Page 13 of Icarus

Monday was wet with the rain from Sunday night. The gloom carried into the classroom, making lessons slow and irritable. Worse, gym class was held inside on rainy days, in the caustically bright gymnasium.

Their teacher didn’t care what anyone did while gym was outside, so long as he had enough players for a game. But with less space indoors, anyone not playing was actively in the way. On rainy days, Icarus actually had to participate.

Floor hockey wasn’t his favorite, but he got to be the goalie, which was nice. Normally people in other classes who walked the mile would fight over that position—seeing as it was the most sedentary. But Icarus’s reflexes made him startlingly good. Team captains always picked him first and instantly assigned him that role.

Luca, who was on the other team, had made his way across the gym and parked himself near Icarus to chat. The center back defenders on Icarus’s team watched him warily.

But Luca didn’t care, he was blabbing about some video game that he thought Icarus might like.

“It’s open world, I’m not sure if you’re into that. You don’t really seem like an FPS-type guy.”

“I’m not.” Icarus didn’t play video games; he didn’t have time for it.

“That’s what I thought.” Luca pushed his hair back and glanced up the court at their classmates loudly chasing the ball. Attentive, even still.

“But anyway, you can do whatever you want in it, which is pretty fun. You can do side quests, or mine or fish, you can be a hero or a villain or like . . . I don’t know, a vagrant?”

Icarus snickered. “Middle Ages Fantasy Crust Punk Simulator?”

Luca laughed loudly. “Yeah man, if you want it to be.”

The ball rolled quickly across the room, pursued by Janine Rodgers—one of the most athletic girls in their school. She scrunched her freckled nose in concentration and slapped it. Icarus tracked its trajectory. He easily parried it back into play right at the feet of one of the defenders on his team.

Luca whistled low. “Man, you should definitely try an FPS though. With that kind of reaction time . . . you’d be dangerous.”

Icarus shrugged. “I like the sound of the other thing you were describing better. I . . . like the idea of getting to go wherever you want and do whatever you like.”

Luca smiled, but it was an odd one. “Yeah . . . I thought you might.”

The ball sailed in their direction again. This time Luca did his job and volleyed it sharply into Icarus’s net. Reflexively, Icarus’s body instantly fell to its knees and his arms jerked up to catch the ball with a painful smack.

“Fuck,” one of his teammates gasped. “He’s like a professional.”

Icarus’s ears burned at the attention. He climbed to his feet and gently tossed the ball back into action.

Luca was gazing at him, eyes dark with amusement. “You can’t keep doing stuff like that and still turn me down when I try to recruit you for team sports.”

“Yes, I can.” Icarus smiled back shakily as he rubbed his smarting palms on his thighs.

“Come eat lunch with us next period. At least turn down Akeem in person so he gets off my back,” Luca said, his eyes tracking the play toward his own team’s net. “Literally no one else in school knows you well enough to ask. He’s been bothering me about it every day.”

It was rare that permanent solutions to social problems were dropped in his lap, so Icarus agreed.

Blush

Icarus usually ate in the photo room; it was dim, quiet, and almost always completely empty. On the rare occasion that someone was trying to work in there, he would switch to eating outside on the hill. If it was rainy, or winter, he would sneak to the back of the library and eat on the floor surrounded by books. The three or four times that the librarian caught him and firmly reminded him that there was no eating in the library, he waited twenty minutes until everyone had been served and went to eat in the kitchen with the lunch ladies.

He’d come up with this method after he accidentally fell in with a habitual group to sit with in freshman year and they started trying really hard to chill with him outside of school.

But even so—even when he was younger and less careful—Icarus would never have sat with Luca and his friends.

Luca led him through the loud, busy room to the back where the sporty popular kids sat. Akeem—tall, African American, and talented at baseball—sat at the center of the table leaning back against the window. To his left: Patrick—blond, big as a house, and better at football than most other things—was loudly talking about how he didn’t want to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it made him uncomfortable. To Akeem’s right was his girlfriend, Trina, who was exceptionally nice, but so pretty she was completely unapproachable. There were two other guys at the same table, both on the basketball team. Each had two lunch trays with two portions of lunch each.

All of them perked up as Luca and Icarus approached.

“I see you brought something for show-and-tell,” Patrick said, pausing in his tirade.

Luca grinned and put a firm hand on Icarus’s shoulder. The other kids shifted to the side to make more room.