the tutoring in light of her perfect,