Gathering Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page B

a moment.
    Lynette had this wonderful, healthy and bright smile highlighted by her impish ebony eyes and soft, full lips. She really looked more like a model than an athlete.
    “Larry is very studious, a national achievement scholar and a published poet. Marcus is always trying to get Larry to ease up and have a good time. He might be fun to talk to and be with, knowing how you can unravel someone.”
    “Unravel?”
    “I see how you twist and turn some of the other girls, here, Megan,” she said laughing. “You come out with things that absolutely confuse them sometimes.”
    “I had a lot of practice growing up with the sister I have,” I said.
    “So? What do you say? It’d be just an afternoon. Nothing serious intended,” she added thinking she had to promise such a thing. “Of course, if you think your parents might not approve because he’s an African-American, I understand. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
    “He’s a published poet?”
    “Yes, in four different highly respected college magazines. He’s done some acting in school, too. Marcus teases him. Calls him the poor man’s Denzel Washington or Sidney Poitier.”
    I really didn’t think anything would come of it, but I also thought it might be fun, a different way to pass a weekend day, and it was unusually warm for the time of year. The ocean would surely be refreshing.
    “Okay. I’m in,” I said.
    She called Marcus to tell him. From the conversation I understood Marcus was having a hard time getting Larry to come along, but in the end, he managed to get him to join us. They came to the campus about nine in the morning. I wore jeans, a knit blouse, and a hooded light pink sweater. Neither Lynette nor I had mentioned our beach trip to any of the other girls in the dorm. We simply stepped out into the bright sunshine and got into Marcus’s station wagon. His car was a hand-me-down from his parents and not very sporty.
    I glanced at Larry and quickly closed the car door, checking to see if any of the other girls were watching us. I saw no one in particular and we drove off. After we pulled away from the campus, I turned to Larry Ward and smiled. He was wearing a turtleneck cable knit sweater and jeans and was as good-looking as Lynette had implied. He was lighter skinned than Marcus, and when we stepped out of the vehicle later, I saw he was close to six feet tall with well-proportioned shoulders. He had a shy but disarming smile that made me feel he was always two or three steps and seconds ahead of everyone else and able to anticipate reactions to anything.
    Unlike all of the other young men I had been with, he had no interest in talking about himself. Once we were over the awkwardness of just meeting, he asked me questions about where we lived, my school, the friends I had, and my interests. We talked about music and movies. He and Marcus had a nice banter between them, gently teasing each other about each other’s failures in sports and how Lynette could whip “both our asses” in a one-on-one basketball game.
    When we reached the beach and parked, Lynette and Marcus walked on ahead at a much faster pace, looking like they had come for the exercise mostly. Larry and I lingered far behind. There were long silences between the things we said until I asked him about his poetry.
    “When I was growing up in Baltimore,” he said, “I kept my poetry secret. My friends didn’t know about it until my senior high English teacher went and submitted one of my poems to a magazine for me and it was accepted. The school principal made a big deal of it at an assembly and I was exposed.”
    “What sort of poetry do you write?”
    “It’s all free verse. I’m more interested in images, allusions, irony, that sort of thing. I’m doing my graduate work in Shakespeare,” he added. Then he stopped walking and put up his hands, laughing. “I’m not going to be an actor, just a college teacher. Also,” he said, leaning toward me as if there were