Read Rocks, The for Free Online Page B

toward the barracks. He leapt up the stairs toward his room.

Three
    L
ate in the afternoon,
Charlie rode his bike down the rutted dirt driveway from C’an Cabrer, his grandfather’s farm. It was another kilometer along the paved road into Cala Marsopa. He met Bianca at the English and German bookshop and café off the plaza. They bussed each other on both cheeks and walked, Charlie pushing his bike, through town to the port.
    “Ho-laaa,”
Rafaela, the pale, lightly mustached, dark-haired woman who owned the Bar-Restaurante Marítimo, greeted them both with affection.
    “Hola,”
Charlie replied, with a smile,
“cómo estás?”
He’d been brought to this restaurant overlooking the port as an infant in a basket, and he’d come back every summer of his life. Rafaela always knew him. It wasn’t so everywhere in Cala Marsopa. A week ago, buying a bag of hot
churros
from the gnarled vendor whom Charlie had known since toddlerhood and remembered like an uncle who always had a treat for him, the old man had looked at him—now a six-foot youth—without recognition, and asked him for “
fünfundzwanzig
pesetas,” and Charlie had been cut to the quick.
    Rafaela led them to a table on the terrace overlooking the yachts and the fishing boats in the harbor. They ordered
hamburguesas
,
papas fritas
, and Cokes. Before the food arrived, Sylvestre, Natalie, and Marie joined them. Rafaela had known them for years too: the children of children of foreign residents who had lived on or come back to the island since Rafaela had been a child herself. They ordered calamari.
    “On va tout le monde à l’anniversaire de Lulu au Rocks?”
asked Sylvestre.
    “Yeah. I’m going to be the DJ,” said Charlie.
    “Ahhh, non!”
said Marie, expectorating the first word with exasperation.
“Putain, j’en ai marre de cette musi-i-i-que.”
    “No, it’s cool,” said Charlie agreeably. “Anyway, it’s what Lulu wants.”
    After they’d eaten, Sylvestre and the two French girls walked back through town.
    The sea breeze had died. It was hot near the stucco apartment buildings and concrete walls that had replaced the shade of bent pines and crumbles of limestone that defined the edges of the old fishing harbor that still appeared in postcards of Cala Marsopa. Charlie and Bianca climbed the steps to the top of the breakwater and walked out to the blinking light at the far end where they sat in the shadow of its structure, out of the flash. It was cooler above the water.
    They kissed wetly, hungrily, like people eating steadily under a time constraint. Charlie put his hand inside Bianca’s shirt and slipped her precocious breasts free of her bra. She threw her legs over his lap and let her hand rest on Charlie’s thigh. Charlie’s own crossed legs prevented, he hoped, Bianca feeling his erection pulsing spasmodically beneath her. As a child, Bianca had been skinny. When Charlie saw her the summer they were both twelve, she’d become softer. At thirteen, she was heavier. This year, at fifteen, Charlie’s age, that heaviness had concentrated in her sizable breasts, and her hips. Now he thought of Bianca ceaselessly when he masturbated, but they’d been playmates since they were children and he didn’t want to spoil their friendship. Sex had come over them, and they played with it nicely like friends playing dolls. They went no further. By unspoken agreement, they’d settled on this decent plateau of intimacy. Charlie liked Bianca too much to make her uncomfortable.
    After a bit, he looked at his watch and said, “I better get going.”
    At the bottom of the steps, Charlie got on his bike. Bianca sat on the crossbar and he pedaled them down the quay. He dropped her close to the plaza and she said,
“À toute à l’heure,”
as he pedaled away.
    Five minutes later, he swung into the small driveway off the alley and laid his bike against the wall outside the kitchen.
    At seven, with the tables set, dinner being prepared, most of the