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Description
Chapter One

       I don't remember how that day started.  I certainly didn't think my life would change at all. The day was the result of change. School had ended the day before, I'd gone home to do my normal chores and to sleep, and then I was awake again.  Change can happen as simple as that-just closing your eyes, and opening them again. No matter what, when you open your eyes the world will not be the same as the world you left by shutting them.
     My brother was home from Rennes; where he went to school and played for the soccer team.  From what I remember he was good but I don't remember much of him.  Although, I still remember walking through the town that morning with him at my side.  When you don't have a mother it's easy to become close to your older siblings.  Often they're the ones that end up taking care of you.
     It was my last year at the French Lycée and I was glad of it.  It was only October.  We were deep enough into fall to feel the bite of approaching winter and exams but not enough for the leaves beneath our feet to have lost their crunch or the days to have lost their sun.
     But I walked, books at my side as always.  I talked to my brother.  Nothing of any great consequence happened until we reached the schoolyard.
    And then, a frigid breath of wind brought some leaves to swirl at our feet.  A cloud crossed over the sun.  Faden, my brother, looked to me with a smile on his face.  I raised an eyebrow, unknowing of what was to come.  It didn't really matter to me.  Life would continue as usual, or so I thought-I only thought of how there were minutes left until I'd be in French class studying Voltaire.
    "I'd like you to meet someone." He said with a childish sort of joy.  He was still beaming; I was still confused at how significant everything was to him, almost like he knew he hadn't much time left in his life.
    I followed him down the cement walk until, near the foreboding entrance to the school, a young man I didn't recognize rose from the bench he sat on and walked to us.  His physical appearance was as conflicted as I would soon discover his personality to be.
    While he dressed in a perfectly ironed school uniform, pressed to the codes worthy of Peyramale-St. Joseph Lycée, the leather shoes that stuck out from under the creased pant legs were worn and lacked any kind of shine.  His hair was clean and combed neatly but his eyes were tired and his cheeks washed of feeling.  They were only starkly white, pale from being out in the cold, most likely-but without the pink tinge that attached itself to the cheeks of most.
    "Here he is." Said my brother, in French before he said, "Hello." in English.  While I became more confused as the minutes wore on, I stole a glance at the man's eyes-strangely colored as they were, a metallic grey that shifted in the light like mercury balls spilled from an old thermometer.
     Faden sensed my confusion.  He turned to me, eyes focused on the stranger to whom he spoke in English.  I'd taken enough English at school to recognize when someone was speaking it.  "His name is Elliott."
    My brother laughed a little under his breath.  As I pull event after event from my memory I begin to remember the small things about him I tend to forget, like the smells on him and the feelings they ignited in me.  I remember what he looked like.  Tall, but shorter than me.  He was strong, athletically, where my strength was too elegant and hardly as masculine.  I always held an imbedded jealousy over him.  I didn't want to be him, though I hated every ounce of his success.  He was good at whatever he did: academics, sports, and wooing the girls.
    But I didn't feel jealous of his connections to the lucid stranger with dead eyes.  Especially not after I saw "Elliott" draw a cigarette from a pressed jacket pocket.  He allowed the lighter's flame to hover below the time of his cigarette for a time before he pocketed it and turned his full attention to me, exhaling the first drag of his cigarette like he was something important.
    "Who's this?" He asked, in English.  From the second he spoke I could tell he was British.  The accent came to me, clear and pretentious as a crystal bell.  The syllables weren't loud and important like American ones, nor were they slow and drawling.
     "My brother, Samren." Faden smiled at me.  The stranger surprised me by laughing without taking the time to smile.  An outsider to the conversation could've thought he'd choked on his own foul smoke.
    "… a pleasure…"I struggled; Faden shot me the worst sort of glare.
    "He's from Britain." Said Faden. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket and sighed.  "He needs to pass the BAC, can you believe? One year older than you and he still needs to get out of the Lycée."
    I could only nod while I kept one eye on the stranger, as if he could penetrate my soul with those eyes that seemed hungry to gain an identity.  I hoped they wouldn't steal mine. I wondered what my brother wanted with him.  "You want me to help him through his school day? Helping him where he needs it?" I spoke incredulously.  A dark brown, nearly black, eyebrow arched over one of the grey eyes.
    Faden nodded as if he asked nothing of me.  And then, with all his nerve, he sighed, still smiling.  "Well I've got to go to my job, then to practice for Wednesday's important match."  He left without asking my approval.  But I knew what he was talking about.  He worked at a small restaurant in out town, Le Verseau, and did play soccer.  He left me, all alone, with a person whose name didn't match him.   I stood, pathetic, watching him in the distance, leaving sad Lycée Peyramale behind him.
     Elliott and Voltaire became my closest realities when Faden turned the corner.  Palm, oak, and birch trees screened my view of the sidewalk.  I was defeated.  When I was that young, closed from the world, held in my tiny religious town like a shiny pearl within a grey oyster, I knew not of puffing out my chest and walking away.  All I could do was stand there, head empty and chin held high.
     "I'll take you to your first class, if you tell me what it is."  I offered quietly, carelessly.  Elliott seemed to feel the same.  His eyes shifted from subject to subject, never hovering on one lace for long.  In a smooth, graceful movement he reached over to stamp out the cigarette against the school wall.
     "Sure." He sighed.  "Good 'ol Francais.  With M. Lemarais." His voice was cool, and calm, like winter's first snowflakes.  It drifted up, then down, and swallowed you in shimmering hard light.
    Without the burn of smoke in my lungs he nearly brought me to smile, even to struggle a sarcastic laugh.  I soon found his eyes shimmering, just like his voice.  They were on me.  I wondered if they'd already stolen my soul.  I had to shake my head to clear my thoughts.
    "Follow me."  I opened the door, letting in a small group of female students and even allowed Elliott in before me.  There was an arrogance on him that made me wonder how he'd come to be in Lourdes.  He didn't pause to smile or to acknowledge my aid.
      "I have M. Lemarais first, as well."
     The corridors suddenly became longer; the amount of students in them decreased.  Time, space, and life stopped as I plodded along with Elliott taking his long, graceful strides behind me.  Neither of us said anything.  I began to think he was French when I saw him eyeing the students, perhaps comparing himself to them, proud of his pressed suit and tired shoes.  Since the male students were his targets I trusted my assumptions.
     We arrived at the closed classroom and time resumed.  Everyone I'd come to expect to see in the halls was there.  Elliott nearly didn't exist.  When my eyes finally fell on him I discovered him eyeing me.  The only way to respond was to move on.  I pushed open the door, motioning him in quick when he seemed to question my judgment.
     Though, looking back, perhaps I wouldn't have trusted the room in which cigarette smoke hung like curtains and a small disheveled teacher wrung his hands while sitting on a desk.  Add to that a cigarette hanging loosely over his lower lip and there is a scene that most wouldn't expect to find in a strict French school of old.
    "Come." I beckoned; his feet didn't move with the commands of my actions.  I felt he was safely delivered to the class and walked to my seat in the back of the room.  I thought after my actions that he wouldn't follow me.  I resented having the open seat near me.  He took it before my French notebook was flat on the surface of my shiny wood-and-wrought-iron desk.
    Though I wanted to speak, the bell rang and M. Lemarais rose.  He was ready to terrorize us about our weak French skills and to pound our shortcomings through our waking minds and into our subconscious.
    For once I didn't listen to him as the nuns listened to the Catholic priests on Sunday morning.  I saw Elliott and I saw the teacher through Elliott's eyes.  He was shored, the hair atop his head messy and thinning.  Where it hadn't turned white it'd become a pale mousy brown.  Voltaire's life and writings weren't any more significant than mine; I didn't have to listen.
    Instead I drew circles on the first bare page of my notebook.  My bored feet probed at the desk's supports.  I shifted my eyes to Elliott, feeling odd chills run down my spine when I watched him reach down, adjusting the way his pants laid over his privates.  It was only natural; I'd seen him glance my way once in a while in the same manner.
    That, too, gave me the chills.  I wondered if he felt the chills too.  Or, could it have been my imagination?  The feelings could've been simple, just chance, and as far away as a happening in my dreams.  Perhaps the windows of the old school were older than I imagined them to be, and fingers of cold were seeping through the window and my wool blazer.
    That was the answer; I decided. My eyes were only wandering out of boredom and the chills were from outside.  Elliott hadn't anything to do with the feelings.
    Though, as soon as I'd solved the mystery of my morning the look in his eyes returned to me.  Not of my father's, or Faden's eyes, but of Elliott's.  They were hungry and prying, ready to snatch my soul like a spirit wandering a graveyard.
    My class continued like this.  I tried to justify Elliot; I tried to justify my feelings.  Once I was comfortable with myself the cycle returned me to the point of questioning the thoughts all over again.  My mind was as cloaked in smoke as M. Lemarais's classroom.
    When the bell rang, signaling the end of the class and the confusing cycle, I awoke form the stupor and found a note in the upper left corner of my desk.
     The paper was crinkled and the edges flecked with small dots of mildew.  How pathetic it was, and yet, amazing.  Elliott was already gone from his seat.  Somehow I knew it was from him and I can remember what it said, to this day.

I know enough about this place to get around
But, I like your brother; I like you
Meet me outside on the soccer field, after school
Until next time,
                                                                         Elliott J. Thomas

    He wrote in French with perfect grammar.  Something told me that I shouldn't refuse.  Little did I know that I would later find myself thinking the opposite.

***

    School ended and I was finally free to appreciate one of those perfect fall days when the sun sits high in the sky, perfectly outlined by the azure blue sky as and uncolored circle in a child's coloring book.  Night was still a good two hours away when I strode out to the fields behind the lycée.
    The afternoons were still hot enough to cause the active soccer players to break into sweats before they'd played very long.  I knew some of the players but wasn't as popular with them as I was with a small group of the school's girls.
     My eyes drifted over the sun kissed field as I made my way around the cement walk surrounding the grass field.  At the farthest end of the track was a shower house. The only think between the tracks longest parallel distances were the greenest blades of grass.  Sometimes I wondered why the plants could exist at all in the Pyrenees, but then I was forced to remind myself that I was living in France then.  Anything was possible.
    At least, anything besides having Elliott at his scheduled venue-the one he picked for our rendezvous.  The one soccer player I spoke to on a regular basis sauntered over to me.  He was Spanish-French, just like me, with dark eyes, hair and high Castilian cheekbones.  My mother would've scoffed at him and assured me that he wasn't of our kind.  What else could she have done? The gypsy blood in her made her think she was something greater than human.
    Torrance, that was the Spanish boy's name, didn't think of himself on that level at all.  Well, he didn't have the gypsy inside him. He was short, but built up as successfully as Faden.  He was always amiable, always smiling. Girls liked him but for all I remember he was uninterested in them.  I believed it was only because his Catholic mother wished him to become a priest, someday. The université was not so important if he had the protection of a Higher power.
   "It's not often I see you here."  He said, smiling.  I wasn't feeling nearly as friendly.
   "A new student wanted to meet me here; I didn't want to accept, now all I want is to go home."
    Some players called to us from across the field and Torrance pretended not to hear them.  His eyebrows raised.  I was sure he knew something I didn't.
   "Really? A new student? Is he tall, and older looking?"
   My heart skipped a beat.  Torrance looked calm enough.  I wasn't.  Someone I didn't expect to have met Elliott had nearly described him.
   "His hair is dark brown; his skin is pale, like a bar of soap."
   "Ah... with silver eyes?"
   I nodded, but knew that Torrance's comparison was all wrong.  Elliott was something harder; his eyes were dangerous, yet beautiful.  They weren't of a metal to wear close on one's body. I knew they were hungry for direction.  They didn't want to serve, they wanted to be served to, doted upon.
    "Why didn't you say so right away? I saw him down here, right after he finished his gym hour. He was sucking on someone's neck.  Who knows what's going on in the shower house right now? All I can tell you is that he wasn't in any hurry to leave."
   My heart skipped again, but not out of excitement.  I was disgusted.  How could he ask me to take my time to meet him and then be off in the shower room? So many things were left unanswered.
   "I'm quite angry.  How did the new student manage to get a girl into the boy's showers?'
   Torrance laughed.  My question must've struck him as sadly ignorant.  He leaned nearer to me, chuckling soft and deep under his voice, as if about to tell me the greatest secret.
   "He's with Marvin." Torrance laughed and stood back.  His entire body seemed to cock to one side, smug with his arms held over his chest.
   "Who?"  I asked, pretending I didn't hear him right.  I was starting to wish that Elliott was smooth enough to sneak a girl into the shower house.
   "Fontaine. You know, he moved here from Alsace two years ago?"
   I nodded, bowing my head in consent, recognizing the name.  However, I was also trying to hint that I'd tired of his presence.
    He wasn't as stupid as some.  All of a sudden he straightened and cleared his throat.
   "I'll be going now…" He sighed, and sprinted across the field to his teammates.
   Marvin Fontaine. I rolled the name around in my head. It was so foreign and familiar all at once.
   There were benches on either side of the shower house.  One for the girls, and one for the boys.  The design wasn't so intelligent, however. The benches were close enough to the building to offer one a way to climb up and peer inside either side of the house through the high windows.
    Something was pulling my thoughts to the bench.  I took my steps, padding quietly over the concrete, and I listened carefully.  If I listened hard enough I began to believe I could hear sighs, and the dripping of an aging shower head.
   I winced, nearly hissing "aï" under my breath at the sudden bolt of pain across my shins when I reached the bench.  But I was there, and with the promise of a could-be fantasy happening on the other side of the beige-painted brick wall.
    Even then I felt the relentless pulling at my subconscious.  To sigh would be to give myself away, or so I believed.  My right foot began to rise, pulled by the invisible string. Perhaps it was the promise that I could be a voyeur of forbidden pleasures.  When I was that young I believed in everything my town's priests had to say.  I knew it would be a heavy week of confession and repentance.
    I put him hands up near my knee and hoisted myself up onto the bench.  Both my feet were supporting my sin. I didn't feel sorry; all I felt was a laugh.  But I suppressed it. I suppressed many feelings that afternoon.
    My fingers grasped at the windowsill and I rose to my tiptoes, just like a child at the window poised to catch a glimpse of a shooting star. Though, what I was doing was hardly as innocent.  And yet the same excitement, if not more, welled in the pit of my stomach.
    I heard more sighs and directed my eyes downward.  I saw Elliott.  His hair was damp and his vest was off.  The shirt that had been so pressed in the morning was unbuttoned at the neck.  He kissed Marvin's chest, then kneeled before him. They were right beneath my window, too consumed by the promise of pleasure to notice the shifting world around them.  Too consumed to notice my curious fingers winding over the open sill.
    Elliott's eyes were closed lightly. A mischievous grin danced on his lips.  I pondered it.  How could he have been that happy to go against anything he'd ever learned? Had he learned?
   And, somehow, it was the most erotic thing I'd seen in my seventeen years of existence.  It was joyous, and saddening. His eyes turned up at just the right time; he grinned to Marvin.  I wondered what it would be like to be so consumed in the moment to be numb to the world, and even to a curious and inexperienced young man who watched the entire scene above, or below, my nose.
    Marvin began to breathe heavily, and sighs came plentiful.  I knew when he was through because I heard his last sigh, defeated and victorious all at once. His hair was as damp as Elliott's.
    The last thing I saw was Marvin's hand reaching out to the nearest article of clothing, and I hopped off the bench. When I saw the pink tinge above the mountains surrounding my city I realized that time had stopped for me, as well.  Between taking my time after school, walking to the soccer field, chatting with Torrance, and being momentarily drawn into a dark world of lust and sin my day was nearly over.  I imagined there was only about one more hour of light left.
    I shouldn't have let Elliott's words sway me, or his actions, but I did. Now my heart hammered in my chest and I sat quietly, distantly, on a bench, waiting for Elliott.
   He came, eventually, my books had slid onto the ground by that time. He seemed refreshed, proud of what he'd done.  Or maybe a weight had been lifted off his chest.  I didn't know; and, I didn't know why I cared.
    Yet, I cared enough to stay.  He beamed up until the moment he reached my bench.  When I shot him a glare the grin was gone.
    "Nice of you to come." I said. Elliott winced.
    "I'm sorry." He said, quickly, and curtly.  I could tell he believed in his apologies validity as much as I did.
    "No you aren't."  I was quiet after that. The rest of the walk home was a blur to me.  I don't quite remember whether anything was said or not. I let him come with me. Faden never brought him to our house before.  Elliott was the one who convinced me to take him up to Rue de la Gare.  This part of the day no longer exists in my memory-perhaps in his.

***

    Samren Trouillefou brought me through the small town.  After living in London and a larger town in Normandy I found it interesting that I could walk wherever I wanted to go and be from one end of the town to another in an hour. With all the students in school and the tourists working, action was minimal in famous Lourdes.
     His house was set among commercial buildings, an office here, a hotel there; but, when we came to a short stone barricade with an iron fence extending the shield to a normal fence height, he stopped.
    Though I could tell he held venom for me, I admired him.  I admired his height, his dark hair, and his chocolate-and-toffee eyes.  He held a different sort of masculinity.  While he wished to be cold and unrelenting I could sense his grace, and how he would bend to a person's wishes if they weren't farfetched.   He was like his brother-and yet not at all-only in that after I got to know him I knew part of him wanted success and natural aptitude in all Faden's areas.
   I glanced up to the house.  It was three stories, sided in terracotta, and the edges were trimmed in stone blocks and carved lion accents on the windows roared silently toward the street they'd face forever.
   "Come along, come along."
   How impatient.
   I wanted to observe the house, to know it so that I could somehow store the moment and the place in my memory.
   The gate creaked open; Samren walked in, and held it open, urging me on.  I couldn't allow him to wait so I entered into a small courtyard.  There was nothing there, save for an overgrown brick walkway and some patchy grass that probably hadn't been cared for in years.
   Before I could absorb the second scene he urged me up a few stone steps and into a small entry. The only features on the level were a door and a staircase.
    "We rent the apartment to a businessman." He said in a tone that made me think he was asked the question often.
    He began to ascend the stairs. "He hates people who hover near his door."
   Samren reached into his book bag, out of habit, but realized that the door might already be unlocked.  The hand jumped out of the pocket and to the doorknob
   "Wait here." He hissed, and disappeared through the newly opened doorway.
  Great. I thought. Now I'm sandwiched between a messenger and a nervous businessman who I bet has an ulcer.
   Luckily the door was left open a crack and I peered in.  There was a China cabinet, filled with finery. I found it a bit feminine for the brothers and their stern father, if he was as stern as Faden and Samren made him out to be.
    The stairway door only opened to a small niche, it was impossible for me to see any more beside a hall that Samren had disappeared down.
    I rocked back and forth on my feet, nervously, heel to ball and ball to heel. A few boards squeaked under my feet; I released a sigh.
    And then Samren returned, but his face was clouded and serious.  That night was not the time for me to enter.  I knew from his expression.
     I nodded and turned to descend the stairs, not at all prepared to give up on Samren Trouillefou.

***

     My changes had arrived.  Elliott had arrived; I didn't know what his coming into my life would come to mean.  Now I remember, I was honest in turning him away from the entry of my house that day.
    Father needed rest. "Rest would help him forget mother.  Rest would make him work more smoothly at his firm. Rest would make our wildest dreams come true."  No, I didn't understand his logic either.
    Our house stood ten years back in time, untouched and unaltered from the time my mother died.  It was probably another superstition of my father.  If we left everything in its place it would be easier to forget her death.  The room she died in on the house's highest level hadn't even seen anyone enter or exit it for the entire time. All the emphasis on locking the house in a time warp was really what made my father sick.
   But my changes had arrived. I don't know whether it was the strange British boy with perfect French or just Mother Earth and Father Time's plan for me-for everything to start changing then.
     My father wasn't locked up into his study like a man in a straightjacket.  He sat, calm, in the sitting room.  He still had a work notebook on his lap.  But he was downstairs in a room with windows that weren't hung with heavy curtains to block out all light.
    "He's gone." I said, quietly. He looked up from the notebook, over a pair of old fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles.
    "Ah, good. I have something important to tell you, tonight." He spoke slowly, his tongue molding each of his words carefully before they arrived in the open.  My eyes were lost on my book back laid in the corner of the room.
    The conversations I had with my father were weak.  I never responded with a question.  I didn't like to formulate them and after mother's death he didn't like to be questioned.
   He sucked in a great stream of air, filling out his chest and I recognized a faint half-smile at the corners of his frown-line framed mouth, caused by aging without growing out of sorrow.
     "Have you been wanting to leave Lourdes?" He asked.
    I'd never pondered the thought.  The house belonged to my mother's father. While her mother was a traveling dancer, her father was wealthy and able to station himself, lovers, and servants in the three-story Lourdes house.  We'd never re-decorated.  I never thought him the type to be willing to leave the house.  I had to be honest.
      "No." I said.  He furrowed his brow as my answer was surprising.
     "Come on. You're a good boy. Born in Lyon, raised a good part of your youth there. You haven't missed city life at all?"
   I pondered the thought but could hardly remember anything of the city. We left for the comfort of the country as soon as mother fell ill.
     "I don't remember very well."
    He smiled knowingly, a secret blazing away in his chest like a box of Francs sitting in a nightstand.
    "My job is about to station me in Paris."
    For some reason he looked more delighted than I'd ever seen him.  There was another element to his surprise I didn't know of that brewed an ocean away.
    I smiled politely, and nodded, excusing myself from the room and from dinner-anything that had to do with the evening's family affairs, pretending to have a headache.

    I walked from the room, turning down the hall to the narrow stairway at its end, and ascended into a hallway saturated in the smell of 10 year-old incense and rich perfume.
   My room was the first one, and wasn't too big. The house made up for it by having, then, plenty of rooms for everyone in the house.  The bed was more inviting than ever.
   I laid my homework things carefully upon a mahogany desk without the intention of sitting down to do my duties. The bed was more inviting, as was stripping down into my underwear and sliding between the covers.
   That's what I did.  I was comfortable, my soft blankets pulled to my chin.  The warm amber light beside my bed comforted me as well.  I was under the spell of the day. Elliott and visions of confusing Montmarte streets flitted in and out of consciousness.
   However, Elliott had been a larger part of my day than my father and beat Paris efficiently from my thoughts.  Instead I saw his hungry grey eyes-lifeless and seeking a host from which to gather emotion, and perhaps a greater shimmer.
    I saw him kissing Marvin's pelvis, his damp hair on his forehead, some of it brushing against Marvin.  His lips around Marvin's sex, pink, and slightly smiling.  Those lips had slightly smiled at me.
   My hand brushed down my pelvis and into my underwear.  Even under my blankets I felt a chill.  The images flashed through my mind, just as pictures in a slideshow.  I had my own internal slideshow-intense and personal.
   Elliott's lips, around my sex. My hand reaching down to touch myself in such an intimate way.  To stroke, to caress, to love another man. Grasping at him, pulling at him, stroking at myself, stroking up more images like stroking through California river sand for gold.
   I gasped, came, and laid on my back, breathing away the pleasure and sin.  I sat up in bed, all at once, my thoughts running back to me all at once. I came crashing back into myself, just like a dream or a brush with death.
    I felt disgusted. I staggered down the hall to retrieve a swatch of toilet paper to clean up, after taking a good pee, and went to sleep in a new pair of underwear, batting away thoughts of Elliott from my dreams.

Description
Chapter One

       I don't remember how that day started.  I certainly didn't think my life would change at all. The day was the result of change. School had ended the day before, I'd gone home to do my normal chores and to sleep, and then I was awake again.  Change can happen as simple as that-just closing your eyes, and opening them again. No matter what, when you open your eyes the world will not be the same as the world you left by shutting them.
     My brother was home from Rennes; where he went to school and played for the soccer team.  From what I remember he was good but I don't remember much of him.  Although, I still remember walking through the town that morning with him at my side.  When you don't have a mother it's easy to become close to your older siblings.  Often they're the ones that end up taking care of you.
     It was my last year at the French Lycée and I was glad of it.  It was only October.  We were deep enough into fall to feel the bite of approaching winter and exams but not enough for the leaves beneath our feet to have lost their crunch or the days to have lost their sun.
     But I walked, books at my side as always.  I talked to my brother.  Nothing of any great consequence happened until we reached the schoolyard.
    And then, a frigid breath of wind brought some leaves to swirl at our feet.  A cloud crossed over the sun.  Faden, my brother, looked to me with a smile on his face.  I raised an eyebrow, unknowing of what was to come.  It didn't really matter to me.  Life would continue as usual, or so I thought-I only thought of how there were minutes left until I'd be in French class studying Voltaire.
    "I'd like you to meet someone." He said with a childish sort of joy.  He was still beaming; I was still confused at how significant everything was to him, almost like he knew he hadn't much time left in his life.
    I followed him down the cement walk until, near the foreboding entrance to the school, a young man I didn't recognize rose from the bench he sat on and walked to us.  His physical appearance was as conflicted as I would soon discover his personality to be.
    While he dressed in a perfectly ironed school uniform, pressed to the codes worthy of Peyramale-St. Joseph Lycée, the leather shoes that stuck out from under the creased pant legs were worn and lacked any kind of shine.  His hair was clean and combed neatly but his eyes were tired and his cheeks washed of feeling.  They were only starkly white, pale from being out in the cold, most likely-but without the pink tinge that attached itself to the cheeks of most.
    "Here he is." Said my brother, in French before he said, "Hello." in English.  While I became more confused as the minutes wore on, I stole a glance at the man's eyes-strangely colored as they were, a metallic grey that shifted in the light like mercury balls spilled from an old thermometer.
     Faden sensed my confusion.  He turned to me, eyes focused on the stranger to whom he spoke in English.  I'd taken enough English at school to recognize when someone was speaking it.  "His name is Elliott."
    My brother laughed a little under his breath.  As I pull event after event from my memory I begin to remember the small things about him I tend to forget, like the smells on him and the feelings they ignited in me.  I remember what he looked like.  Tall, but shorter than me.  He was strong, athletically, where my strength was too elegant and hardly as masculine.  I always held an imbedded jealousy over him.  I didn't want to be him, though I hated every ounce of his success.  He was good at whatever he did: academics, sports, and wooing the girls.
    But I didn't feel jealous of his connections to the lucid stranger with dead eyes.  Especially not after I saw "Elliott" draw a cigarette from a pressed jacket pocket.  He allowed the lighter's flame to hover below the time of his cigarette for a time before he pocketed it and turned his full attention to me, exhaling the first drag of his cigarette like he was something important.
    "Who's this?" He asked, in English.  From the second he spoke I could tell he was British.  The accent came to me, clear and pretentious as a crystal bell.  The syllables weren't loud and important like American ones, nor were they slow and drawling.
     "My brother, Samren." Faden smiled at me.  The stranger surprised me by laughing without taking the time to smile.  An outsider to the conversation could've thought he'd choked on his own foul smoke.
    "… a pleasure…"I struggled; Faden shot me the worst sort of glare.
    "He's from Britain." Said Faden. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket and sighed.  "He needs to pass the BAC, can you believe? One year older than you and he still needs to get out of the Lycée."
    I could only nod while I kept one eye on the stranger, as if he could penetrate my soul with those eyes that seemed hungry to gain an identity.  I hoped they wouldn't steal mine. I wondered what my brother wanted with him.  "You want me to help him through his school day? Helping him where he needs it?" I spoke incredulously.  A dark brown, nearly black, eyebrow arched over one of the grey eyes.
    Faden nodded as if he asked nothing of me.  And then, with all his nerve, he sighed, still smiling.  "Well I've got to go to my job, then to practice for Wednesday's important match."  He left without asking my approval.  But I knew what he was talking about.  He worked at a small restaurant in out town, Le Verseau, and did play soccer.  He left me, all alone, with a person whose name didn't match him.   I stood, pathetic, watching him in the distance, leaving sad Lycée Peyramale behind him.
     Elliott and Voltaire became my closest realities when Faden turned the corner.  Palm, oak, and birch trees screened my view of the sidewalk.  I was defeated.  When I was that young, closed from the world, held in my tiny religious town like a shiny pearl within a grey oyster, I knew not of puffing out my chest and walking away.  All I could do was stand there, head empty and chin held high.
     "I'll take you to your first class, if you tell me what it is."  I offered quietly, carelessly.  Elliott seemed to feel the same.  His eyes shifted from subject to subject, never hovering on one lace for long.  In a smooth, graceful movement he reached over to stamp out the cigarette against the school wall.
     "Sure." He sighed.  "Good 'ol Francais.  With M. Lemarais." His voice was cool, and calm, like winter's first snowflakes.  It drifted up, then down, and swallowed you in shimmering hard light.
    Without the burn of smoke in my lungs he nearly brought me to smile, even to struggle a sarcastic laugh.  I soon found his eyes shimmering, just like his voice.  They were on me.  I wondered if they'd already stolen my soul.  I had to shake my head to clear my thoughts.
    "Follow me."  I opened the door, letting in a small group of female students and even allowed Elliott in before me.  There was an arrogance on him that made me wonder how he'd come to be in Lourdes.  He didn't pause to smile or to acknowledge my aid.
      "I have M. Lemarais first, as well."
     The corridors suddenly became longer; the amount of students in them decreased.  Time, space, and life stopped as I plodded along with Elliott taking his long, graceful strides behind me.  Neither of us said anything.  I began to think he was French when I saw him eyeing the students, perhaps comparing himself to them, proud of his pressed suit and tired shoes.  Since the male students were his targets I trusted my assumptions.
     We arrived at the closed classroom and time resumed.  Everyone I'd come to expect to see in the halls was there.  Elliott nearly didn't exist.  When my eyes finally fell on him I discovered him eyeing me.  The only way to respond was to move on.  I pushed open the door, motioning him in quick when he seemed to question my judgment.
     Though, looking back, perhaps I wouldn't have trusted the room in which cigarette smoke hung like curtains and a small disheveled teacher wrung his hands while sitting on a desk.  Add to that a cigarette hanging loosely over his lower lip and there is a scene that most wouldn't expect to find in a strict French school of old.
    "Come." I beckoned; his feet didn't move with the commands of my actions.  I felt he was safely delivered to the class and walked to my seat in the back of the room.  I thought after my actions that he wouldn't follow me.  I resented having the open seat near me.  He took it before my French notebook was flat on the surface of my shiny wood-and-wrought-iron desk.
    Though I wanted to speak, the bell rang and M. Lemarais rose.  He was ready to terrorize us about our weak French skills and to pound our shortcomings through our waking minds and into our subconscious.
    For once I didn't listen to him as the nuns listened to the Catholic priests on Sunday morning.  I saw Elliott and I saw the teacher through Elliott's eyes.  He was shored, the hair atop his head messy and thinning.  Where it hadn't turned white it'd become a pale mousy brown.  Voltaire's life and writings weren't any more significant than mine; I didn't have to listen.
    Instead I drew circles on the first bare page of my notebook.  My bored feet probed at the desk's supports.  I shifted my eyes to Elliott, feeling odd chills run down my spine when I watched him reach down, adjusting the way his pants laid over his privates.  It was only natural; I'd seen him glance my way once in a while in the same manner.
    That, too, gave me the chills.  I wondered if he felt the chills too.  Or, could it have been my imagination?  The feelings could've been simple, just chance, and as far away as a happening in my dreams.  Perhaps the windows of the old school were older than I imagined them to be, and fingers of cold were seeping through the window and my wool blazer.
    That was the answer; I decided. My eyes were only wandering out of boredom and the chills were from outside.  Elliott hadn't anything to do with the feelings.
    Though, as soon as I'd solved the mystery of my morning the look in his eyes returned to me.  Not of my father's, or Faden's eyes, but of Elliott's.  They were hungry and prying, ready to snatch my soul like a spirit wandering a graveyard.
    My class continued like this.  I tried to justify Elliot; I tried to justify my feelings.  Once I was comfortable with myself the cycle returned me to the point of questioning the thoughts all over again.  My mind was as cloaked in smoke as M. Lemarais's classroom.
    When the bell rang, signaling the end of the class and the confusing cycle, I awoke form the stupor and found a note in the upper left corner of my desk.
     The paper was crinkled and the edges flecked with small dots of mildew.  How pathetic it was, and yet, amazing.  Elliott was already gone from his seat.  Somehow I knew it was from him and I can remember what it said, to this day.

I know enough about this place to get around
But, I like your brother; I like you
Meet me outside on the soccer field, after school
Until next time,
                                                                         Elliott J. Thomas

    He wrote in French with perfect grammar.  Something told me that I shouldn't refuse.  Little did I know that I would later find myself thinking the opposite.

***

    School ended and I was finally free to appreciate one of those perfect fall days when the sun sits high in the sky, perfectly outlined by the azure blue sky as and uncolored circle in a child's coloring book.  Night was still a good two hours away when I strode out to the fields behind the lycée.
    The afternoons were still hot enough to cause the active soccer players to break into sweats before they'd played very long.  I knew some of the players but wasn't as popular with them as I was with a small group of the school's girls.
     My eyes drifted over the sun kissed field as I made my way around the cement walk surrounding the grass field.  At the farthest end of the track was a shower house. The only think between the tracks longest parallel distances were the greenest blades of grass.  Sometimes I wondered why the plants could exist at all in the Pyrenees, but then I was forced to remind myself that I was living in France then.  Anything was possible.
    At least, anything besides having Elliott at his scheduled venue-the one he picked for our rendezvous.  The one soccer player I spoke to on a regular basis sauntered over to me.  He was Spanish-French, just like me, with dark eyes, hair and high Castilian cheekbones.  My mother would've scoffed at him and assured me that he wasn't of our kind.  What else could she have done? The gypsy blood in her made her think she was something greater than human.
    Torrance, that was the Spanish boy's name, didn't think of himself on that level at all.  Well, he didn't have the gypsy inside him. He was short, but built up as successfully as Faden.  He was always amiable, always smiling. Girls liked him but for all I remember he was uninterested in them.  I believed it was only because his Catholic mother wished him to become a priest, someday. The université was not so important if he had the protection of a Higher power.
   "It's not often I see you here."  He said, smiling.  I wasn't feeling nearly as friendly.
   "A new student wanted to meet me here; I didn't want to accept, now all I want is to go home."
    Some players called to us from across the field and Torrance pretended not to hear them.  His eyebrows raised.  I was sure he knew something I didn't.
   "Really? A new student? Is he tall, and older looking?"
   My heart skipped a beat.  Torrance looked calm enough.  I wasn't.  Someone I didn't expect to have met Elliott had nearly described him.
   "His hair is dark brown; his skin is pale, like a bar of soap."
   "Ah... with silver eyes?"
   I nodded, but knew that Torrance's comparison was all wrong.  Elliott was something harder; his eyes were dangerous, yet beautiful.  They weren't of a metal to wear close on one's body. I knew they were hungry for direction.  They didn't want to serve, they wanted to be served to, doted upon.
    "Why didn't you say so right away? I saw him down here, right after he finished his gym hour. He was sucking on someone's neck.  Who knows what's going on in the shower house right now? All I can tell you is that he wasn't in any hurry to leave."
   My heart skipped again, but not out of excitement.  I was disgusted.  How could he ask me to take my time to meet him and then be off in the shower room? So many things were left unanswered.
   "I'm quite angry.  How did the new student manage to get a girl into the boy's showers?'
   Torrance laughed.  My question must've struck him as sadly ignorant.  He leaned nearer to me, chuckling soft and deep under his voice, as if about to tell me the greatest secret.
   "He's with Marvin." Torrance laughed and stood back.  His entire body seemed to cock to one side, smug with his arms held over his chest.
   "Who?"  I asked, pretending I didn't hear him right.  I was starting to wish that Elliott was smooth enough to sneak a girl into the shower house.
   "Fontaine. You know, he moved here from Alsace two years ago?"
   I nodded, bowing my head in consent, recognizing the name.  However, I was also trying to hint that I'd tired of his presence.
    He wasn't as stupid as some.  All of a sudden he straightened and cleared his throat.
   "I'll be going now…" He sighed, and sprinted across the field to his teammates.
   Marvin Fontaine. I rolled the name around in my head. It was so foreign and familiar all at once.
   There were benches on either side of the shower house.  One for the girls, and one for the boys.  The design wasn't so intelligent, however. The benches were close enough to the building to offer one a way to climb up and peer inside either side of the house through the high windows.
    Something was pulling my thoughts to the bench.  I took my steps, padding quietly over the concrete, and I listened carefully.  If I listened hard enough I began to believe I could hear sighs, and the dripping of an aging shower head.
   I winced, nearly hissing "aï" under my breath at the sudden bolt of pain across my shins when I reached the bench.  But I was there, and with the promise of a could-be fantasy happening on the other side of the beige-painted brick wall.
    Even then I felt the relentless pulling at my subconscious.  To sigh would be to give myself away, or so I believed.  My right foot began to rise, pulled by the invisible string. Perhaps it was the promise that I could be a voyeur of forbidden pleasures.  When I was that young I believed in everything my town's priests had to say.  I knew it would be a heavy week of confession and repentance.
    I put him hands up near my knee and hoisted myself up onto the bench.  Both my feet were supporting my sin. I didn't feel sorry; all I felt was a laugh.  But I suppressed it. I suppressed many feelings that afternoon.
    My fingers grasped at the windowsill and I rose to my tiptoes, just like a child at the window poised to catch a glimpse of a shooting star. Though, what I was doing was hardly as innocent.  And yet the same excitement, if not more, welled in the pit of my stomach.
    I heard more sighs and directed my eyes downward.  I saw Elliott.  His hair was damp and his vest was off.  The shirt that had been so pressed in the morning was unbuttoned at the neck.  He kissed Marvin's chest, then kneeled before him. They were right beneath my window, too consumed by the promise of pleasure to notice the shifting world around them.  Too consumed to notice my curious fingers winding over the open sill.
    Elliott's eyes were closed lightly. A mischievous grin danced on his lips.  I pondered it.  How could he have been that happy to go against anything he'd ever learned? Had he learned?
   And, somehow, it was the most erotic thing I'd seen in my seventeen years of existence.  It was joyous, and saddening. His eyes turned up at just the right time; he grinned to Marvin.  I wondered what it would be like to be so consumed in the moment to be numb to the world, and even to a curious and inexperienced young man who watched the entire scene above, or below, my nose.
    Marvin began to breathe heavily, and sighs came plentiful.  I knew when he was through because I heard his last sigh, defeated and victorious all at once. His hair was as damp as Elliott's.
    The last thing I saw was Marvin's hand reaching out to the nearest article of clothing, and I hopped off the bench. When I saw the pink tinge above the mountains surrounding my city I realized that time had stopped for me, as well.  Between taking my time after school, walking to the soccer field, chatting with Torrance, and being momentarily drawn into a dark world of lust and sin my day was nearly over.  I imagined there was only about one more hour of light left.
    I shouldn't have let Elliott's words sway me, or his actions, but I did. Now my heart hammered in my chest and I sat quietly, distantly, on a bench, waiting for Elliott.
   He came, eventually, my books had slid onto the ground by that time. He seemed refreshed, proud of what he'd done.  Or maybe a weight had been lifted off his chest.  I didn't know; and, I didn't know why I cared.
    Yet, I cared enough to stay.  He beamed up until the moment he reached my bench.  When I shot him a glare the grin was gone.
    "Nice of you to come." I said. Elliott winced.
    "I'm sorry." He said, quickly, and curtly.  I could tell he believed in his apologies validity as much as I did.
    "No you aren't."  I was quiet after that. The rest of the walk home was a blur to me.  I don't quite remember whether anything was said or not. I let him come with me. Faden never brought him to our house before.  Elliott was the one who convinced me to take him up to Rue de la Gare.  This part of the day no longer exists in my memory-perhaps in his.

***

    Samren Trouillefou brought me through the small town.  After living in London and a larger town in Normandy I found it interesting that I could walk wherever I wanted to go and be from one end of the town to another in an hour. With all the students in school and the tourists working, action was minimal in famous Lourdes.
     His house was set among commercial buildings, an office here, a hotel there; but, when we came to a short stone barricade with an iron fence extending the shield to a normal fence height, he stopped.
    Though I could tell he held venom for me, I admired him.  I admired his height, his dark hair, and his chocolate-and-toffee eyes.  He held a different sort of masculinity.  While he wished to be cold and unrelenting I could sense his grace, and how he would bend to a person's wishes if they weren't farfetched.   He was like his brother-and yet not at all-only in that after I got to know him I knew part of him wanted success and natural aptitude in all Faden's areas.
   I glanced up to the house.  It was three stories, sided in terracotta, and the edges were trimmed in stone blocks and carved lion accents on the windows roared silently toward the street they'd face forever.
   "Come along, come along."
   How impatient.
   I wanted to observe the house, to know it so that I could somehow store the moment and the place in my memory.
   The gate creaked open; Samren walked in, and held it open, urging me on.  I couldn't allow him to wait so I entered into a small courtyard.  There was nothing there, save for an overgrown brick walkway and some patchy grass that probably hadn't been cared for in years.
   Before I could absorb the second scene he urged me up a few stone steps and into a small entry. The only features on the level were a door and a staircase.
    "We rent the apartment to a businessman." He said in a tone that made me think he was asked the question often.
    He began to ascend the stairs. "He hates people who hover near his door."
   Samren reached into his book bag, out of habit, but realized that the door might already be unlocked.  The hand jumped out of the pocket and to the doorknob
   "Wait here." He hissed, and disappeared through the newly opened doorway.
  Great. I thought. Now I'm sandwiched between a messenger and a nervous businessman who I bet has an ulcer.
   Luckily the door was left open a crack and I peered in.  There was a China cabinet, filled with finery. I found it a bit feminine for the brothers and their stern father, if he was as stern as Faden and Samren made him out to be.
    The stairway door only opened to a small niche, it was impossible for me to see any more beside a hall that Samren had disappeared down.
    I rocked back and forth on my feet, nervously, heel to ball and ball to heel. A few boards squeaked under my feet; I released a sigh.
    And then Samren returned, but his face was clouded and serious.  That night was not the time for me to enter.  I knew from his expression.
     I nodded and turned to descend the stairs, not at all prepared to give up on Samren Trouillefou.

***

     My changes had arrived.  Elliott had arrived; I didn't know what his coming into my life would come to mean.  Now I remember, I was honest in turning him away from the entry of my house that day.
    Father needed rest. "Rest would help him forget mother.  Rest would make him work more smoothly at his firm. Rest would make our wildest dreams come true."  No, I didn't understand his logic either.
    Our house stood ten years back in time, untouched and unaltered from the time my mother died.  It was probably another superstition of my father.  If we left everything in its place it would be easier to forget her death.  The room she died in on the house's highest level hadn't even seen anyone enter or exit it for the entire time. All the emphasis on locking the house in a time warp was really what made my father sick.
   But my changes had arrived. I don't know whether it was the strange British boy with perfect French or just Mother Earth and Father Time's plan for me-for everything to start changing then.
     My father wasn't locked up into his study like a man in a straightjacket.  He sat, calm, in the sitting room.  He still had a work notebook on his lap.  But he was downstairs in a room with windows that weren't hung with heavy curtains to block out all light.
    "He's gone." I said, quietly. He looked up from the notebook, over a pair of old fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles.
    "Ah, good. I have something important to tell you, tonight." He spoke slowly, his tongue molding each of his words carefully before they arrived in the open.  My eyes were lost on my book back laid in the corner of the room.
    The conversations I had with my father were weak.  I never responded with a question.  I didn't like to formulate them and after mother's death he didn't like to be questioned.
   He sucked in a great stream of air, filling out his chest and I recognized a faint half-smile at the corners of his frown-line framed mouth, caused by aging without growing out of sorrow.
     "Have you been wanting to leave Lourdes?" He asked.
    I'd never pondered the thought.  The house belonged to my mother's father. While her mother was a traveling dancer, her father was wealthy and able to station himself, lovers, and servants in the three-story Lourdes house.  We'd never re-decorated.  I never thought him the type to be willing to leave the house.  I had to be honest.
      "No." I said.  He furrowed his brow as my answer was surprising.
     "Come on. You're a good boy. Born in Lyon, raised a good part of your youth there. You haven't missed city life at all?"
   I pondered the thought but could hardly remember anything of the city. We left for the comfort of the country as soon as mother fell ill.
     "I don't remember very well."
    He smiled knowingly, a secret blazing away in his chest like a box of Francs sitting in a nightstand.
    "My job is about to station me in Paris."
    For some reason he looked more delighted than I'd ever seen him.  There was another element to his surprise I didn't know of that brewed an ocean away.
    I smiled politely, and nodded, excusing myself from the room and from dinner-anything that had to do with the evening's family affairs, pretending to have a headache.

    I walked from the room, turning down the hall to the narrow stairway at its end, and ascended into a hallway saturated in the smell of 10 year-old incense and rich perfume.
   My room was the first one, and wasn't too big. The house made up for it by having, then, plenty of rooms for everyone in the house.  The bed was more inviting than ever.
   I laid my homework things carefully upon a mahogany desk without the intention of sitting down to do my duties. The bed was more inviting, as was stripping down into my underwear and sliding between the covers.
   That's what I did.  I was comfortable, my soft blankets pulled to my chin.  The warm amber light beside my bed comforted me as well.  I was under the spell of the day. Elliott and visions of confusing Montmarte streets flitted in and out of consciousness.
   However, Elliott had been a larger part of my day than my father and beat Paris efficiently from my thoughts.  Instead I saw his hungry grey eyes-lifeless and seeking a host from which to gather emotion, and perhaps a greater shimmer.
    I saw him kissing Marvin's pelvis, his damp hair on his forehead, some of it brushing against Marvin.  His lips around Marvin's sex, pink, and slightly smiling.  Those lips had slightly smiled at me.
   My hand brushed down my pelvis and into my underwear.  Even under my blankets I felt a chill.  The images flashed through my mind, just as pictures in a slideshow.  I had my own internal slideshow-intense and personal.
   Elliott's lips, around my sex. My hand reaching down to touch myself in such an intimate way.  To stroke, to caress, to love another man. Grasping at him, pulling at him, stroking at myself, stroking up more images like stroking through California river sand for gold.
   I gasped, came, and laid on my back, breathing away the pleasure and sin.  I sat up in bed, all at once, my thoughts running back to me all at once. I came crashing back into myself, just like a dream or a brush with death.
    I felt disgusted. I staggered down the hall to retrieve a swatch of toilet paper to clean up, after taking a good pee, and went to sleep in a new pair of underwear, batting away thoughts of Elliott from my dreams.