The Egg
Two Men Wearing Green Coats, also Straw Hats with Brown Bows
Yashima Gakutei
By Adora Svitak
Luca’s a California boy in New England. Robert Frost’s New England, iced over in December and hostile to all but grizzled men who think fences make good neighbors. He is supposed to be grateful to be here, full scholarship to a tony boarding school in New Hampshire that has produced poets and politicians, but transplanted from the land of palm trees waving lazily over beach bums on boardwalks he feels only a constant irritation, a tugging lust for the feeling of being warm again. When the alarm goes off at 5:40 in the morning he is dreaming about the L.A. blacktop. The way it looks in the sun. The furthest point where the asphalt meets the horizon, gleaming white. The rooster cawing of his alarm, first gentle—if a caw can be gentle—is getting more demanding now. He is flying towards that singular spot and then it’s not the horizon and the asphalt but Aristide’s body in motion, the light of the squash court reflecting like white paint on his black knee, bent close to the ground as he lunges deep to get the ball. The wall reverberates with impact.
The rooster in his phone is screaming.
“Fuck, Luca,” groans the roommate, half-asleep.
He jerks awake, slams his hand on the glass screen, and swings his legs out of bed. He pulls a well-worn hoodie over his workout clothes and looks critically in the mirror. His hair is piecey, winter has faded his freckles, and the hoodie’s too big for him now, hanging loosely off his thin frame.
He runs towards the gym. He’s always slow in the morning, waiting for his muscles to warm up. At this hour it still looks like night. People move darkly, a sea of bobbing corks. They are swaddled so heavily he can’t identify most of them except by height. There’s the principal, stern-nosed and tall.
“Morning, Luca,” a woman says, stopping with her gloved hand half in her messenger bag. Dr. Pedrad. She teaches his physics class. He tries to respond but when he opens his mouth he lets out an ugly cough, the kind that sounds like a prelude to throwing up. From between his stinging lips comes a plume of white air. Everybody looks like they’re vaping.
He finds his voice. “Morning.”
“Are you doing alright?” she asks, raising one exquisite eyebrow.
“I’m fine.” It must be the mess of his hair, the way he’s dressed, or his lackluster performance on her final—she still looks concerned. “Thanks.”
“I heard from the college counselor about Stanford,” Dr. Pedrad says sympathetically.
Luca shifts from one foot to the other. “It’s fine.”
“Rough news to hear right before a final.”
“It’s okay,” he says again, flatly. How many ways are there to say he doesn’t care, really? That he’d stopped caring, after throwing his too-expensive Stanford beanie into a trashcan. That there are other sunny California schools, just that he didn’t apply to them. As if it would’ve been shameful to end up at USC or UCLA like the other kids in his cohort at his old high school, when the whole point of coming here was getting out. He doesn’t say any of this, just jabs his hands in his pockets to keep them from freezing.
“I was a Stanford reject myself,” she says. “Which I’m kind of grateful for, in retrospect.”
He knows this story: Dr. Pedrad went to Berkeley, researched with a Nobel Prize winner as an undergraduate, and got her name on a paper as a co-author before she turned twenty. An upward trajectory through prodigious research output that culminated in her doctorate. He looks at her and wonders why she’s here, teaching teenagers and living in this no-count town, after all that. “Right. That makes sense.” Even though it doesn’t.
“I should let you go,” she says. “You’re on your way to the gym?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Dr. Pedrad. See you later.” He breaks into a sprint.
Aristide will already be inside, hitting the ball to himself repeatedly like a conveyor belt whirring steadily under and over on its chain. Luca walks noiselessly between the bleachers and the glass doors of the squash courts, looking at the reflection of his shoes in the liquid-like polish of the honey-yellow floor. The courts are empty except for #8. In white shoes and white shorts Aristide whirls light on his feet, a dervish come out of the wall. Finally he lowers his racquet and turns, nostrils flaring from breathing heavily, sweat in a dark line on his T-shirt, the wet cotton clinging so closely to his chest that Luca can almost trace the whole path of the delicate golden chain that skims his clavicle.
“Hey,” Luca says. Aristide nods. There’s a black gym bag with Luca’s racquet. Actually it’s one of Aristide’s spares, sourced from what Luca imagines is a mythical closet in some distant land filled with $200 racquets; via some unspoken agreement it is Luca’s to borrow for the season. The racquet’s grip looks like a row of black bandages wrapped thickly around a wound.
They warm up together, Aristide starting with forehand, and Luca with backhand. Luca’s body knows when Aristide is about to send the ball to him before his brain does; he can feel his arms tense up, the tingle that runs from his neck to the tips of his fingers before he swings. Move like you’re throwing open curtains, Aristide had coached him once. Since then, each time he hits the ball with the right part of the racquet the thwack feels like sunlight. In truth there is no real light here, just wood and glass and walls, a white pock-marked by grey crescents, slivers of moon. Masturbating in prison must feel like this, he thinks, absurdly; bright lights, clanging, doors with little windows that open and close moved by forces unseen. And someone is watching you as you’re finishing, ball rolling limply back across the wooden floor into your open palm, you, heaving, flush-faced, spent.
“Who came up with squash?” Luca asks, volleying.
“Boys in boarding schools. Or prison cells. One or the other.” Aristide returns the ball with such ferocious speed that it flies to the back corner of the court.
“Kinda the same thing, isn’t it?”
Aristide doesn’t dignify this wisecrack with a response.
Crouching down to collect the ball from its hiding place, half-nudged into the dusty space between the floor and the wall, Luca sees its dirty footsteps on the walls and thinks of men etching their names. “How do you know so much about squash, anyway?”
“I played growing up.”
“Does everyone in your family play?”
“All the men.” He takes short, clipped steps to the service box, demarcated by bright red paint on the wood. “You ready?”
“Yeah, I gue—
“Play to eleven?”
“Yeah sure.”
“Love all.”
“So why’s it ‘love’ and not zero?” Luca asks, but Aristide just serves.
Luca swings out and misses.
“1-love,” Aristide says tonelessly.
Luca gets it this time, and hits a drive that makes Aristide run to the back of the court, almost colliding with Luca, who stands dumbly in place before he realizes how far back the ball is going, and he yelps “Sorry!” before Aristide kneels, gracefully, to scoop it from the jaws of gravity. He looks like a statue, Luca thinks. The shirt is clinging to his chest like a Roman breastplate. When the ball comes sailing towards him Luca raises his racquet and volleys.
“Don’t apologize.” Aristide hits it easily.
“I thought it was gonna be a let!” Luca almost slams into the glass as his racquet skims the wall, lifting the ball from a bounce into the corner of the court. These are the hardest shots. The ball falls short, just kissing the tin with a pathetically quiet clang.
“2-love,” Aristide says.
Aristide will probably beat him. He usually does. Luca didn’t play squash in California, hadn’t even registered that it was a game. He liked tennis, though, so when he’d seen some girls he knew leaving the dormitory with racquets he asked them where they were going and they told him about this odd sport, one of Britain’s best exports to her far-flung colonial possessions.
The squash team has plenty of boys from Greenwich, Connecticut who use “summer” as a verb, but it also has Indians and Pakistanis and Egyptians and Malaysians or their hyphenated American cousins, good children of the empire. Aristide is the only black player. As for Luca, he’s the only poor one. He tells himself that it gives him an edge. There’s his discipline, built from summers and graveyard shifts temping at the 24-hour Korean spa where his mom still works as a receptionist. When Aristide asked with an intense expression during team practice who wanted to join him at 6 in the morning on weekdays for extra games, Luca’s hand was the only to shoot up.
Now he wonders if that was a mistake, four points behind.
“10-6, game ball,” Aristide intones.
When he is about to lose, Luca gets good. Time slows. He hits clear and straight. Their rally sounds like drumming, violent and unforgiving, building to a crescendo. Aristide misses a drop shot, running too far up, his racquet scraping the ground. That sickening sound of carbon fiber rapping on wood. 10-7. Aristide volleys in response to Luca’s serve and Luca hits another drop shot that Aristide misses. 10-8. His mouth twists like he has bitten into something sour before the expression dissolves, as quickly as an improv actor pulling their expression down with their clasped fingers. Luca realizes he likes watching this, the face he makes when he misses. Not sadism but curiosity. He wants to know all the expressions Aristide wears. In the end maybe he is looking too much at his face and not his racquet, because Aristide gets him with a shot that zooms to the back of the court before he has the chance to turn around.
“You played well today,” Aristide says. It’s a rare thing, a compliment from him. Luca tries not to smile as widely as he does, and Aristide shakes his hand. Luca still doesn’t know why they do this every time. A formality he thinks the intimacy of this ungodly hour should have unknotted a long time ago. He’s seen other boys. The way they reel each other in like docking boats. The hand grab, the bro hug, the chest bump, slapping each other on the shoulders, the back, the ass. Still he likes the handshake, the safeness of it. And the firm grip of Aristide’s callused fingers, the wetness of his palm.
As their hands slide apart he says quickly, “You want to—um—” He rummages in the pocket of his hoodie and produces a slim contraption. It’s a $60 weed vape he ordered online, last time he was home. The green, half-crushed buds lie in a plastic chamber, springs of verdant resistance to the lifeless white around them.
Aristide bursts into laughter, a friendly chuckle that wraps itself around Luca’s ears. “It’s 7 in the morning. I have my literature final in an hour, it’s my last one. Let’s do it tonight.”
“Okay,” Luca says. “Okay.” He adds quickly, “You want me to invite the other guys, like...” Aristide just shrugs, claps him on the arm, and lopes away.
Luca realizes they didn’t agree on where or when to meet up and is resigned to the idea that Aristide used “tonight” to mean “never,” a mythical land off in the distance, but then it’s 9 p.m. and he’s moving his eyes over words in a book of poetry without really understanding them while his roommate FaceTimes a girl, and someone is knocking at his door.
When Luca opens the door he sees Aristide, wearing a deep red sweater fastened by brown wooden toggles. It looks expensive, but more than that it looks impossibly well-tailored—taut on the chest, drawn in at the waist.
“Shit, nice sweater,” Luca says, before he can think better of it.
Aristide looks amused. “It was a gift.”
“You want to come in?”
The roommate peeks over the top of his phone and waves, “Yo, man,” to Aristide, then “Cat, I gotta go, the ‘rents are collecting me for the weekend,” and he ends his call and slings a bulging duffel bag over his shoulder with practiced ease. “I’m out, Lukey-Luc,” he says in a singsong voice, sliding past them out the door.
There is a vacancy in the air until Aristide steps neatly into the room and closes the door behind him. They stand silently in front of the closed door. Luca sees, in his head, how different things would be if this were a movie—that they would be lolling around, splayed out like jellyfish, at ease—but it’s not so easy to just propose reconfiguring.
“Oh, I brought something,” Aristide finally says, reaching into the cavernous depths of his coat to pull out a bottle of rum, three-quarters empty. He pauses and then looks up with a twinkling eye. “In case your—” he pauses, “—California weed—” in a surfer’s drawl, “isn’t strong enough.”
“My California weed is excellent.”
“As excellent as your backhand serve?”
“Low blow, man.”
They don’t start drinking, yet. They sit on the floor, their backs resting against the hard wooden frames of the room’s two beds, and Luca finds his eyes drawn back towards Aristide—the peripheral sight of his index and middle fingers tap-tapping on his knee, the shadow in the hollow of his throat.
They glance at each other at the same time and Luca quickly looks away, swallowing down an apology that threatens to mutiny out of his mouth.
“I meant to ask before, where are you from?” Aristide says.
“California.”
Aristide just looks at him.
“My mom’s Korean, my dad’s white.” Luca wonders what tips the scale to one or the other, when people look at him. His black hair, his dark eyes? Sometimes he passes; usually he doesn’t.
“People do this to you often,” Aristide says. Meaning the long glance, the implied follow-up question. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“You miss home?”
“Not really,” Luca says, and then he looks up and sees that Aristide is waiting for him to say more. He’s not just waiting to say something, the way guys can get sometimes, especially in big jostling groups, leaning forward always ready to interject like thoughts are fighting at the corners of their mouth for air. The silence emboldens him to keep talking: “Actually, I guess. I—there are these weird things, I think about going—there’s the Santa Monica Boardwalk, where tourists go. My friends and I would play arcade games and walk around and stuff. I guess that sounds cheesy.” If he’s seeking comfort, or refutation, he doesn’t get it, just Aristide’s even gaze. “So where’d you grow up?”
“Little bit in London. We’re from Haiti, but we hardly live there.”
“Your parents travel for work a lot or something?” Luca was meeting more and more of these kids, whose parents seemed to belong not to a city or a state but to the 5-star hotels and airports of the world. There were the WASPs, who seemed now oddly quaint, regional, and then there were these people, who lived on a plane of existence so far away it hadn’t yet been mapped on a trashy CW series or reality TV.
“They do, but now they’re primarily based in DC. My mother is at the World Bank, and my father’s a businessman.”
“Gotcha.” He braces himself for a question about his own parents, eyes darting around for some ambient distraction. The roommate’s side of the room is amply decorated with posters for indie musicians that Luca’s never heard of, and he weighs asking Aristide for an opinion on one, if this quiet continues.
Aristide doesn’t ask about Luca’s parents. He just gestures at the rum. “You want to?”
Luca nods and Aristide raises the rum and swallows it like water. On the bottle’s mouth he leaves a thin wet crescent. Luca presses the bead of liquid into the thin line between his closed lips before he opens his mouth and lets the fire stream in.
“You find out about any schools yet?” Luca asks, after swallowing.
“I’m taking a gap year,” Aristide says. “I have a cousin who’s a program director for an NGO working on gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS education in South Africa, I want to go and work for her.” He pauses. “I heard about Stanford.”
“How come everyone at this fucking school—” Luca starts. “I mean. Sorry. Not you. And the gap year sounds incredible. I’m just—Dr. Pedrad brought up Stanford this morning too.”
“You really wanted to go.” Aristide takes a calm swig from the bottle. “I remember seeing you on the first day of class, walking in with that hat, the one with the tree on it.”
“I threw it away,” Luca says violently.
“Why?”
“I wasn’t gonna rep a school that doesn’t want me.”
“You’ll be fine. You’ll get into an Ivy League school and study Econ and become a consultant. Or you’ll get into a Little Ivy and study Econ and become a consultant.” Aristide has a tiny twitch at the corner of his lips.
“Everyone in your imagination becomes a consultant, huh?”
“In reality. That’s what everybody does.”
“My mom’s a receptionist at a spa. She’s never made more than 15 an hour.” Luca doesn’t know why he says this, something he’s never said out loud here, but he does, looking at his feet. “When I came home for Thanksgiving the first thing she said after she asked about my grades was that I sounded like fancy people.”
“Is that why you wanted to go to Stanford?”
“What, to sound like fancy people?”
“To be fancy people.” Aristide glances at him. “You’re good at studying the way people act, absorbing it into your way of doing things.”
There’s something surprising about realizing someone has been observing you. It’s like hearing your name in another person’s conversation. It makes sense, Luca thinks, because he talks about other people and watches the way they act, too, but it still knocks the words out of his mouth to hear Aristide describe him. “I didn’t realize people noticed that.”
Aristide shrugs. “If they’re looking.”
“Clearly you study the way people act.”
“Occasionally. Not as much as you.”
“Sometimes it feels as if the whole point of going here is to make me sound less like me and more like—well, you, I guess. So I have to study people. But then, if I don’t end up somewhere good, why did I do any of it at all?” Luca presses his thumb against his index so hard the pad of his finger turns white. “Sorry. I don’t know why—”
“Don’t apologize.” Aristide says it differently off the squash court. Quieter. “I sound the way I do because my grandfather had to try to not sound like himself, if it’s any consolation.”
“Fuck. At some point I’m just like, is anybody really themselves?” Luca laughs at himself, a little meanly, as if to indicate his self-awareness of how fake-deep the question is, thinks about adding a “hits blunt” comment to cut the sincerity even more, but Aristide just looks at him with his head cocked to the side.
“Are you yourself right now?”
“I don’t know.” If being himself means speaking honestly, there are lies by omission. There are so many things he wants. It feels like walking around with a pressure-cooker bomb in his chest. And Luca knows well that this is just being angsty, this unavoidable condition of his age along with all the other bullshit, but he also wants to say something, to know if Aristide, in all his outward composure, ever feels the same. “Are you?”
Aristide lifts the bottle. “On my way there.”
Luca opens the window and turns out the light so people walking outside can’t see them flouting school rules and leans out towards the feeble screen, vape clutched between both palms. He inhales deeply, then passes it to Aristide, who looks at it with an expression of deep concentration and sucks in his cheeks. They pass it back and forth. Time starts to get waxy and melt, from rum or weed or both, until Aristide starts coughing and the room looks sharp again.
“You want a drink?” Luca says. “Sunny-D?”
“You have—Christ—Sunny-D?” Aristide wheezes. He pronounces it as if it’s a foreign delicacy. “In your minifridge?” He’s laughing again.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just—I’ve only seen it in that movie about the pregnant girl—you know, when she’s trying really hard to piss—”
There is something unexpected and wonderful about Aristide saying the word “piss.” “I’ve never heard you say ‘piss’ in my life.”
“Oh, piss off.”
“You sound so British right now.”
“Alright,” Aristide says. “This is part of how I talk, too, it’s not all the Queen’s English. Just give me your piss-water Sunny-D—”
“Piss-water? What does that even mean?” Luca howls and throws open the mini-fridge. The light inside startles him, makes him glow in the dark. He hands the bottle to Aristide, who raises it aloft, like a war trophy. Luca imagines this as a statue in a contemporary art museum, or at Madame Tussaud’s, “Modern Boy With Orange Juice.” While drinking Aristide starts laughing until juice streams out of his nose and he throws himself theatrically onto the bed. Luca flings his arm out to the tissue box on his desk, a movement that takes so much effort, his insides sloshing around in his body. He sits on the bed and dabs Aristide’s sticky face with a fistful of tissues wadded up in a ball, and then Luca’s so dizzy that he feels like he’ll puke if he doesn’t hold onto something. He grasps the top of Aristide’s arm, feels the bicep seize up in his grip, until he’s steadied himself enough that his hand slips limply down to the crease of his wrist, his plinth-like hand. He leaves his hand resting on top of Aristide’s for a beat. He thinks, later he can say the lingering is not his doing but ghostwritten—by the alcohol, by the weed, by the laughter—but then Aristide’s head is falling into the crook of Luca’s neck, the tickle of his hair electric. Luca’s arm wraps around Aristide under the open puffer jacket, holds him, wondering at the space between his own arm and Aristide’s shrugging out of the jacket sleeve, this pocket of heat that he wants to be the whole world.
They sit just like that, a head on a shoulder, an arm on a waist.
Luca hardly dares to breathe.
Aristide moves gracefully away, unraveling out like a spool of thread and promptly lying down on his side, his back pushed against the wall. Luca mirrors him, on the opposite edge of the bed. They are both propping their heads up with their bent arms, looking at each other, and then they inch closer on their elbows. The flannel sheets drag on Luca’s skin but he registers the feeling distantly. He has never been this close to the paint-strokes of Aristide’s eyebrows. Then Aristide’s fingers are bullet trains racing over Luca’s shoulders and chest. There is a new insistence to their motion, a quickening drumbeat in Luca’s brain, pushing his hands under Aristide’s shirt. There is something dangling on his chest—the sharp point of something, hanging on the golden chain close to his skin.
Luca lifts the chain.
The emaciated Jesus is made of beaten gold, hanging from the cross in almost-contrapposto, toes pointing down like a ballerina’s, his only raiment the cloth that drapes at a diagonal beneath his waist.
Aristide is lying very still, the cross above his eyes still held between Luca’s fingers. Luca can’t tell if Aristide is about to say something or about to get up and leave. He wants to draw his face closer, wants to bury his head in the curve of Aristide’s neck, but he can’t read any of this, the cross, the touching—he half wants to say this out loud, too, explain the whole goddamn thought process. TMI, he thinks. The wind blows cold through the open window. Suddenly he remembers something his mom told him sternly before he went on some abortive, terrible ninth grade date, “You never make a girl think she owes you anything, you hear me? Only the worst kind of man does that,” this memory rushing back now making him start, “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t—”
And then Aristide kisses him fiercely, lips rum-sweet.
The blankets are hot and twisted up around their legs. It feels like they have more limbs than before, everything entangled. They are falling asleep and then not falling, inhaling the scent of smoke on each other’s clothes.
“Why did we never hang out like this before?” Aristide murmurs, his eyes closed.
Luca considers, and finally says quietly, “I dunno, what was I gonna say to you?”
But Aristide is asleep now, or at least he looks asleep; Luca watches the rise and fall of his chest. He can’t sleep yet, his body still feels jolted, each cell awake with elation.
He remembers that he never did find out why they say “love all” in squash. Just a quick search, he thinks, and his phone screen bathes his face in blue light. The internet gives many answers but mostly that “love” sounds like “l’oeuf,” the French word for “egg,” because that’s what a zero on a scoreboard looks like.
A draft blows in and he shivers, stumbles out of bed and closes the window. A streetlight outside casts a white scar across Aristide’s face. He is one of those people whose eyes look a little open when they sleep. Then he is awake, his eyes fixing questioningly on Luca’s figure standing in the semi-dark.
“I wanted to look up why it’s ‘love all,’” Luca explains. “You know, in squash.”
“My father joked to me once that it’s because it’s the point in the game when the players still have love for each other.” He stretches out a hand, as if to pull Luca back to bed.
Next to each other they lie neatly and unentangled as two monks in their cell, except for one point where the three wrinkles on the middle of Luca’s pinky finger just barely touch their twins on Aristide’s hand. This alone almost sets a doorstop at his eyelids, but then he is slipping under, slipping into the court, seeing a ball suspended at the top of its journey arcing through the air. That first serve, the moment they both have nothing yet, only the exquisite bend of Aristide’s arm, the whole sun in his elbow.
Adora Svitak is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer. Her stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Apogee Journal, 8Poems, BUST, the Huffington Post, and numerous others. Her book Speak Up! Speeches by young people to empower and inspire is forthcoming from Quarto in February 2020. You can learn more about her writings at www.adorasvitak.com.
