Free The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon Page B

fight?”
    My father sent us then to play with the pages.
    Arimnestus ran off immediately with a few boys his own age as though he had known them all his life. That was his gift.
    “Where’d you get that?” the older ones wanted to know, of my black eye.
    “Fight,” I said.
    Raised eyebrows, half-smiles.
    “Leave him alone,” a voice called. “My father likes his father.”
    Philip was less than a year younger than me, short, strong, with a high colour and clear, open eyes. The pages separated to let him through. He reached up and flicked me companionably across the eyebrow with his finger. “Hurt?”
    It occurs to me now that I had the one eye then and he the two; a joke across the years. I want to have flicked him back or hit him or said something withering, but I just stood there, eye watering like a mouth until I couldn’t see from it but could feel tears running down the one cheek. He laughed happily and invited me to the gymnasium with his companions.
    “My father told me to wait here,” I said.
    What a lot I am claiming for the eyes—my mother’s eyes, my father’s, and now his—but I swear he looked at me as much as to say that he too had such a father, and understood, and would help me. He flicked me again, roughly in the same place, with his knuckles this time, enough to open the wound there and start it bleeding again.
    “Come on,” he said when I hesitated. “Come on. Have to clean that up.”
    The other pages were already ahead of us. I was seeing through a red scrim.
    “It’s just over there,” he said.
    I had never been in a gymnasium. The attendant wanted to bandage my eye, but my father believed in clean water and open air. He said covering allowed a wound to fester. The attendant dabbed hard until the bleeding stopped, and told me to avoid anything vigorous or risk opening it again. The other boys were already hard at it, my brother too, wrestling and tumbling on the mats, their voices echoing off the high stone ceiling. The few old men who had been there when we arrived sighed and left for the baths. Philip looked around his world in approval.
    “You’ve never been in a fight in your life,” he said. “You don’t have another scratch anywhere, and when I hit you, you didn’t flinch. You didn’t even see it coming. And you didn’t try to hit me back.”
    “Can you swim? I need a place where I can swim. Every day.”
    He asked if I was fast and I said no. “No kidding.” He laughed. “Maybe one day you’ll be my physician.”
    “No. Do you swim or not?”
    “It’s like you’re retarded. I can swim. Do you fuck girls or boys?”
    “Both,” I said.
    “That your father?”
    He was in the doorway, waiting.
    “Tell him I hit you for no reason,” Philip said. “I want to see what he does.”
    I could tell my father was staring at my brow as I walked over to him, and only at the last second looked at my eyes. “All right?”
    “I hit him for no reason,” Philip said. He had come right along behind me.
    My father took him by the elbow and raised his arm once or twice like a wing. “Show me.”
    Philip pulled the clothes from his shoulder and let my father dig his fingers under the collarbone. I looked over my father’s shoulder to see the scar.
    “Excellent,” my father said. He cuffed Philip lightly on the head and turned away. I followed him.
    “I’m going swimming tomorrow,” Philip called after us. “Can he come?”
    My father raised an open hand without looking back, yes .
    The scar had been a smallish white clot, indicating a penetration rather than a tear. My father told me, when I asked him, that it was from a training session, a spear wound, and Philip was lucky it hadn’t been a finger or two off in any direction—joint, throat, heart.
    O URS WAS AN ODD friendship, with respect and contempt barely distinguishable. I was smart and he was hard: that was what the world saw, and what we saw and liked and disliked in each other. I was not his first friend