Being Roy, page 20
I DIDN’T see Oscar for the rest of that day, or the next. His brother, Mani, came to collect his duffel, and I kept to the trailer and Dot’s as much as I could. If he thought the silent treatment was going to drive me back to him on my knees, swearing my allegiance as his girlfriend, he was sorely mistaken. I’d done wrong with Hadley, but that wasn’t the real issue between us. The real issue was something I wasn’t about to apologize for. Keeping our paths from crossing in a place the size of Wayside was a real trick, but he must’ve been spending a lot of time at the garage, because I didn’t see hide nor hair of him even though I kept vigil by the big front window in the trailer.
I distracted myself by working on my midterm project for Mr. G., which I’d finally gotten a handle on in the nick of time, since it was due during exam week after Thanksgiving. I worked hard, taking a few trips back to Winchester to use the dark room. I had most of what I needed, but even though I’d mapped the whole thing out, there were some pieces missing that I couldn’t pin down. Looking at the installation was like looking into a mouth of perfect teeth with two incisors knocked out. That, on top of Oscar giving me the cold shoulder while our short time together slipped away, was driving me batty.
Mama Dot wouldn’t stop badgering me about what was up with the two of us, and she kept trying to coax it out of me with 7Up cake and squash casserole baked with ham and cheddar cheese. The trailer was starting to look like a Howard Johnson’s exploded. When Reenie got home and threw a shit fit after Hadley called her to tell her about the pills, I actually welcomed the distraction. Reenie wasn’t prone to suspicion, but there was a minute there when she seemed to be wondering whether Hadley was just covering for her latchkey daughter. That was more about Reenie’s working-mother guilt than trust issues with me, though. Once we’d reestablished that I was still about as likely to take drugs as I was to go with her to the next past-life regression appointment with her “life coach,” Shonda, we actually had a pretty nice time together. She even volunteered to sit for my project, though it didn’t fill that stubborn hole.
We did Thanksgiving with Dot, Leon, and their family like always. It was weird because we usually followed that up with a trailer crawl between Dot’s and the Jimenezes, since neither place was big enough for everybody but we still wanted to share the day together. After Dot and Leon’s family left, we’d hit up the Jimenez trailer bearing leftovers and extras that Dot made special for them, like succotash and sweet potato pie. In return, Oscar’s mom would load us up with pollo con mole, pupusas, and a simmered brisket dish called ropas viejas that Leon talked about all year.
This Thanksgiving, though, there was no trailer crawl. When we were done eating and the extended family left, Dot and Reenie ran some hot dishes over while I watched football with Leon. I still hadn’t told anybody about our fight, but given that Oscar and I had gone from being attached at the hip to silent strangers, no one asked questions when I curled up on Dot’s La-Z-Boy instead of heading over to his trailer. Had Oscar told his parents why we were on the outs? Did they hate me? The thought was too upsetting to dwell on, so I focused on getting through the holiday without bringing everybody else down.
Reenie left for her Birmingham run on Friday morning, and I spent the rest of the day working and trying not to look at the clock. Saturday passed in the same way—creative trances interspersed with excruciating clock watching and the odd snack break at Dot’s. Oscar’s bus back to school was scheduled to leave in the early hours on Sunday morning. I was in denial that he might leave without even saying goodbye. I lay awake all night Saturday, feeling like I was being hollowed out with a rusty shovel. I was miserable without him, but there would be no end to the misery if I betrayed myself.
When I heard the door to the trailer creak open, the digital clock on my nightstand read 4:30 a.m. Before he even appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, I was crying with relief. I reached for him blindly as he laid himself on top of me. I welcomed the weight—the way his solid body pressed the ragged breath and sadness out of me. He pulled us both up to a seated position so we could yank our shirts over our heads and twine around each other. I straddled him and cradled his head against my shoulder. There was no way to get close enough, to be touching everywhere at once, but I was in a frenzy to try. We rocked gently, soothing ourselves with each other as I covered Oscar’s face with kisses, swallowing his breath. “I love you,” I whispered fiercely, “no matter what.”
“I know,” he said, and he shuddered in my arms.
When I woke up, my eyes were crusted shut from crying and the inside of my throat felt coarse. Wayside looked as bleak as a Dust Bowl photo and Oscar was well and truly gone. My maddeningly incomplete art project, in disarray around the trailer, amplified the sucking void left by Oscar’s departure. I could only see two choices: I could pick up my Exacto knife and stab it straight into my thigh just to feel something different, or I could get in the Chevelle and drive, trusting my instincts to guide me. I didn’t have to be back at Winchester for another twenty-four hours, and there was still time to fill the void.
Chapter EIGHTEEN
BUGS SOUNDED as surprised to hear from me as I was to be calling from a gas station in the middle of Nowhere, RFD. It took nearly ten minutes for me to convince her mom to even put her on the phone since it was “family time,” but a sharp male voice in the background intervened. “Christ, give her the phone, Ellen. Let her be a teenager for once!”
“I don’t know why I even bother,” Bugsy’s mom said, her voice pitched high with indignation. “We’ve only got a house full of relatives, that’s all.” I was pretty sure that was intended for the male voice instead of me, but it was still awkward as hell. She passed off the phone to Bugs without saying goodbye, just a muffled “Make it short!” as her daughter took the phone.
“Mom, Dad, calm down, okay? Go have some food. Hello?” Bugs sounded strained to capacity. I had half a mind to drive straight to whatever tower her parents had her locked up in and spring her, “Birdman of Alcatraz” style. But I had a more urgent visit to orchestrate.
“Bugs, it’s Roy.”
“Roy? Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you called! What’s up?” Her words tumbled over each other in a rush—an indication that her mother was probably standing over her with a stopwatch.
“Bugs, I need you to tell me where Hadley is. Do you have her number? I need to talk to her.”
“Why don’t you just go see her? She’s at some rehab place near Cumberland, Maryland. Heartwood Lodge, I think. She called me a couple of days ago. She wanted to know if I could come visit. Immy can’t because she’s in Banff with her mom, and Hadley thinks you hate her, so…. You don’t, do you, Roy?”
“Of course not.”
“I wanted to go. It broke my heart not to, but—Mom, I know! One second!”
“What the hell is she doing in Maryland?”
Bugs sighed. “Her parents are still on vacation. Can you believe it? They figured there was no point in sending her all the way back to the rehab place she went last year near their house in Connecticut without them around. At least she’s closer to school.”
I fed another quarter into the pay phone as I digested the news. Hadley had been a forty-minute drive from Benbow this whole time? I heard Bugsy’s mom say something, and the male voice respond in kind, at a louder decibel.
“Roy? I gotta go,” Bugs said, in a voice that told me she’d actually rather stay on the phone until we both grew roots.
THE HEARTWOOD Lodge might have been all rustic charm on the outside, but as soon as I walked into the industrial carpeted lobby, the illusion vanished. Judging from the reception area, the reality was something between a hospital and a white-collar prison. I approached the front desk, which was situated on the other side of a sliding glass window with a bell beside it. A woman with bad highlights, a pair of reading glasses perched on top of the sticky, frosted mess and another pair slipping down her nose, opened the window without looking up from her book. “Help you?” she said, before licking the tip of her finger and turning a page.
“I’d like to see Hadley Rockwell,” I said. “I called about an hour ago?”
“Visiting hours are almost over,” the woman said. “She’s probably in the rec room. Through those doors, down the hall, and to the left. Stop at the security door so they can search your purse and pockets. You’ve got fifteen minutes until meds and quiet time.”
“I don’t have a purse, just a—” But the window slid shut before I could finish, the glasses on top of her head glaring back.
The “rec room” was big and white, with clusters of secondhand furniture where anxious clusters of kids and parents chattered nervously or stared stonily at their slippered feet. A small, rabbit-eared TV with tinfoil wrapped around the antennas blared Happy Days from one corner, surrounded by bored teenagers and a napping orderly. There were card tables bearing puzzles and crafts in halfhearted stages of assembly, a piano with keys missing, and a scattering of metal folding chairs by a wall of tall windows—the room’s one redeeming quality. I couldn’t imagine Hadley tolerating a place like this for more than five minutes, until I recognized the ratty Yankees sweatshirt she always wore. She had the hood pulled forward so that all I could see was her mouth, gnawing absently at the end of one of the hood’s drawstrings.
“Hadley?” I ventured, walking toward her.
The drawstring fell out of her mouth as she gaped at me. Her eyes were dark hollows, but something sparked in their depths when they landed on me. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Roy!” she cried, and she flung herself at me with some of her old boisterous abandon. “I can’t believe you came! It’s awful here, Roy. Everyone just smokes and screams at each other during group then talks about how much they’re going to use when they get out. It sucks so bad.”
I wrapped my arms around Hadley, not caring that she was locked around my neck tight enough to snap it. She smelled like that awful room, like cigarettes and antiseptic. A blank, yellowed page.
“I would have come sooner if I’d known how close you were,” I said as I pulled the hood off her head so I could see her better.
“Really?” she asked with tears in her eyes. “You don’t hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Because I think I hate myself,” she said softly, sinking down into a chair but keeping my hand in a steely grip. “I ruined everything.”
“You didn’t,” I said, easing down into the chair beside her. “You just fucked up.”
“Again.”
“I guess.”
“And I made things weird with us.” Her hand loosened in mine but I held fast.
“No, Had, we both did that.”
“Seven minutes!” the orderly in the corner shouted, coming to life for an instant like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland before lapsing back into a stupor.
Hadley toyed with the soggy end of her drawstring. “I should have been more honest.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I had no idea you were an addict.”
“That too,” she said, “but I’m talking about us. I should have told you I had feelings for you. I knew about Oscar, but I pretended it didn’t matter. Then I shut you out. I shouldn’t have done that.”
My palm started to sweat in hers, or hers in mine, but we held on. “It wasn’t just you, Had,” I admitted, trying to tell the truth about something I still didn’t understand myself. “I felt something too.” Something big enough to make me question who I am, I added silently.
“Felt?” Hadley asked in a Bugs-like squeak, her face just inches from mine as our wrists twined around each other like the necks of swans.
“No,” I corrected, raising the back of her hand to my cheek. “Feel.”
WHEN I got back to Benbow that night I was wrecked. My insides weren’t big enough for all of the emotions and people taking up space. I kept flashing on Frida Kahlo’s painting Broken Column, in which she depicts herself bare breasted, wearing a cage-like corset and torn open at the midline. Her spine is a shattered Ionic column, her body pierced by hundreds of nails. It was the ultimate expression of trapped anguish, and though I knew what I felt was only a shadow of her agony, I raged around the trailer feeling like a blood-drunk tick about to burst. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, and I couldn’t go outside and face Dot and Leon or the Jimenezes. They would look at me with confusion and worry and try not to pry, though they knew Oscar was hurt and that I was the cause. Just like I caused Hadley to get shaky enough to blow her recovery by letting things go too far. I’d been so afraid of what my feelings might mean about me that I’d become totally selfish. The hell of it was, I still didn’t know who that “self” actually was.
I grabbed a roll of electrical tape out of our junk drawer and began hanging up all of the finished pieces for my project. After my little road trip, I felt sure that at least my art would make sense if nothing else did, but I was wrong. The problem was that what was missing from my project and what was missing from my relationships with Oscar, Hadley—hell, everyone, really—was the same damn thing. Me. I was trying to create my life without actually being in it, exposed and vulnerable to the world. I just couldn’t seem to put down my brush and step inside. Until I did, I couldn’t belong to anybody, not even myself.
Chapter NINETEEN
“HERE?” I asked Mr. Gaines as I held the last shrouded photo up against a white expanse of wall over the podium where Norah Trent, Student Head of School, would be presiding over the last morning meeting before Christmas break.
“Perfect,” he said, laying a reassuring hand on my shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “You ready for this? You don’t have to do it, you know. You’ve already got the grade.” I glanced up in surprise at his serious butterscotch eyes. Mr. G. was being almost parental. That was when I knew for sure that I was about to get into deep shit.
“I honestly don’t know what ‘ready’ would feel like,” I admitted. The word didn’t even seem relevant. This was happening, the end.
“You got this, Roy Rogers. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen come outta this Margaret Thatcher factory,” Mr. Gaines said wickedly, then ambled off to help Moira set up the projector for her multimedia piece. The show was meant to be like a real art opening, with the entire school as our audience. No one except Mr. Gaines had seen our finished pieces until we came together that morning to install them in the library. The rest of the school would collect in the middle of the atrium, going from project to project as the student artists introduced their work. We would start with Elana’s silkscreen series to my left, go around the circle, and end with me. Not everyone’s art was shrouded, but the unveiling of my photos was key to the impact of my presentation. If I were totally honest with myself, it also gave me a chance to back out at the last minute, though that would give rise to a very interesting problem. What was I going to do, make shadow puppets with my hands instead?
I swallowed past the lump in my throat as I settled the last two-foot by three-foot photograph into its mounting and adjusted it until it hung straight. I knew ahead of time that our art midterms would be on display in the atrium of the library until finals in June. I’d counted on it, in fact. But my photos hanging above Norah’s head like haunting nightmares? Even I couldn’t have thought that one up. Mr. Gaines took one look at the series and decided to put me last, to be fair to the other artists. He knew the photos were going to cause a stir, to put it mildly, and he wanted to make sure everyone had their chance to shine. Immy, who was in the stairwell rehearsing her performance piece, pretended not to be miffed about not getting the choice spot, especially once she realized how rattled I was about the whole thing.
In the calm clutter of my trailer, I wasn’t the slightest bit nervous, but as I mounted the final photograph alongside the others and waited for everyone to show up from breakfast, I started having second thoughts. I hadn’t felt much at all since I completed the series, beyond the numb daze of an earthquake survivor, but my brain was still spinning its wheels. Maybe my heartache over Oscar and confused feelings for Hadley had made me reckless, blind to the realities of the situation? Was I so derailed by relationship drama that I would unconsciously try to sabotage my academic future? At this point, there appeared to be no limit to the acts of insanity I might be capable of.
There’d been a note from Oscar, passed on by Mama Dot when I stopped in to see her and Leon before I left for school for the week. It was short, scribbled on one of Dot’s large Post-it notes with the blue-bonneted mama duck and her ducklings marching across the bottom. Dear Roy, it read. I’m sorry. Your friend, Os. It was too cryptic to be comforting. Sorry for what? Because everything between us was over? Had he written it before or after he came to my trailer? And what did he mean by your friend? Was it reassurance that the best part of us still existed, or was it a sarcastic jab at me for ruining our romantic future? I honestly couldn’t tell. Our psychic connection, where I could so easily read between the lines and know what he was thinking, had been blocked if not permanently severed. He’d left no mixtape to fill in the blanks, and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking the worst.
The old hinges on the library double doors complained as a gush of students poured through them. As girls filtered into the central space, turning in tight circles and craning to get a sneak peek at the art projects, I searched for Immy and Bugs. I was anxious to talk to them before the presentations started. Who knew what they would become to me once the shrouds came off. They deserved a heads-up, at least, and I craved just one more dose of their friendship and support while I still had access. Funny how addictive it was, once I’d gotten used to all of the annoying stuff that came with it.
