A Face Too Pretty for a Boy

Currently, somewhere south of the Baltic Sea

A last look in the mirror, a smooching of the disobedient strands of hair that, despite the rather short haircut, were anyway sticking up in all directions, a smile at the mirror and there, done. Or at least the best that could be done under the circumstances. David went to great lengths to make his facial expression a little more serious, more mature, more befitting the twenty years he turned six months ago rather than such a childish one. His mother admittedly said that it ran in their family and almost all the men in her lineage had boyish, yes, even girlish facial features, but this did not comfort him at all. Some colleagues laughed in his face, saying that he looked like a girl.

Fortunately, girls didn't mind this so much. Most of them liked his delicate facial features and almost all of them stared at his dark blue eyes, so unusual with black hair, like some kind of miracle of nature.

David himself since he entered adolescence had dreamed of looking more masculine. It's true that he didn't manage to grow a beard (another hereditary trait from his mother's ancestors, who apparently arrived from Asia some three hundred years earlier), but he didn't shy away from hard outdoor work, so although he was far from Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique, he wasn't pathetically skinny like he was just two years ago, when he couldn't even find decent clothes to wear. Now he looked normal and a white T-shirt with a drawing depicting gray hussar wings looked pretty good on him.

"Then I'm going!" He called out, running out of the bathroom and heading for the exit.

"Just don't come back too late!" called out from the kitchen his mother. "Remember that tomorrow morning you have to be at the palace to finish before the new owner arrives!"

"I remember! See you later!"

David ran out of the house straight to the waiting car, an old, sporty, that was the pride of his buddy. Philip finally passed his driver's license and was able to buy his dream sports car in the noisy indigo color, although for David it was just navy blue.

"You're late," growled Philip from behind the wheel.

"You wish I was!" smiled David and jumped into the passenger seat. In the back sat their two buddies, Jarek and Sebastian. "Hi, guys!"

They answered him as pleased as he was. I guess they were all looking forward to this disco. Rumor had it that the students, who had started some kind of art camp in a neighboring municipality last week, would come to it. Philip was probably the most excited of all, because he took off before David closed the door. The boy hastily buckled his seat belt.

"Hey, are you sure you have a driver's license?" laughed David.

"Yeah, I'm sure," Philip replied lightly. His wide smile had something naughty about it and his blue eyes sparkled wryly. Even his sun-bright hair heavily sprayed with hairspray gave a wry impression. Everything about Philip screamed that he was about to embark on the biggest adventure of his life and was looking forward to it. "But if we don't hurry, the guys from Makowiec will clean the students from under our noses," he explained, pressing the accelerator to the floor. "And those girl are from the first year..."

David was actually all the same. And so he had one girl picked out, Berenice. He had had a crush on her since elementary school, but Berenice had always been smarter than him and on top of that quite a bit taller, and he never got around to telling her how much he liked her. Two years ago she left to study in Krakow and became even more unavailable to him. The previous summer he dared to talk to her for a while when she came to the flower shop where he was replacing his mother. She smiled a lot and seemed happy to meet him, but David didn't dare ask for her number. Later, he still saw her in passing at the church, but did not even exchange a word with her. Berenice was beautiful, intelligent and studying in the big city, and he was just being himself.

Berenice was an absolute ideal, and about this there was no discussion. A girl like her was destined for success, a great career and a guy who would provide her with a beautiful house, a car and take her on exotic vacations. David had no doubt that the girl would find just the right person for her. He knew that this someone would never be him. But he probably had the right to dream a little about a girl as beautiful and good as an angel?

From various sources, David gathered scraps of information and learned that his first and only love had come again on vacation. Unfortunately, tethered by his work with his father and uncle in renovating the palace and taking care of its surroundings, he did not have time to frequent the town, where he had a better chance of meeting Berenice.

This youthful, unsatisfied love, however, was not so tragic that David could not occasionally go out to have fun and dance with the girls. He knew he wouldn't meet Berenice here, she was too serious for that, but he liked to be in the company of people, laugh, dance, have two or three beers. After all, there was nothing wrong with that. He was young and should spend time with his peers, not just work.

After ten minutes, they were on the spot. Philip parked the car in the meadow, because there was no more room in the small parking lot in front of the barn. The wooden building, erected a few years ago in the middle of nowhere, was as if made to hold parties in, so it was often used for this purpose. David, who was just a visitor, never cared who made them, or whether the owner knew about them. He came here to have fun, as did the rest of his buddies. Barely had Philip turned off the engine, they heard loud music. The party was already in full swing, as evidenced not only by the colorful lights but also by the number of empty beer bottles and cans.

"Whoa, there are more people than I thought," Sebastian remarked admiringly.

David felt a little uncomfortable. He liked parties and the company of his peers, but he wasn't fond of crowds, and here it looked like company from the city had descended again. It was half poor if it was familiar youngsters from a nearby town, but sometimes boys from a large agglomeration were able to show up here, and then David was viewed as a kind of zoological curiosity. More than once he had to explain to drunken partygoers that he was not a girl and ask them to take their hand off his ass. For him, such situations were awkward, but his colleagues always had a laugh then.

"Uuuu, David, you're going to have a take again," laughed Philip.

"Shut up," he growled, feeling that he was blushing. Fortunately, he was sufficiently tanned so that the blush was not pronounced because if it had been, he would have really burned from embarrassment.

His buddies, on the other hand, were happy. True, the city boys came to party with the village girls, but they were often accompanied by female friends. The city girls were also eager to spend time with the locals, and although for Philip, Jarek and Sebastian the chance to pick up one of the locals was declining, the opportunity to have a nice time with a girl from a slightly different world was coming up.

Usually it wasn't so bad that David had to give up the fun because of the musings of drunken townsfolk. He wasn't going to now, either. He sighed, smiled with added confidence and entered the barn.

The people were unusually large in number and, despite the draught, the air was already heavy. There was a suffocating smell of beer and an exploding mixture of perfumes. It was recommended by cigarette and pot smoke. Even by the latter you could tell that it was the cream of the big city. It's not that the locals didn't use certain substances. They just did it less publicly, where there was no risk of being seen by someone who shouldn't. Urbanites, on the other hand, were precisely why they came to these types of events. After all, here in the provinces, far from the big city, they were sure not to be seen by anyone who shouldn't. And what the locals would think of them, they were unlikely to care much.

For David, however, it was totally irrelevant. The music was good, so getting into the rhythm of it he began to look around the room in search of some free group of girls.

"Hey, pretty girl" he heard right next to him. "Leave those boring losers and come have fun with us. Do you hear?"

David, who at first thought this sentence was directed to some girl twitched when he felt someone's hand on his shoulder. He turned around and saw a swaggering townsperson looking straight at him….