He was friendly enough in greeting me, but as always there was something reserved about him, as if he were deciding whether or not to pronounce a judgment he was on the point of making. He stood out here, with his slightly formal clothes, his feathered hair, though in the States he would have been generic enough, an East Coast aspirant prep school kid, maybe not quite the real thing, especially if he smiled too broadly (as he was careful almost never to do) and revealed a lower set of teeth in un-American disarray. But then he did appear, standing beside me suddenly, and my annoyance dissolved at the sight of him. continued not to appear I wondered if my sacrificed afternoon would go to waste.

I was getting annoyed with the booksellers who, sensing my foreignness, kept directing me to their piles of battered American paperbacks, and as G. I had some idea, then, what we would talk about, and why school didn’t offer enough secrecy for us to talk about it there, but I was still curious: he wasn’t a student I was particularly close to, he didn’t stop by my room outside of class, he had never confided in me or sought me out, and I wondered what crisis was bringing him to me now. It was familiar to me, that intensity, a story from my own adolescence, as was the basking ambivalence with which the other boy received it, how he both invited it and held it off. sought him out and the privacy he drew about them.

had caught my attention, at first simply because he was beautiful, and then for the special quality of friendship I thought I saw between him and another boy in my class, the intensity with which G. It was December now, though winter hadn’t yet really taken hold the sun was out and the weather was mild, it wasn’t unpleasant to stand for a bit and browse the books on display. Really it wasn’t a fountain anymore, it had been shuttered for years, since faulty wiring stopped a man’s heart one summer as he dipped his fingers into the cool water there. was late, and as I waited for him I browsed the book stalls the square is famous for, their wares piled high under awnings in front of the city library. We had agreed to meet at the fountain in front of the McDonald’s in Slaveykov Square.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell