Ugly

• Marcus Verdicchio, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2020

Patrick looked in the mirror, he commonly did this. He looked at himself, his naked body, and wondered where his youth gone. Then he answered himself
Down the toilet.
He walked into the bathroom, and took a pause, where did his hair go?
Back into his skull
Patrick signed. He made Santa Claus beard of shaving cream and painfully wiped it off with a sharp blade. He went into the shower and again took a little while. He always had to wait before he put his head under the water. It was just a natural reaction to getting hurt. He avoided it. But he didn’t want to meet Sal after all this time and show up with what hair he had left as a greasy mess, the kinks tighter and sharper than any barbed wire. He stepped out signed, looked at himself in the mirror again.
What a joke. I was so good looking when I was young, you would think that I would then settle into aged decency, but no.
He dabbed himself in some cologne (careful not to smell like a queer) and brushed his hair (careful not to look like a schizo). He opened his wardrobe, one which he had first as a teenager and then afterwards as an adult. He had hidden porn here, drugs here and now he hid his sense of style, which he could only find when it wanted to be found. He picked up a white linen shirt, it suited him, and a pair of blue jeans which suited them. Now dressed, he walked into the Livingroom/kitchen/dining room of his home, an apartment he called “an oasis of poverty in a desert of wealth”. He opened the door. And walked to the car, parked just up the street. There were no passers-by, and the lowering sun with its pink-blue sky gave him the feeling that he was in a painting that might sell well.
Skipping forward, the restaurant was bright and bursting. Waiters and waitresses rushed, weaving around the tables like foxes in borrow holes. He saw him waiting by the door, leaning on it in a way that someone who needs ed to lean would do so. It was Sal. It had been a while they had talked, seen each other, know each other. They were friends in school, a connection first made out of desperation by two unpopular kids, but it developed into two people with nothing in common, communing together and finding everything about them in common. They had drifted apart after high school as most did, only reconnecting as two old men out of pace on the internet.
“Heya Pat! Long time no see!”
“Same to you!”
They hugged.
“Geez, Pat. You look good. Better than me…”
“I work hard not to look too ugly.”
They both walked up the stairs. Sal stumbled. He might of the fell, had Pat not grabbed his arm. Sal smiled an apologetic smile.
“Sal, are you sick?”
“A little bit. But I’m getting better. Still look terrible.”
“A.I.D.S?”