Tessellate

#1

"Are you sure you'll be alright, Ben."

I was nodding when Elise drew a smile, patting my hand before she drive again—said 'bye' and 'take care' before leaving, I could still see her car, the shadowy red of its body before it's completely gone right around the corner.

Behind me there a coffee shop, by it's name you know it's not from some franchise you can find in every single corner of the road or mall. Some hipsterish coffee shop with antlers as their logo, san-serif font to emphasis—i bet it's Helvetica Neue, combination light and ultra light—and the name is Hunting Deer which makes me a bit confused about the correlation of hunting and coffee. I might never understand their philosophy but I enter the coffee shop anyway, in the end I need caffeine.

White antlers hang on white brick wall, no colour except wooden texture that you can find in uniformed chair, some green from tropical high end plants and black accent from the chalkboard behind the cashier. The barista smiled at me, I smile back and look around. Most of them look dapper as they could, the girls mostly wearing this trendy dark lipstick--not black yet, just dark—more into burgundy, a bit vampire-like, but I spot some with no makeup look, kinfolk-ish clothes. Yeah, this is a hipster place indeed.

"Cappuccino for one, please."

"Milk?"

"Huh?"

"What kind of milk do you want?"

Never know there are tons of milk choices here, who the heck drink their coffee with soy milk? Silence got me for a while with my raised eyebrow.

"Can I ask for regular milk?"

"Of course, name?"

"Benoni."

I can see she's confused to say my name back.

"Ben."

With amount of dollar that's surprisingly less than franchise coffee (again, you can choose any kind of milk you need) here I'm waiting for my cappuccino, the only coffee thing I can drink just because they put fair amount of milk inside it. Don't ask me to drink espresso without tremor afterwards, yeah along with flat white and so on.

I sat in the corner, far from the big window but close to the exotic plant with strange-looking leaves. Leaves that you might found in some tropical pattern clothing around Topman, quite trendy, exactly the opposite of me. Plain navy sweatshirt with denim and grey sneakers—the basickest basic, if you want to make it a word.

I checked my phone and, as I expected, I found some messages from Clement. A good friend of mine, he is. In fact he is a year younger than me and had a crush with Belle—my cousin, driven from Belona—yet it makes us even closer. Too close if you want to include our casual-drunk-sex without any kind of commitment, in fact we don't fuss about it at all. Happened here and there and done, no one knows, not even Belle.

Bye Benoni! See you when I see you.

That last sentence from two inches long of word by him, I skipped it sentence per sentence until unconsciously I put a frown on my head, rereading with more attention to a message which pretty much good enough to be a prompt for a short movie. Long story short, I took my paper cup filled with a nice warm cappuccino and by foot I try to reach my dorm, a couple of blocks away.

As soon as I open my dorm, I sense none of Clement's presence. His stuff is pretty much gone, except that Tintin's rocket mini figure which now belongs to me—i won the bet—and a photo of him and me stuck on my study desk. Most of my stuff is still in two nice big suitcases and some I've put in a storage room, meanwhile my mouth is wide open when I saw the bed across mine.

Three frames with family pictures on study desk, one black round thing that I believe is a puck from ice hockey, and nice folded stuff with pretty neat stacked books about things that i'll never understand, never heard the names like John D. Clark or Richard Feynman that's printed on those books, except Stephen Hawking—God! Here I see no sign of Sagmeister, Berman, or even the notorious Saatchi along that stack, I'm wondering what language should I speak here.

"Hey, you must be Carson?"

Strange voice right behind my back and I almost jump as surprise, looking at someone who makes me feel so small, literally. I'm five seven and here he is, a creature so gigantic that I have to make my neck longer just to see his eyes, taller than six feet, I guess around six four. He's blond with a boring haircut, incredibly high forehead that make me assume he might go bald as an eagle not any longer. There's a one inch long scar under the right corner of his mouth.

"It's Ben, please. Hey, is that a puck that you got framed?"

What an idiot, I am.

And I can see his smile in an instant. He all but run to framed puck and hold it, play it around while he sat on his bed—Clement's bed, in any kind of reason I just don't want to betray my old friend this soon. I don't need more Sherlockian deduction, I know he is a hockey player.

"Yeah, from the first goal I scored in high school."

"So you've played hockey since high school, huh?"

"Naaah, I've been playing as long as I can remember." I heard a deep sigh, a sigh of someone who just tell me a tale of himself, with achievement and pride slither in humbleness. He put the puck back to its frame. "I'm here because of the sport, you know. It got me this scholarship. Otherwise I might be stuck forever in Quebec with my parents and my sisters."

I'm amazed.

"Oh wow, and you are majoring in?"

"Engineering Physics."

Hockey player studying engineering physics? Are you kidding me? Finding this out makes me feels like I'm the laziest person on earth. Even though in my defence I live with my motto--to do what I love and embrace every second of it. Might sound like a loser but why should I care?

"That's effing cool—hum..."

"James, James Darling. "

I try to not laugh, even though I want to—God! Please, not just a light laugh but really laughing my ass off just knowing his name. But I know impression in first meeting is always the most important one so I try to not to, seriously I try to not to laugh so hard—so hard I end up scoffing and he notices it. I heard some chuckles coming from him continued by a shrug.

"I know it's a bit funny."

Not just a bit.

"Peterpan much?"

"Relative of Wendy Darling."

Both of us crack up, laugh as we can be.