Stay Up with Hugo Best by Erin Somers

Author:Erin Somers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

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When Hugo and Laura came home at two, they found us at the island, eating grilled cheese sandwiches like siblings. The pool cleaner had returned to suck up the remnants of Spencer’s party—the leaves and waterlogged Doritos, the floating cigarette butts—and we watched him as we chewed. He had dreads and wore expensive cherry-red headphones. He wielded the hose with what seemed like style but may have just been experience.

Laura put her bag down on the counter, smiling. Hugo looked grim and unwell, his mouth pressed into a bloodless line.

“How were the nitrates?” I asked. “Get your fill?”

“I’m good for twelve months,” she said.

Spencer beckoned Laura over to his phone. He was high. After I’d left him in the basement he’d made his way out to the patio and packed a moody bowl, gazing out at the pool like it was open ocean.

“Check this out,” he said.

It was a video of a mountain goat climbing vertically up a cliff, licking at a seam of salt. One of its curled horns pressed up against the rock face. Its darting tongue looked obscene.

“That’s you,” said Spencer. “You crave that mineral.”

“Who? Me?” said Laura.

“Yeah. With the nitrates.”

“But I don’t like the nitrates. The nitrates are bad. I don’t understand.”

She looked at me for help. I shook my head.

“You crave that mineral,” Spencer said again, and cracked up.

Hugo took a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and popped it open.

“Diet soda is full of toxins,” Laura told him. “The aspartame accumulates in your joints.”

“That sounds made up,” I said.

Hugo ignored her. “Are we playing tennis or not?”

Laura turned to Spencer and me. “What do you think, guys?”

Spencer looked at me and I looked away. I had decided that going forward there would be no covert glances, no loaded dialogue or physical contact. In fact, him on the other side of a net, separated by yards of clay, sounded great to me.

“Let’s play,” I said. “Why not?”

We made a sorry foursome. I had refused any more borrowed garments and played in cutoffs, the flat soles of my sneakers slapping the clay. Everyone else had changed clothes, Hugo and Laura into pristine whites, and Spencer into a neon-green tank top and a pair of mesh basketball shorts from his bottomless collection.

As promised, Hugo and I were on one side against Laura and Spencer. Spencer fixed himself a gin and tonic before we started. He played holding it in his off hand, splashing all over the court when he attempted to hit a ball. He’d made me one, too, but I knew better than to drink it. Hugo narrowed his eyes when he’d handed it to me, sweating and overfull, garnished with a lime.

I set it in the slatted shade of a bench and picked up a racket. I’d taken tennis lessons for years at the run-down yacht club in my hometown. The court there was fissured and dusted with pine straw from the trees overhead. It was hot all the time, too hot for tennis.

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