Being Roy Read online

  “Cows are out of the barn now, hon. Might as well let ’em graze,” she said. The aluminum legs of the chair squealed at the cheap bolts holding it together when Leon sat down. He wore the same hangdog look as when Dot dragged him to church. When he made to reach for my fork so he could pick at my plate, Dot slapped him on the wrist. “Oh no you don’t. Talk.”

  “Well,” Leon began, “when I asked Oscar what the scout had to say to his folks, he said it didn’t much matter. Florida’s a long ways away, and he wouldn’t even think about leaving you. He said you all had plans, and he meant to stick to ’em, rain or shine. Wasn’t even a little iffy about it—just went on about how you all were gonna get a place so you could make your art like you wanted to, and happily-ever-after-the-end.” Leon’s words made me happy, I wouldn’t deny it. Oscar running off to Florida to be some dumb jock while our whole plan went up in smoke was a nightmare scenario. But there was this whole other thing about it being such an amazing opportunity for him, and all that stuff Dot said about my future, or lack thereof.

  “Oscar’s parents are beside themselves, Roy,” Dot said, breaking into my thoughts. “They don’t understand how he could pass up something like this. I talked to Hernanda after Leon told me about Oscar. Miguel doesn’t give two figs about Oscar taking over the shop. It’s about all Mani’s cut out for anyway, and then there’s Bernardo coming up. Oscar’s ready to throw a golden ticket in the trash just to stick around Benbow with some girl who can’t think past next week.”

  Leon grabbed my fork again, and this time Dot let him. Before he dug into my plate, he waved it at me. “Make no mistake, Roy, Dot and I are about as proud of you as we can be, but time’s coming to be more practical. Life gets going pretty fast, and before you know it, things get chosen for you. We just don’t want that for you, or Oscar. He’s a fine boy.”

  Dot didn’t say anything, just looked at me with those shiny eyes she gets when someone dies or gets married in one of her stories. I looked around Dot’s kitchen at the crocheted potholders, the faux wood paneling, and the faded orange and yellow linoleum coming up from the floor despite Leon’s best efforts to tack it down. It felt like home, but not the kind of home I ever imagined for myself. I didn’t want this any more than I really wanted to wind up in a tiny, run-down apartment in Benbow with no way out. This life was a means to an end, not the end itself. Oscar and I were different, destined for broader horizons, but I hadn’t done one single thing to make that happen, and now here was a fork in the road I never saw coming. Oscar was too loyal to do what needed to be done, and life was waiting to choose for us if I didn’t step up.

  I looked at Dot and Leon across the scratched Formica tabletop where I’d had more snacks, suppers, and Sunday breakfasts than I could count, loving them so much my teeth ached. I stood, kissed them both on the cheek, and went back to my trailer. There was nothing more to say.

  Chapter TWO

  IT WAS a cowardly act. There might have been another way to go about it, but the one thing I couldn’t do was hurt Oscar that deep. He had to believe that we had no choice, because even just thinking about the look in his eyes if I told him I was choosing Winchester Academy over a life in Benbow with him made me want to crawl into a hole and die.

  We were studying in the trailer, taking breaks to kiss and stretch out the kinks from hunching over my little dinette. That was where I slept when Reenie was home and where, unbeknownst to Oscar, I would be sleeping that night. She’d taken a shorter first run that week because her back was giving her trouble again, and she wanted to squeeze in another chiropractic appointment before her next long haul. The timing was perfect.

  By sunset, Oscar and I were definitely doing more making out than studying, crammed into one of the bench seats with me straddling his lap. I kept pushing to go further, pulling our shirts off and sucking on his neck the way he liked, but keeping one eye on the digital clock on the mini stovetop. I could tell he was having a tough time holding back, and when I knew he didn’t have much resistance left, I tugged him up from the seat and led him back to the bedroom. His eyes were hooded and glazed like they got when we’d been at it for a while, and he let me guide him down onto the bed. But when I started to wriggle out of my jeans, he stopped me.

  “Wait,” he said, “don’t do that.” When he sat up away from me, I had a great view of the muscles swelling his caramel skin. I loved his maleness, the cords and veins that textured his skin. My own back looked like a piece of smashed Wonder bread compared to his, and touching him was the next best thing to being him. I sat up and held Oscar from behind, chin on his shoulder with my breasts pressing into his back. Since they popped out during puberty, my breasts had been an annoyance to me, like two UFOs that mistakenly landed in an empty cornfield. I didn’t like having them handled. It made them more real, harder to ignore, but Oscar was crazy about them so I decided to use them to my best advantage. The alarm clock on the bedside table confirmed that time was running short.

  I took Oscar’s sweet little earlobe between my lips, covering my teeth with my lips like you might fake chew on a baby’s hand. He shivered and reached around to cup my breast and run a thumb over my nipple. It felt good, but I also wanted to swat his hand away—an inner war I didn’t understand. I wanted to have sex with him, though that part was more about loving him and wanting to get as close as I could. I wanted to be under his skin, and have him under mine, whatever way our parts ended up coming together. As far as my discomfort at being the one who was “entered,” well, I just didn’t have the time to hash that one out. I wasn’t afraid of going all the way, but I was afraid of it not happening the way I planned. There was too much at stake for both of us.

  “It’s getting hard for me to hold back,” Oscar rasped. “We need to slow down.”

  “Os, I don’t want to slow down,” I coaxed, coming around to straddle him and look him full in the face so he could see I meant it. “I’m ready for this, and I know you are too. Look, I’ve already thought of everything.” I pulled the crinkly-wrapped condom out of my pocket and pressed it into his hand. Oscar’s eyes got so big I could see the wintergreen flecks around his pupils.

  “You planned this without telling me?” He tried to shove me off his lap, but I held on tight, squeezing my thighs and locking my arms around his neck.

  “Because I knew you’d make a fuss. Os, we’ve known each other forever! We’ve been making out for a year, and I’m about going crazy here. Aren’t you? We know we want to be together, right?” Oscar tipped forward so our foreheads touched. He had milky granola breath, which was the closest thing to snack food Reenie kept on hand. He smelled like a baby.

  “I love you so much, Roy.”

  “I know, Os. Me too,” I said, and started to kiss him again, talking against his mouth and leaning into him so his body tilted back against the bed. “I want you, Oscar,” I whispered, rolling away and pulling him on top of me, trying to channel Erica Kane from All My Children. “Please, let’s do this now.” The digital clock flared red in my peripheral vision. He lifted his head and looked down at me, searching my face like he did when he was trying to figure out if I was messing with him. I smiled and pushed a crow’s feather of hair off his forehead, pulling him down so I could kiss the scar at his hairline. He sighed once and then began to kiss my neck.

  He worked his fingers under the waistband of my jeans, shocking my skin with static electricity as he released the button and pulled down the zipper. I tried to stay soft, pliant. My body was wet and ready—way ahead of me. I’d held him in my hand many times before, stroking him as I watched pleasure play over his face. I’d close my eyes and pretend that I could feel what he felt, but he’d never touched me between my legs. I’d never wanted it before.

  The ceiling spun a little as I realized, and I mean really got, what was about to happen. The bulge in the front of Oscar’s jeans pressed into my inner thigh, and I tried to imagine it inside of me. The thought didn’t feel sexy the way all of the kissing and rubbing did,
but the idea of being joined with Oscar, the person I loved most in the world, sure as hell was. I would have swallowed him whole if I could have, and I slipped my hand down his jeans, wrapping my hand around him to tell him so. He looked wonderstruck and scared as I helped him put on the condom and find his way inside me. Or maybe his face was just mirroring mine. This is his first time too, I reminded myself, and for just a second I wished it was with someone better than me. Someone who didn’t need to pretend that the hardness inside me was my own, and the softness his, just to relax. “I’m sorry, Os,” I said silently, then buried my face in his neck and forced all thinking aside. There was no going back. A single stab of pain, his soothing, apologetic kiss. I coaxed him onto his back, and we moved together like dancers who’d been practicing their steps since birth. We were so lost in each other that neither of us heard Reenie burst in, right on schedule.

  “NO!” OSCAR shouted. He slammed his fist onto the hood of the car his dad put him to work on after Reenie chased him out of the trailer with the derringer she kept in the nightstand. It was the first time I’d seen Oscar hit anything, ever.

  “Yes,” I countered. It had taken me two days to get Reenie calmed down enough to let me out of her sight, and seeing Oscar again after being so rudely separated almost undid my resolve. I could still feel him moving underneath me, even in the middle of that greasy garage. “Reenie’s made up her mind, and like it or not, she is my legal guardian. I don’t really have a choice.”

  “Yes, you do!” Oscar shouted in full panic, gripping my shoulders with grease-blackened hands. “I’m graduating soon, and then we can get our own place! You can finish up at Benbow like you planned, y al infierno con todos las demás!” Spanish meant Code Red for Oscar. He looked bruised, like a ripe tomato dropped on the floor.

  “It’s already settled, Os. Reenie wouldn’t let me leave the trailer until I filled out the application and we got an interview set up at Winchester. It’s past the deadline, but apparently they have some kind of hillbilly affirmative action program that I might be able to squeak in on.”

  It had been a real hostage crisis situation in our old Airstream, with Reenie pacing around like a neurotic circus bear while I wrote those ridiculous essays about the thing I’m most proud of, who I admire most, and how I think I can contribute to the community at Winchester Academy. It wasn’t easy cranking all that out with Reenie breathing down my neck, trying to keep up the façade of reluctance while I knew Oscar was out there going through hell. I didn’t worry about Reenie’s state of mind as much, though when she walked in on us, her face got so pale that the sun damage on the left half from getting sunburned through her driver’s side window looked more like a map of South America than usual. She was finally getting what she wanted, and once the shock of seeing me and Oscar going at it wore off, Reenie was thrilled that I would be a Winchester girl at last.

  Not to be cocky, but I knew I’d get in. I sent in a portfolio along with the application, and within twenty-four hours, someone from the admissions office called to set up an interview. As a local girl, promising artist, and certified West Virginia trailer trash (I could use that term because I lived at Wayside, but if any of those Winchester girls got in my face with it, I’d snatch them bald), I was a scholarship committee’s wet dream.

  Oscar’s eyes were wild as he paced the floor of the garage. “Okay. Okay. So Winchester’s what, forty minutes away? You’ll be a day student, and we’ll still see each other every day.”

  I put myself in his path and placed a hand on his chest. “I’m going to be a five-day boarder, Os, only home on weekends. Reenie doesn’t want me on my own so much, and she doesn’t want me to be alone with you. She made Dot and Leon promise to make sure we aren’t alone together in the trailer when she works weekends.” I choked on that last little bit. It was a lie, but he had to believe that sticking around wouldn’t fix anything. Oscar was looking at me like I’d hit him with his favorite bat. Just a little longer, I told myself. It will be over soon.

  “And you’re just going to do what she says?” Oscar whispered. His shoulders drooped and he started to back away, but I grabbed his shirt.

  “Listen, Os, I know about FSU. I have to go to Winchester, and all you’ll have is this garage and those shitty classes at the community college. Go to Florida. We’ll both have a better chance if we do this, and I’ll write you all the time, I promise. I’ll call.”

  “So you’re okay with this?” Oscar said, shaking his head in injured wonderment. “You’re just going to go along with it and never see me again?”

  “Of course not,” I said, wicking a tear from his cheek with my thumb. “Maybe by the time your first break comes around, Reenie won’t be so strict about me seeing you. Wayside’s tiny, Os. It’s not like she can stop us forever. She’s never around, and Dot and Leon can’t watch me every second. We just have to let things calm down a little. I’ll be at Winchester two years, then maybe I can apply to some art program down near where you are. Nothing is going to keep us apart, I promise. But I can’t defy Reenie as long as I’m a minor. Plus, she’s more stressed out than I’ve seen her since before she started going to that chiropractor. She called in sick for her next shift to be at home with me, and I don’t even want to think about her getting back behind the wheel upset as she is. You know me getting knocked up is her worst nightmare.”

  “But you’re nothing like her,” he shouted, rallying to my defense even from rock bottom. “You wouldn’t let that happen, which she’d know if she was ever around.” I put my hand back on his chest, his heart revving like a V-8 engine under my palm. Oscar had always been down on Reenie for being gone so much, but I cut her more slack. She got knocked up at nineteen by a married supervisor at the bottling plant where she worked after high school. Her family disowned her, all her high school friends turned their backs on her, and the supervisor moved to another plant in Kentucky when she threatened to tell his wife if he didn’t help out with the hospital bills. Reenie stayed on at the plant for the health benefits just long enough to have me, buy the trailer, and land a job with Hardy Trucking and Hauling. She started out working in the front office answering phones, but as soon as there was an open rig in the fleet, she told Mike Hardy she wanted it. What she really wanted was out of Benbow, any way she could get. He would have laughed her out of his office if it hadn’t been his busiest season.

  “I almost lost everything,” she’d say in the rare times she spoke of it, “but instead I gained my freedom.” No, I wasn’t much like her, but for the first time ever, I was kind of trying to be.

  “YOUR GRADES are a bit… underwhelming,” Mrs. Perry murmured as she scanned my transcripts. The part in the Winchester admission counselor’s hairdo looked like it had been drawn with a ruler. Not one single hair dared trespass from one hemisphere to the other. Her office smelled different from the office at Benbow High, which reeked of Mr. Dyson’s Brut aftershave and printer toner. Mrs. Perry’s office smelled like coffee and leather and something floral. My eyes were burning from taking it all in. I’d barely blinked once since the guard at the gate gave Reenie’s old Chevelle a raised eyebrow, found my name on the visitor’s list, and let me through onto campus.

  The grass was so green and even that I wanted to roll down every hill naked. The fences were crosshatched and painted white, and low stone walls ran alongside towering old oaks and willows. All of the buildings were weathered red brick with white trim, and the whole thing was ringed with woods, stables, athletic fields, and tennis courts. Instead of a cafeteria that smelled of boiled cabbage and canned spaghetti, Winchester had a “dining hall,” with trestle tables, high, arched ceilings and french doors. In place of Sloppy Joes and creamed corn, the spread at the dining hall contained fresh vegetables, cuts of real meat instead of gray, ground-up who-knew-what, and a frozen yogurt machine humming along by the salad bar. Most of the rooms the girls shared were bigger than the Airstream, and the beds were on something called a “sleeping porch.” It looked like some
thing straight out of the Madeline books Dot read to me when I was a kid.

  From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Winchester was a feast for the eyes, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. There was no “Oscar” quality that I could see, and I wasn’t talking about the fact that Winchester was an all-girls school. Where was the necessary flaw—the thing that made it all right? Where was the dirt of use, the crooked or broken thing that highlighted the perfection of everything else? Even the stables were swept cleaner than a hospital ward, and not even a dribble of soap from the soap dispensers marred the granite countertops in the bathrooms.

  Mrs. Perry gave up on finding an A in a haystack and looked across her desk at me. “Perhaps you could shed a little light on your academic performance? You are obviously a very bright young woman, and the academic dean is excited at the prospect of having you at Winchester, but there is a standard here that every student is expected to meet.” Mrs. Perry put her sharp elbows on the blotter on her desk and folded her crepey fingers together like the President about to give the State of the Union address. I didn’t dislike her, but she didn’t exactly ooze warmth. I hadn’t given that much thought to defending my grades, what with Winchester falling all over itself to set up the interview and make sure I knew about all the scholarships. Overconfidence had struck again, or maybe I was intentionally sabotaging myself. I was still in denial about Oscar heading down to Florida for summer training.

  I scooted to the edge of my chair and propped my elbows on Mrs. Perry’s desk too, so I didn’t feel like such a bug under a microscope. Mrs. Perry may have been interviewing me for Winchester, but I was interviewing Winchester right back. Reenie told me that she read in one of her books about how mirroring someone’s posture can enhance communication. She was full of tips like that in the days leading up to my interview, but I drew the line at wearing the bulky “medicine pouch” she’d picked up for me at a truck stop in eastern Tennessee. I didn’t see how a fake deer hoof, a shark tooth, and a little pink marble were supposed to help me ace my interview, though I met her halfway by looping it around the rearview mirror in the Chevelle. I’d noticed a few strands of wiry gray around Reenie’s temples lately, and they definitely had my name on them.