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The grass is quasi-green from the taste of winter rain not falling, barely tangible to a color that's connoted with life and flesh rather than suffering and meagerness. The thinly cladded, shivering athletes droop along the rugby fields sullenly, still waking up from a late afternoon math class or indulging in a quick-but-futile afternoon energy snack.
The air is humid and cold, drawing heavy patterns across Pia's skin as he sits and tries not to suffocate in it—the noose-like air. Breaths exude in the shape of wreaths of smoke; laughter like mushrooms of smoke punching into the air.
The hierarchy's highest boys infect the dewy bleachers and the field's rim, passing rugby balls to each other and stretching to prepare themselves for the practice. [Of course one could never be ready enough for rugby practice here.] Amongst the boys you will find Pia, leaching onto the side of the rugby field, trying to retain his body heat in only a thin shirt and shorts [not his greatest idea this deep into winter still lingering for another month and a half]. A group of boys surround him.
The boys collect in clusters close to their designated coach, conversing, eating, laughing, sitting close to regulate a good enough body heat even when all of them are clothed in thick jackets and are far too manly for any physical contact.
Pia doesn't pay any attention to his peers, to his coach ticking off on his board or anything important to his life. Instead, he wonders where the rain went and how it'll come to rain when the season's finished. He worries about drought a lot, even when it's not his to worry about—he has to worry about rugby, even though the season is close to finished [Westford is on a winning streak].
He worries a lot about his mother too. When she dropped him off at the hostel, she didn't make a single utterance the entire car ride to the hostel's front door. He never heard her in such a state—usually she'd try to tell him something, even if it meant a story about a client she had with a massive penis tattooed on his leg or a rat she found in the building's storage compartment with a missing front tooth.
But she only turned the radio up to cry out in some generic, early 2000s pop song no one listens to anymore.
He stares at the apple's freckles, folding around the fruit like a pretty jacket. Pia is not hungry, but he knows himself well enough to know if he doesn't force himself to eat, he will not eat at all. He tears a bite out of the fruit, but the taste and texture disturbs him—it's sandy and saccharine, like raw sugar; not something he can enjoy. He struggles to swallow, but it's like vines of hair tangling down his throat.
He looks up at the faces framing his body in the center of the circle, desperately searching for a place to discard the thing. A conversation shoots around him like a war, words spitting from mouths and grins slicing through his skin. Occasionally, he hears his name, or a topic regarding him as part of the conversation, even when he's not.
