Being Roy

  Being Roy

  By Julie Aitcheson

  The greatest trial Roy Watkins faces isn’t deciding whether she’s gay or straight, male or female, West Virginia country mouse or prep school artistic prodigy. It isn’t even leaving behind her childhood sweetheart Oscar to attend uppity Winchester Academy in the hunt country of Virginia, or acclimating to a circle of friends that now includes privileged Imogen, her sharp but self-conscious sidekick Bugsy, and the tortured Hadley. No, the hardest thing for Roy to face is the world’s expectations about who and what she should be.

  As Roy’s journey of self-discovery forces her to cross one hurdle after another, her identity closes in fast. Sooner than she could have ever predicted, she’ll have to decide what that means for her, the people she’s coming to care about, and the life that lies ahead.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter ONE

  Chapter TWO

  Chapter THREE

  Chapter FOUR

  Chapter FIVE

  Chapter SIX

  Chapter SEVEN

  Chapter EIGHT

  Chapter NINE

  Chapter TEN

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Chapter TWELVE

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  Chapter NINETEEN

  About the Author

  By Julie Aitcheson

  Visist Harmony Ink Press

  Copyright

  For my parents, Bob and Wanda Aitcheson. For everything.

  Acknowledgments

  THE AMOUNT of space it would take to thank everyone to whom thanks is due would far exceed the length of this book. I can only chip away at it, in hopes that there will be other books with other Acknowledgment sections to accommodate my gratitude.

  A world of thanks to my agent, Melissa Edwards of Stonesong. To be far more dramatic than Roy would ever condone, you saved me. Thanks also to the dynamite team at Harmony Ink Press for walking me through this adventure in publishing with such great care, and for believing that Roy’s world was one worth sharing. Roy agrees.

  For their endless love and encouragement, I owe my family to the max. To my siblings and their tribes (the Cooleys: Amy, Greg, Mikey, Grayson, and Lily; the Goughs: Sarah, John, Kate, Talon, and Eden; and my brother Rob Aitcheson), I am indebted for sorely needed hugs, laughter, and distraction in the leanest of times. A special thanks to my grandmother, Ann, for cheering me on no matter what; William, E.K., and Eula Mae for watching over me, and the aunts, uncles, and cousins who reassured me that a breakthrough was just around the corner. The scope of support that my parents, Bob and Wanda Aitcheson, have provided over the years is so vast as to resemble fiction, so I’ll just say thanks to Mom, who reads everything, and Dad, who never gives up. You two always do the important things right.

  Last but not least, to the true believers who are related to me by spirit rather than blood. It turns out that surrounding yourself with great people can rub off a little if you hold them close. Nikia Bergan, Marcia McGee, Kim Couch, Rebes and Jay Nash, W.O.C., my Peace Corps loves (Katherine Reed, Mia Pedersen, Erikalynn Romweber, Dee Hertzberg, and Cristina Bisson), Maren Gauldin, Heather Peroni, Liz Lopez, the Pyles clan, Renee Howard, Lynsie Mckeown, and Emily Caldwell—I am so very glad I kept you close.

  Then there are the people who were and are my hope and my home (and gave me both again and again) while I wrote this book. To Petra R. Rhines, Claire Wheeler, Lisa Mase and Ryan Case, Casey Ellison, Twylla Lannes, Brooke Moen, Kelly Walsh, Bethany Pombar, Vini K. Devine, Kate and Jose Galarza, Kate Stephenson and Glen Hutcheson, Ben and Ellen Cheney, Sian Foulkes and Eyrich Stauffer, Sarah Waring and Paul Eley, all my love and thanks for keeping me under your mighty wings. Reeve Basom, in whose home the first draft of this book was written, has been a limitless source of faith, friendship, and sanctuary of all kinds. Thanks also to Rose Marcellus, Paula Gerardi, and my very dear Wendy Halley for wise words at the right time. My gratitude to Amelia Turner and Liz McNerney for vital sustenance while I wrote this book. This is where the list gets out of hand, so I’ll just say that there are many others who have swooped in, as angels do, at the perfect moment to give me a shot of hope when I might have otherwise given up. Not a moment of it has gone unnoticed, and I’m blessed to know you.

  This book was written in honor of those brave souls who are living their truth from the inside out, regardless of how the world receives them. Never stop. You inspire me every day.

  PROLOGUE

  THE FIRST time I knew about Oscar—I mean, knew that he was solid gold and not just some shy kid waiting for all the bullying to turn him into one himself, was down in the gulley. I was seven, he was nine, and even taking him down into that big, litter-strewn ditch bordering the back end of the trailer park was risky business. What if he made fun of the idea that a muddy stream gushing through a culvert could be a kid-ruled kingdom of its own, or what if he decided he was the king, and claimed it as his? Among other things, I liked to go down to the gulley after school to rinse out the bottles and cans to redeem at the liquor store. I could make five bucks a week that way, when I could get Leon to take them to the redemption center for me. Os had been trailing me for weeks since his folks moved into the double-wide on the dirt lot a few over from mine. He didn’t talk much, just slipped into my shadow like that was the very thing that brought him to Wayside, marking my trail and giving me an audience for all of my secret missions and make-believe. After a few weeks I figured that if he was gonna be lurking around like that, I might as well put him to work with the bottles and cans.

  I’d found a mossy green glass Rolling Rock bottle and rinsed it out in the post-storm surge of water coming through the culvert while I told Oscar about Cassie Bickerman, an eighth grader rumored to be pregnant. Getting knocked up young happened regularly in Benbow, like every girl in town got a bull’s eye stamped on her back on her thirteenth birthday. Mama Dot cried when she heard the news from her church lady friend Mae—a kitchen phone call I wasn’t supposed to overhear from the depths of the recliner in Dot’s living room, but of course I did. The walls were thin as fly strips. I lounged there half listening, half watching Saturday morning cartoons, trying to figure out how something like that could happen. I didn’t even know how sex worked. I imagined Cassie caught a baby from sitting on some boy’s lap while his pants were dirty. I pictured Dot in the kitchen, flapping her hands in front of her face until the loose flesh on her arms that she called “bat wings” stirred the air.

  “Sad,” I tsked in my best imitation of Dot and her church lady friends, shaking the water in the Rolling Rock bottle to rinse out the sludge.

  “This happens here,” Oscar observed, picking up a mud-caked Miller Lite bottle from the pile. “But not where I am from in Mexico. There would be too much trouble for everybody.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked. All I could picture was Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner duking it out in the desert, or Jerry from Tom and Jerry in a sombrero and curly mustache. “Like a shoot-out?” Oscar looked up at me in alarm, then laughed for the first time since I’d known him. It was a machine gun kk kk kk sound, and it made me smile, even though I thought that maybe he was laughing at me.

  “No, not like a shoot-out,” he protested. “I’m not from a city where there is drugs and guns. It’s small, like here, only people aren’t so separate in their own houses and doing things just three or four together. If a young girl got a baby from someone, the whole town would punish the boy. It would be shame for him and his family.” Oscar dunked his bottle into the
rain-swollen stream, shook it with a thumb over the mouth, and poured the gritty water out onto the ground at his feet, just missing his sneakers. “Here it’s hard to know what is shame,” he murmured, making an imprint in the mud with the sole of his shoe. The brim of Oscar’s Goodwill Orioles ball cap hid his face, and I saw that the button on top was hanging by a thread. The cap was a little too big and pushed his ears out.

  “‘Shame,’ like, what are the rules you mean?” I asked. Oscar’s English was better than that of his parents and brothers, but it was still hard to catch his drift sometimes. He turned the clear glass Miller Lite bottle over in his hand and scraped some caked mud off the neck with his thumbnail.

  “Yes, rules, but what to feel bad about also. Like my father and my mother who came here to work so hard in the fields and help your farmers and our family in Mexico but that is shame here. People get mad.” I knew he was talking about the blue spray paint on the Jimenezes’ trailer, fresh and drippy this morning, that said “Dirty Spics Go B—” The rest had already been scrubbed into a blue cloud by Oscar’s dad, Miguel, whose eyes must have been burning from the paint stripper, judging from the tears running down his face. Oscar rubbed his thumb across that bottle so hard, just like his dad, though there wasn’t any mud left.

  “Some people are just stupidheads,” I said, flinging down my Rolling Rock bottle for emphasis. “It’s not a rule that you can’t be here! Dot said, and she knows everything, so….” I trailed off. Oscar was still looking at his bottle, blinking fast.

  “What means ‘Dirty Spics’?” he asked quietly. “Papi wouldn’t say, and my brothers told me it’s nothing for me to know.”

  I shrugged and stomped on a Coors can so that the edges wrapped up over my muddy sneaker.

  “Danged if I know. Maybe it’s like ‘spit’? Like how someone spits on you when they’re being mean?”

  Oscar nodded mutely, wiping a trail of snot inching toward the creased border of his upper lip with the back of his hand. “Is this normal here, to do like that with the paint if you’re mad?” he asked, looking at me with swimmy eyes.

  I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to older kids asking me stuff—wasn’t really used to talking to other kids much at all. No, it wasn’t normal to mess up somebody’s new house with ugly words as far as I knew. Just seeing it made me feel all scared, and it wasn’t even my trailer. One thing I’d learned about my new friend in the few weeks I’d known him was that Oscar had a thing about “normal.” It was probably because that was the last thing he ever got called. “Harelip” and “wetback”—that’s what he got stuck with instead. Nobody even knew what “wetback” meant, and the harelip part wasn’t even accurate. A surgeon in Nogales repaired Oscar’s cleft palate on his family’s way north. He just didn’t do a very good job.

  “It’s just some dumb kids being bored,” I said, prying the Coors can off my sneaker. “Don’t kids get bored in Mexico?” Oscar just stared at me, waiting for me to say something that made sense. “Hey, let’s swim!” I yelled, spurred by a crazy urge to keep him from crying. From the very beginning, something about that boy made me want to throw myself between him and all the sharp edges. We couldn’t really swim. The water was running fast, so we’d have to hold on to the top edge of the culvert and dangle, but it was close enough.

  “We don’t have swimming clothes,” Oscar pointed out, biting his lip as he glanced at the churning mud.

  “You mean suits? Mine’s hanging up at Dot’s,” I said. “If we go back, she’ll know what we’re doing and stop us. Let’s just go in our underwear.” I whipped off my T-shirt and threw it on the ground.

  “You should keep your T-shirt on,” Oscar said, frowning at my smooth torso as he shucked off his own shirt. “Girls are supposed to cover on top.” I planted my fists on my hips, my little kid belly sticking far out beyond my flat chest.

  “Well, I told you I don’t have my suit, and I’m not going back for it,” I said. “Besides, I look the same as you on top. Why should I have to wear a dumb shirt and you don’t?”

  “Because I’m a boy and you’re a girl,” Oscar said. “This is normal.”

  “It’s not my fault!” I shouted, stomping my foot into the tangle of discarded clothes on the ground. I didn’t even know what I meant by that. It just came out.

  Oscar looked baffled. “This is a silly thing to say.” Tears boiled behind my eyes and stung the back of my nose as I wrestled my shirt back on. Oscar followed me as I flailed back up the slope to the trailer park, blinded by tears. “Wait! Roy!” he cried, grabbing at my heels. I tried to haul myself up by some exposed roots, but upset made me uncoordinated and I kept sliding back. I pounded a fist into the embankment and pressed my forehead into the rock-strewn soil.

  “It’s not silly,” I gasped.

  “No, no, okay,” Oscar said. “It’s not silly, okay?” He laid his hand on my back and rubbed small circles like a little mother. That kind of sweet, unthinking gesture was what got me about him, though no one but me saw it once the boys at school starting parroting their older siblings by calling him “homo” and “fag.” After Oscar’s brother explained what the bullies meant, Os stopped being his whole self around anyone outside of the trailer park. Those names just clammed him right up.

  “Let’s do swimming, okay?” Oscar urged, tugging at the hem of my T-shirt to coax me off the slope. “You can go however you want. How you do, I’ll do too, so we’re the same.” I turned my shoulder into the slope and looked at him, the hem of my T-shirt still pinched between his grubby fingers. Oscar’s wide-open beauty struck me. He probably had a ton of friends back home, boys he could laugh and run around with whose skin and accents matched his own. But in Benbow, all Oscar had was me.

  IT SURPRISED me to hear a girly voice coming out of my mouth after Oscar’s began to change, and it wasn’t about preferring blue to pink or playing football to baking cookies. I actually hated football and fart jokes and the rough, stupid way boys bashed on each other because they didn’t know how else to be. It was more about how I thought of myself when I didn’t have a reflection in the mirror telling me different. It didn’t matter to either of us, at least not until we were thirteen and Oscar tried to hold my hand on the walk home from school. It was just a regular Tuesday and I never saw it coming. I did not handle it well—jerked my hand away, squawked something about needing to pee, and hightailed it the rest of the way back to the trailer park. I just left him there on the side of the road, looking run over.

  I knew holding hands meant something. Doing it was like wearing a T-shirt that said “Property of” with an arrow pointing to the person beside you. Girlfriends held hands with their boyfriends. When I slammed into my trailer that day, I felt like I’d been drop-kicked and landed on Mars, my head a zero gravity mess. I couldn’t be a “girlfriend,” could I? That word did not exist in the known universe of which I was the center. “Friend,” sure, but the awful alchemy that occurred when you slapped the word “girl” in front? No. No no no. But Os was mine, and I wasn’t about to share, so didn’t I have to be? Was I already his girlfriend and didn’t know it? If it all ended up with me liking Oscar back the way he liked me, did it even matter? Of course it did. Because somewhere in there was the real me, and no step away from that person would lead anywhere good. I spent the whole week hashing it out on canvas in the trailer, painting like I had to have the Sistine Chapel done by the five o’clock whistle. When I ran out of acrylics and excuses, I sought Oscar out at his dad’s garage and started yammering away as we walked back toward home. Everything spewed out, sense and nonsense alike, and Oscar took it all in without a blink.

  “So, you’re like… gay?” he whispered when I was out of words, even though it was a weekend and the stretch of road was mostly deserted. The word “gay” sat there between us like a hot, steaming turd no one wanted to scoop up. Nobody was gay in Benbow, even if they were.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. By then kids at school had added “dyke” to their rep
ertoire, calling me “he-she” and “sir” when the teachers weren’t listening, but they were nothing to me, the bullies or the words. Nothing at all. “I don’t know if there’s a name for it, Os, but I do like you. Like like. I’m just… not a girlfriend. I can’t be that word.” I stopped to breathe, watching the stray gravel on the asphalt skitter ahead of us as we tromped toward the intersection of Main and old Route Nine.

  “Why didn’t you say anything before?” Oscar asked, scuffing his ratty old Nikes along the white line, his shoulder bumping mine in our old rhythm.

  “Because I never thought about it,” I said. “I always assumed everybody was different amounts of this and that. I never had to choose.” Oscar pulled me farther onto the shoulder as a refrigerator truck barreled past.

  “Choose what?”

  “Who to be.”

  “And that is?” His voice cracked on the question like an egg on the rim of a mixing bowl.

  “Just… me, I guess.”

  Oscar exhaled and tilted his baseball cap back so I could see the white scar at his hairline from falling off a rocking chair when he was four. Oscar’s body was a landscape of scars and bruises, from the rough times his family had coming north, but also because he didn’t seem to have a sense of what could hurt him. He’d throw himself toward home plate as though surfing on a foamy white wave, all trust. When he stood up scraped chin to shins, he always looked surprised at the bloody streaks on his uniform.

  “Whatever, Aurora,” he said at last, yanking that old Orioles cap back down over his eyes. I socked him in the bicep, though not as hard as usual, and as easy as that we were all good again. At least for a while.

  REENIE NAMED me Aurora after the Northern Lights she’s going to take me to see one day when we’ve got the trailer paid off and something with enough horsepower to hitch it to. “Aurora” helps her remember her dreams, she says, and what really matters in life. For Reenie, it’s freedom, but for me it’s about what happens when an eye lands on something that creates a spark in the brain. There’s the right word for that somewhere, besides “art.” That one always reminds me of some sad-sack used car salesman at his fifty-year high school reunion, drinking a White Russian and making eyes at the former head cheerleader with her new Realtor’s license and her bad boob job. Not exactly what I’m going for.