LJ Idol Season 11: Week 25 - The Catbird's Seat
The despotic Florida sun was almost as cruel a welcome as Roy’s gambit:
“Why are you so cold?”
With a neck craning towards the unlucky blades of grass that bore the stain of the 30 yard line (such that the small lump of his chin sat feebly upon pillowy tiers of fat), yet with dispassionate eyes cast up, tucked just under the awning of a brow unmoved, Marco regarded Roy.
Roy stood a head-and-a-half taller than Marco. The sclera of Roy’s eyes was a stretched ring dividing the lids and the pupils, framing an unpassing moment of bewilderment and expectation. Marco held contact with that white ring spreading out from behind dark, opaque circles, but relented, and lowered his gaze.
You aren’t supposed to look at a solar eclipse.
Marco’s eyes found a lower perch, as they refocused on Roy’s chest, which rose and receded in quick fits of indignation, or heat exhaustion. The golden cotton of Roy’s t-shirt was damp and dark in blotches under the armpits; it distended flatly as the pectorals peacocked with each huffish breath, then became slack as staccato exhalations briefly created a small ravine of shadow between the muscles. The words “DRUM MAJOR”, emblazoned in thick ink across Roy’s breast in capitals, pulsated with the lungs’ tempo.
Marco brought his focal point lower still, to the army of white-helmeted green soldiers sprouting in an unmoving parade at his feet. Some of the soldiers lay crushed under a mighty, metal circle just before Marco’s toes. The circle, the bell of Marco’s mellophone, reflected amber abstractions of the grass, the feet, the legs. It caught a stray ray of the devilish sun and launched it as a hot spear into Marco’s eyes, which closed abruptly. He drew a thin breath held on a fermata through the nose and down into the gut. He felt his sweat-soaked t-shirt cling to the bulging contour of his stomach. His hand darted to the hem of his shirt and pulled it out and away, peeling the heavy cotton off of his midsection, then brusquely returned to his side. He chose not to fold his arms across himself.
“I’m not cold,” he said.
Roy’s eyes went wider still, then shut as his neck lolled back, the back of his head resting on a dense trapezius, nose pointing at the cloudless sky as it gave a long exhale.
“Your turn,” he said without looking at the boy at his right, Stuart. Marco looked on as Roy strode away and across the field to climb up the podium installed at the 50. In a corner of the bleachers, the French horn section had clustered, all girls save the two boys left on the field. Nicole’s leaping soprano laugh bounced off the bleachers and out to Marco, along with illegible looks from Kristy and Robyn.
“Hm,” came a soft buzz from Stuart’s pursed lips.
Marco’s attention snapped to them.
“Must not be easy.” The five syllables rolled through an airy timbre, and slipped along a nascent breeze between the two of them.
Marco didn’t reply.
“Moving, I mean. And then jumping straight away into these summer rehearsals.”
Marco considered Stuart. A perpetual, ruddy blush was splayed across wan cheeks, deepened by exertion and heat. But his eyes. Gray. Blue. Ice. Sky. Soft.
“It’s not even your Freshman year, yet. You don’t have to make friends on day one.”
Marco’s neck tilted a few degrees down in a nod.
Stuart’s mouth pulled into a wide line. A smile. A smile.
“Whoops! Guess you already did. Me!” This last word, punctuated with a thumb pressing insistently into his chest, softly obscuring the “R” of “SECTION LEADER”.
Marco couldn’t reply. Stuart winked, turned, and strolled to the bleachers, his shoulder blades pulled back and down, broadly stretching the image of a soaring falcon.
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A whooping chant boomed and reverberated across a feverish night, the tar sky weakened by hulking pyramids of stadium light. As the second quarter of the season's first game fought its last moments with grueling fervor, the Lake Jess High School French horn section stood hand in hand on the track.
In the circle, Stuart’s airy timbre cut through the din, dissolving it in mellifluous confidence.
“You’ve all been amazing and diligent this summer,” he glowed, clear eyes moving intentionally from Kristy, to Michelle, to Marco at his left. “Let’s put on a show. But first, close your eyes.”
And they did. The night’s frenetic energy swept through them, lighting them from within.
Marco felt his right hand pressed on, a curious sensation of a gloved thumb sliding across his gloved palm. His eyes flew open as lips hovered at his right ear, airy breath pushing across tiny, fuzzy hairs.
“You’re not cold.”
He wasn’t.