Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Creepy Ephebe

In the meantime Luke played go. Midnights were wasted away on a thousand blitz games on the online go servers. He sped to lose a thousand games against the double-digit low-ranked kyu players, held his own against the single digit kyus, wasted the time of dan-level players. He came to the go club every week; the atmosphere differed little from week to week: Brett herding newcomers, Cindy sighing about male players being such klutzes, Ling Ling bemoaning her tight college schedule of booze and screenwriting, Luke ordering the same lemonade and three-inch diameter peanut butter cookie.

This week, he was seated before little Zoë wagging the go tail: play me, play me. She played quickly with nary a thought or a twist of caution on her lollipop face. A good sound to Luke it was, the chaos of stones slap-slap, slap-slap. It helped a little against the winds eroding away his skull.

Albert, shielding the fall of light on the table, stood by Luke’s game. “Is that you? I didn’t recognize you,” he said cheerily, to which Luke lifted from the cloud of the game to the cloud of a face above crowned with sandy brown curls.

Nope, Luke couldn’t recall who he was.

Stout, short-necked, Albert laughed shakily, sat down, and rested his pointed chin over the head rail. “These kid players at the OC club. They play mean go. They play fast and win fast—You remember Dawn? She’s getting married. Who gets married at nineteen?”

Luke crossed his legs, remembering the crispy crunch of Dawn’s curls, her lips mushroom moist against his lips. Trent had ordered him to date girls all because of the ghastly Stanley Hoyt debacle. Wide and loud, he hawked the halls for a date until the junior year princess of the swim team, Dawn Bergman, accepted. But princesses only date frogs in fairy tales as Lisa would say. This princess scudded into motion a deception that caused him two broken ribs all because he had hurt her ex-boyfriend, Stanley Hoyt.

Caressing a stone in his fingers, Luke tried to shape an unattractive asymmetry into her smile, something uncanny in her manners that should have forewarned him of her malice. And yet amidst the leaves of his memory rustling about him, the burlesque glitter of her smile lapped him; her air, strawberry and coconut, fluffed him. The pain of the broken ribs was a void; were they even broken? What did it matter? It was high school, long forgotten, long forgiven, not that there was anything to forgive. He had hurt Stanley.

A foreboding festered and would not leave him to attend the game. A twist knotted in his throat as he thought of the etiquette his mother would demand him to observe—Yes, a wedding, felicitations should be in order.

He said to Albert, “If you do see her again, please give here my hearty congratulations. Is a wedding present more usual?”

“No freaking clue—Marrying before you can legally drink just creeps me out.”

Luke gave a turn of the head and smiled too wide, as Lisa would pinch him to do when she felt he was being weird around people again. He pulled on his long beard, not un-roughly, while his mind sauntered the halls of high school again. Perhaps Albert was the skinhead who kept punching lockers or the chubby boy who stammered about arrow poison frogs. Ultimately Albert was just another human he must have seen and passed by everyday in high school, like the front entrance gargoyle whose chipped nose he only realized on the last day of senior year. The puzzle of Albert was already uninteresting and making him drowsy, and with that, he concentrated on slapping stones.

“New York must be real nice. What are you in town for anyway?” His voice shaded with an unsteady, unsettling thrill that did not bother Luke as much as the seeming fact of their acquaintance. “How’s Columbia?”

Luke held back a black stone in between his fingers and was ground still with surprise. It was undeniable; the man did know him. Warming his soul was the joy of the day when he palmed the thick mail packet from Columbia University. His heart was high with the birds soaring in the sky but then crashed back to the prison of his chest when he espied the velvet turban of Lisa limping out of the car.