The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang

Author:Maya Lang
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner

Eleven

Everything good down here?” Leo ducks into the kitchen, where the warm air hits him like a wall. The staff look up like startled penguins in their bow ties and vests. They regard him uncertainly, but Leo knows his next move. “Any chance,” he ventures, “of a pre-event beer?”

The guy directly across from him, in the midst of filling clear shot glasses with soup, relaxes. “Yeah, man. Bottles just got unloaded.” He gestures with his chin.

Leo ambles over to the tub filled with ice and selects a Flying Fish IPA. He holds the red-labeled bottle an inch above the counter, judges the angle, and then brings his other fist slamming down.

“Jesus,” a girl to his left cries, jumping.

Leo smiles as the metal cap spins across the white marble.

“That doesn’t hurt the counter?” She stares at the spot where the bottle made contact.

“Not if you do it right.”

Condensation drips from the bottle, but he knows better than to ask for a towel. Stephen would ask for a towel. Stephen would ask for a glass, pouring it daintily while the staff looked on and smirked. “Leo,” he says to the girl, nodding at the others.

College was good for exactly two things. One was that being an RA had taught him how to do this, how to enter a room and put everyone at ease.

“Sam,” she offers. “Well, you know. Samantha.” She says this with a grimace, as though nothing could be worse than the feminine name foisted on her by her parents. Try Leopold, he thinks.

Boston University’s other gift was that in such moments, he remembers he is a Pike. Once a Pike, always a Pike. “A brotherhood of gentlemen,” Stephen had read from the brochure. “Does that pertain to the bikini contest?” But Leo carries it with him like a security blanket, that feeling of belonging. Brotherhood, he wants to tell his brother, is the best feeling in the world.

“Clay,” the guy across from him says, doling out the soup. It pours out of a metal dispenser, the opening controlled by a lever under his thumb. From where Leo stands, the shot glasses look uncannily even.

Samantha is around nineteen or twenty. Still in school by the look of her, in that world of summer jobs and evolving majors. She has a silver rod shooting through her eyebrow and a black hoop between her nostrils that gives her the appearance of a bull.

Clay looks a little older, twenty-three maybe, a sleeve of tattoos on his left arm. He wears the tortoiseshell glasses that have been popping up everywhere. A guy at the far end of the kitchen assiduously chops herbs, looking up from his work only when the back door smacks open.

“Whew!” The caterer bustles in, heaving a crate of glassware onto the island and wiping her forehead with her sleeve. “You get the rest,” she says to the herb chopper. “Truck’s open.”

Her eyes adjust to the inside light and come to rest on Leo. “Man of the house,” she remarks with a smile.

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