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Being Roy Page 2


  Our neighbor Mama Dot insists I’m named after the princess in Sleeping Beauty, on account of how “pretty” I am and what a good sleeper I was from Day One. Even now I can put my head down on one of the old cafe tables at the charity shop where she works and fall dead asleep. Reenie can call me what she wants, but my real name is Roy and always will be. I never could pronounce Aurora as a baby, and “Roy” stuck with everyone but Reenie. I guess that’s her prerogative as my mom. She still gets ticked off when people call me “Roy,” though she never could get anyone to call her by her real name either, which is Irene. Mama Dot tries to use “Aurora” in front of her when she’s around, which isn’t much. “Born without a sit-still,” as Dot says. No matter how much Reenie complains about her back and the long hours, we all know she wouldn’t give up trucking for anything but a topped-up retirement fund, and only then so she could hit the road on her own terms.

  Mama Dot is Reenie’s opposite in every way. Our trailer’s just up on blocks, like some docked rocket ship waiting to launch, but Dot’s sits on a thick cement slab like a real house. It’s a double-wide with a deep redwood deck and raised garden beds her husband, Leon, dug up around back. Her trailer is like an extension of her body, and that’s not a fat joke, though the woman’s got more rolls than a jumbo tube of Pillsbury crescents. As far as Dot’s concerned, the edge of the earth drops off at the town line. She doesn’t even think the Aurora Borealis really exists, though she’s seen Reenie’s pictures of those freaky green and purple lights a million times.

  Dot doesn’t believe the sky could look any better than it does here in the Shenandoah, and she prefers her Sleeping Beauty story about my name to Reenie’s anyhow. But I knew it then, and I know it now: if I’m anyone in that dumbass fairy tale, it’s the prince.

  A lot of people tell me how good-looking I am, and I’m not being stuck up by saying it. It’s just true, or true for them, and I know enough about aesthetics not to waste hot air on false modesty. My face is almost perfectly symmetrical, my eyes are what’s called “cerulean blue,” and I’ve got the kind of face just oval enough to work with any kind of hairstyle, though I keep it short so it stays out of my way. I’ve got good hair, though it’s been said around town that I could do with a perm. It’s not the tomato red it was when I was little, but it’s still got some nice auburn tones. I’m not skinny or fat, and my skin hardly ever breaks out on account of Reenie being a total health nut and keeping us on a rabbit diet to offset the diesel fumes she sucks in all day long.

  I like to look good, as long as it doesn’t get in the way or take up too much time. What I don’t like is not being taken seriously. More specifically, I don’t like it when people don’t take my art seriously. When you’re pretty, people act like everything you do is some kind of “Praise Jesus” miracle, like a cat learning to use the toilet. This is bullshit, though Leon would call it a “high-class problem,” which means it isn’t really a problem at all. The only people who don’t treat me like a potty-trained cat are Mama Dot (who says being too big for your britches reflects bad character), Leon (who agrees with her), and Oscar. Oscar’s in love with me, but he doesn’t let it affect his judgment of my work. He’ll be the first to say if I’ve gotten it wrong, or crossed that line between the perfectly flawed and downright ugly. Unfortunately for him, it does affect his judgment in other ways. Like I said, he’s way too trusting.

  Chapter ONE

  Benbow, West Virginia

  1992

  I WAS in a black mood when Oscar knocked, though I’d spent my sixteenth birthday as enjoyably as all the others, stuffing myself with pineapple upside down cake at Mama Dot’s with Oscar, then going to the charity shop to pick out some new(ish) stuff to wear. Things went south when the time came to open the gift Reenie left for me. She always came through with some new art supplies on my birthday, but this time there were no brushes, canvases, decoupage glue, or the field easel I’d had my eye on. Instead, when I opened the Smurf gift bag she reused every year since I was five, the first thing I saw was a brochure for Winchester Academy, a prep school just across the state line in Ashbury, Virginia. She’d been pressuring me since middle school to see if I could get a scholarship so I could have a decent education, and board there so I wouldn’t be on my own so much. I never took her seriously. I’d fit in at Winchester worse than I did with the big-haired ninnies at Benbow High. Underneath the brochure was a packet of angel cards with pictures of different angels on the front and little blurbs on the back, like “The present is a gift!” and “Miracles are everywhere!” There was also a book called Creative Visualization by some fruit loop named Shakti Gawain, and a note. “For my little artist. You can create your life! Love, Mom”

  When Reenie first started driving, she did just like the soft-bellied grizzlies you’d see trying out recliners at the Walmart on weekends and stopping in at the Spare Rib for a T-bone after a long haul. She pounded instant coffee and NoDoz, cranked the Hank Williams Jr., and ate the same blue plate specials and soggy gas station grinders as the rest of them. Soon, though, her back got bad and she started going to that chiropractor over in Ashbury, listening to self-help books on tape, and replacing our perfectly good Hungry Man entrees with birdseed and vegetables I’d never heard of. If it weren’t for Mama Dot’s chicken fried steak and Oscar’s mom’s carne asada, I’d be the most pissed-off vegetarian you’ve ever seen.

  I’d been counting on those new supplies. I’d even made Reenie a list so she didn’t have to think about it the next time she was in Ashbury for her chiropractor appointment. Ashbury was the closest thing we had to a college town nearby, though there was no actual college, just Winchester, known for the competitive herds of horsey girls in its riding program. Reenie forbade me from getting an after-school job, saying I should focus on school, which meant I couldn’t buy art supplies on my own. What the hell was I supposed to do with creepy angel cards and a book by some woo-woo guru with a crazy-assed name?

  I yelled for Oscar to come in, too intent on glaring at the array of bullshit gifts spread out on the table to open the door. Oscar strolled over to the dinette and squeezed in beside me, picking up an angel card. We didn’t fit like we used to, I noticed through my gloom, as Oscar’s heat seeped through my new-to-me gabardine trousers and black tank top. Or maybe we naturally smushed because it felt weird not to be touching. Os picked up one of the angel cards with a chuckle. “Hey, this one looks kind of porny.” He held it up in front of his face, wiggling it and speaking in a high-pitched, breathy voice. “Hi, my name is Ariel, and my double D angel wings can take you straight to Cloud Nine!”

  “You like it so much, keep it,” I grunted. Oscar ignored my bitchy snarl and scooped up the rest of the cards.

  “No way. She’s not my type. I like ’em bossy and mean. But I do think you should cut out the heads on these,” he said, raising a silky black eyebrow at the angel cards, “and paste them into here,” he finished, gesturing toward the Ivory soap girls in the Winchester brochure. Then he tried to whinny, only he ended up sounding like the Wicked Witch of the West. Before I could even laugh or go get the scissors to implement his suggestion, he kissed me, right out of the blue. He just palmed my cheek, turned my head, and laid one on me. It wasn’t much at first, kind of a “Mind if I put this here?” sort of thing. He tasted like pineapple upside down cake. The scar denting his upper lip nestled right into mine like a missing puzzle piece.

  It started to get a little tickly (Oscar was working some peach fuzz on his upper lip back then), and I would have busted out laughing in the next second if he hadn’t parted his lips, parting mine too, since they were stuck to his. He slid the tip of his tongue over my lower lip and teased mine back into the territory of his mouth. That feeling, of me inside of him, was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever felt. We kissed like that, me cradling the back of his head in my hand, until our necks started cramping from sitting side by side. We moved to the couch so we could crawl all over each other. I rubbed my hand over the contour
beneath his straining zipper, back and forth, then back—Oscar jerked and groaned, wrapping his arms around me and holding me to his chest while he quaked. I squirmed against him, wanting more. I wanted to see that part of him, touch it skin to skin, but he wanted me close.

  “Tell me everything,” I prodded as his breathing slowed. “What did it feel like?” Oscar adjusted me so my hipbone wasn’t in such proximity to his tender parts, and I raised up on one elbow to look down at him. Trails of moisture tracked from the corners of his eyes toward the whorls of his ears. He sniffed and took my face in his hands, looking as though he wanted to condense me into something pocket-sized or edible. “It felt like love,” he whispered, in the softest voice I’d ever heard.

  Once we figured it out—how hard and deep we each liked it, we could kiss like that for hours. We’d get tangled up in the lumpy afghan on the couch in my trailer, rubbing against each other until our jeans left red marks on our skin. Oscar seemed to prefer it when I was in charge, and I did too, leading him on to the next step. There was something about his liquid eyes, how relaxed and open his face and body became that made me wish my arms were strong enough to sweep him up and cradle him close. Not like a baby, exactly, but something just as precious.

  So many things started happening after my sixteenth birthday. Oscar got better at baseball, faster and stronger, and he started picking out engineering classes he wanted to take at the community college over in Harding after graduation. My grades were never anything to write home about, and that didn’t change, but I was on fire creatively. Someone brought an old Leica into the charity shop not knowing what they had, and Mama Dot brought it back to Wayside Court for me to fool around with. I grabbed up any old thing I could find, whether it was lying in a ditch or ripped out of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine at the laundromat and photographed it, painted it, or twisted it into a crazy-assed sculpture.

  Leon rigged up an awning just to give me a place to stash what wouldn’t fit in the trailer, and still I kept churning things out. I kept all of my Oscar stuff inside, and there was plenty of it. He was my muse. Even when Oscar wasn’t my subject, I guess you could say he was my object, or maybe my objective. I got obsessed with recreating what made him so perfect—how the scars and sensitivity that others considered flaws actually enhanced his beauty.

  We couldn’t seem to get close enough. Oscar and I had been able to finish each other’s sentences since middle school, but now there were the touches on top of that, small fingertip brushes walking down the road or silky skin-to-skin ones in my trailer. The air around us felt safe, still, but also charged in a whole new way that made us both a little crazy. For the most part, folks let us be about it until Dot sat me down in her kitchen with some baked macaroni and cheese one day for what she called a “come to Jesus” talk.

  “Seems like you and Oscar have been spending a lot of time holed up at your place,” Dot drawled, her scrunchie sliding out of its wispy gray ponytail as she bent over to pull the macaroni out of her oven. She never used a timer when she cooked, but Dot never baked a thing that wasn’t perfectly brown and bubbly.

  “Yep, seems like it,” I said, licking my lips at the sight of that crispy Ritz cracker topping, all crunch and butter. Dot loved feeding me when Reenie was gone, in addition to keeping me in line if she felt like I was “going rotten.” She was pretty good about respecting my independence, so I wasn’t too riled about her bringing up Oscar and me. She knew I was the furthest thing from Wayside’s “fast girls” as a person could get, with their late-night boozing and backseat wrestling matches. Dot shoveled a mountain of mac and cheese onto a plate and put it down in front of me. She stabbed a fork into the noodles before she plopped down onto the split vinyl chair Leon patched with duct tape, glaring at me until I put down the bite I had halfway to my mouth.

  “What’s with the stink eye, Dot? I washed my hands!”

  “You and Oscar is what,” Dot said, her belly rolls settling into her lap like fresh bread. “Don’t think I don’t know what y’all have been getting up to over there.”

  “So?” I said and shoved in a bite. She looked pissed off enough to snatch it away at any second, just to be ornery.

  “Don’t sass mouth me, Aurora. You’re not so big I can’t take you over my knee, and I’ll do it too, if I start thinking you’re not using the brains God gave you when it comes to that boy.” My hackles went up, even though I knew Dot liked Oscar. She always made a fuss when he came over, and praised his good manners, which beat the hell out of mine. Dot poked a pudgy, arthritic finger in my face. “Do you know Ms. Franzen came into the shop yesterday and told me you’re about two steps from failing Chemistry?”

  I put down my fork and crossed my arms over my chest. “Teachers shouldn’t go blabbing about people’s grades. Isn’t there some kind of a law against that? Besides, my grades haven’t changed since Oscar and I started—” I blushed as images of us intertwined flashed through my mind. “I sucked at science way before that.”

  “That may well be,” Dot countered, “but your grades haven’t gone up either. Maybe if you spent less time chapping your cheeks on that boy’s stubble and a little more hitting the books, you might manage to make something of yourself.”

  I was shocked. Make something of myself? Wasn’t I already something? Dot sat back and crossed her arms too. We looked like two Mafia dons having a stare down.

  “Now listen, Roy, I don’t mean anything by that except that you have to start thinking of your future. What are you gonna do when Oscar goes off to college? Stay over there in that tin can and draw pictures?”

  My shoulders loosened and I went for another bite. “He’s not going off anywhere. He’s going to take classes at the community college and work with his dad while I do my art.”

  “Okay, and what will that look like?” Dot asked. “Do you see anybody around here making ends meet that way? Are you gonna live off your mama forever while she keeps doing those long hauls to keep you in art supplies?”

  “I’ll get a scholarship,” I said, but honestly I hadn’t given it that much thought. Turned out being confident could work against a person.

  “Not with those grades you won’t.”

  “An art scholarship.”

  “Uh-huh, and have you even taken an art class since finger painting in kindergarten?” We pitched toward each other nose to nose like we were about to start arm wrestling. Dot watched a lot of Matlock, and she’d obviously learned a thing or two from Andy Griffith.

  “It’s not my fault my rinky-dink school doesn’t have any art classes worth taking. Those kids couldn’t paint their own butts if they dipped them in acrylics and sat on canvas. Benbow High doesn’t even have a real art teacher! It’s just the principal’s wife, and the only art she’s ever sold are those lame paint-by-number figurines she brings into the charity shop!”

  “Don’t you talk trash about that woman to me!” Dot scowled. “She does a fine job with those figurines, and she teaches for free because there’s no budget for it, even though she works full time at the county clerk’s office. She’s the closest thing to an artist we have around here, and more than you’re likely to become with those pitiful grades!”

  I didn’t realize we were shouting until Leon poked his head around the corner from the little living room where he was watching Wheel of Fortune at top volume. Years at the plant had taken some of his hearing, but he refused to wear the Miracle Ear Dot saved up for because he said it made him feel like a “damn robot.”

  “Y’all doing all right in here?” he said in that deep voice that always reminded me of Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street.

  “Fine, fine,” Dot said, waving a hand. “We’re just having us a little heart-to-heart. You go on back to Miss Vanna.” Leon looked from Dot to me and frowned so deep you could lose a nickel in the furrow between his eyes. Some folks said Leon was simple, but they used to say that about Oscar too, because he’s quiet. One thing about Leon is, he may not be able to hear everything, but there
’s nothing wrong with his vision.

  “You look like someone pissed in your pudding, there, Roy.” He ignored Dot’s glower and came over to put a big paw on my head. “Is this because of Oscar getting talked up by that scout?”

  “Scout?” I echoed, twisting around so Leon could see my lips move. High voices were especially hard for him.

  “That one from FSU that came and talked to his folks a little while ago. He told me all about it while he was helping me get that awning up for you. Seminoles! If that don’t beat all.” Dot’s face got ruddy, and she made a cutting motion across her neck, like I couldn’t see her doing it plain as day. Florida State University. How could I not know about this? I knew Oscar was good at baseball and getting better, but I hardly ever went to his games anymore. It was the perfect time to focus on my art projects because he wasn’t available to hang out with anyway. Besides, baseball bored the crap out of me. When we were together, we talked about us and how we could get a place as soon as he had enough saved from the garage. Oscar never talked specifics about school, and I was ashamed to realize I’d never asked. Dot laid a hand over my clenched fist.

  “Since you know, you might as well know this too, seeing as how I’m not getting anywhere setting you straight. Go on and tell her, Leon.”

  “Aw, hell,” Leon said, scratching the leathery accordion of skin on the back of his neck. “I reckon I’ve said too much already.” Dot nudged an empty chair away from the table and gestured for him to sit.