Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley

Author:Alex Pugsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

When the thunderstorm broke, an electrical squall exploding above us, Karin went dashing toward the clubhouse. I found her in one of the rooms of the restaurant, her Adidas bag dropped to the floor, both of us sopping wet, shoulders hunched forward so the rainwater would drip off our chins rather than down our backs. “That storm—” said Karin. “That storm hit me right in the couscous.”

“The where?”

“Aubrey Tudball.” Karin touched again at her barrettes. “What are you doing? Are you soaking wet? Are you still a champignon?”

I was soaking wet, my nose cold, my skin goose-bumped. Making a move for the hallway, I said I was going downstairs to get some paper towels. “You okay with that?”

She frowned. “Did you just say I looked fat?”

“No, Wiggins. Paper towels.”

“No, you said I should lose ten pounds and had a fat ass.”

“Oh, wait. That’s it exactly. No, I’m going to the bathroom—”

“Boys are gross.”

“To get some paper towels.”

On my way back with a stack of paper towels, I was checking my reflection in the glass of a framed photograph of past presidents of the Waegwoltic Club, relieved to see my nose was generally blemish-free, when I heard the crash of a window breaking. Returning to the room, I saw Karin standing in front of a ruined window, a sparkle of broken glass on the hardwood floor, the splintered end of a stout tree branch lodged in the fractured window frame. As I joined her in looking at the wreckage, lightning flashed in the sky and a second surge of rain splashed against the windows. The power winked off, giving a sort of apocalyptic quality to our situation—darkness in the afternoon, lightning tinting the room blue—and, instinctively, we both backed away from the window, our bare elbows touching, slippery with rain. I glanced at Karin to see her tennis dress splattered with moisture, a glisten of watery ketchup on her upper lip, her eyelashes moistened into star-points. She looked at me with open eyes, leaned toward me, and kissed me on the mouth. I remember how eager were her soft, open-mouthed kisses, the murmurs she made as I kissed near her throat, the pattern of peeling sunburn on her exposed shoulder. After some moments, Karin moved to take a step back but my hair, straggly and rain-damp, caught in one of her barrettes so it was a few seconds before we disengaged from each other, our temples colliding as we separated, the barrette springing loose and falling to the floor.

I picked it up. “Your barrette, Madame.”

“Oh. Thank you, kind sir. What would I do without my barrette?” She neatly inserted it in her hair, dried her arms and legs with paper towel, and in the next moment she was grabbing my wrist and spinning my arm to read my digital watch. “What time is it? Oh, God, Tudball. The time has come, the walrus said. I’ve really got to run. My mixed is at four.”

“In a lightning storm?”

“No, Ding-a-ling. Didn’t you hear? They’re making us play in a flipping school gym.

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