Being Roy, page 5
Chapter THREE
SAYING GOODBYE to Oscar was murder, and came way too soon on account of him having to get down to FSU for summer training. His parents and brothers were there at the depot so we couldn’t make a big scene, which was okay because I really hated crying in front of people. Oscar’s mom, Hernanda, saw me getting misty when Oscar waved from his window, and she hugged me so hard I thought my spleen was going to rupture. The two of us stood there sniffling like a couple of ninnies as the bus rolled out. She didn’t let me go until the last sliver of taillight vanished over the hill. I think she needed to pretend I was Oscar in her arms.
Oscar and I had stayed up the night before talking, making plans, and holding each other, both too sad to have sex. We’d managed it a few times under the radar in the previous weeks, mostly on Sundays, when Reenie was on the road and Dot and Leon were at church. I still couldn’t quite get used to the shift in dynamic that happened once Oscar was inside me, even though he always let me take the lead. I wanted as much of him as I could get before he left, so I tried not to be too in my head about it. It was Oscar who backed off first on our last night. He couldn’t cry and get hard at the same time, he said, without a touch of shame. I didn’t think I could love him more.
Instead, we took off all our clothes and tented under the covers of my bed, bound up like Roman wrestlers, shifting only to increase the surface area where we touched. I pulled back now and then to sketch him from different angles, anxious that there was something about him I’d missed and would forget in the long months until I got to see him again. He didn’t like that, though, having my sketch pad between us, so I only got some rough drawings down before he hauled me back into a clinch.
“Tell me again why this is a good idea,” Oscar said, mashing his face into my neck and breathing deep, like the last bit of oxygen on earth was in there somewhere. I toyed with the curls at the base of his neck, and I felt one of his tears slip down into the hollow above my collarbone. He’d been crying on and off for hours, and our pillows were soggy with his tears. My eyes, on the other hand, were dry as dust. If there was anyone I could stand to cry in front of it was Oscar, but it wouldn’t help for me to break down like that with him watching. One of us had to keep it together, or we’d both chicken out.
“You know why,” I sighed, tipping his face up to look at me. “You are a freaking genius and good at baseball, and that got you a ticket out of here. I’m headed to Winchester in a couple of months, and the only thing that makes sense is for us to make the most of it. Can you honestly tell me that you want any of this, Os?”
“Any of what?”
“This. Do you want to live in a trailer park or some shitty-ass apartment and work some shitty-ass job in this hick town for—”
Oscar laid a finger across my lips and shook his head. “I want you, whatever that looks like. There’s nothing wrong with being a mechanic. My dad worked his fingers to the bone to have his own business, and I’d be proud to accomplish that much.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, sitting up. Oscar rolled onto his back and looked up at me, puffy-eyed and raw. He really was just pure sweetness. “What I mean is that most people around here would kill for the kind of chance you and I have to try for something better than scraping by. Passing up a free ride just so we can shack up and settle would be an insult to them.” I stopped, struck by my own argument. I certainly hadn’t ever put it that way to myself, but it sure as hell felt right. Shuffling Oscar off to Florida felt like chopping off my own arm, but there was something I wanted too, besides a better future for him. I wanted more of the feeling I’d had with Mr. Gaines in that art studio, and I’d pay for that with an arm and a leg too, if I had to.
“Okay,” Oscar said, like he always did at the end of our arguments, and he pulled me back down into his soap and salty tear smell. The only place he really cared about winning was on the baseball field and in his classes. With me, he just trusted that I knew best, and this time, at least, he was right.
The only things that got me through the rest of that summer were my art, my fantasies of going to town in that Aladdin’s cave of an art studio at Winchester, and the enigma that was my soon-to-be faculty mentor, Mr. Gaines. Dot tried to keep me busy with shifts at the charity shop and working in her garden, which I did because I knew she was freaking about me being away five days a week, but it didn’t help. The only thing that made me feel better was getting lost in a project. But without my muse, even that felt hollow. Os and I talked on the phone, conversations he yawned his way through on account of being run ragged. I got tired fast too, tired of playing the cheerleader and pretending that I wasn’t scraping the bottom of my resolve to let him go for both our sakes. I wanted to crawl through the phone line, right into his mouth, and curl up in his belly, in his lean brown body that felt more like mine than my own. He would have loved to hear me say that, but it would have been selfish to haul on his heartstrings that way. Selfish and totally fucking pointless. I was hot, heartbroken, and by the time the first day of school rolled around, desperate to sleep in a bed that didn’t hold so many memories of Oscar.
Chapter FOUR
“THAT’S NOT her name, you know,” a Korean girl in jodhpurs whispered in the dining hall after Imogen introduced her as Bugsy, then flounced off to get some fat-free frozen yogurt to round out her meal of carrots dipped in vinegar. “She just started calling herself ‘Moe’ at the end of last year, but now she won’t answer to anything else, even with the teachers. It’s a total thing. All of the underclassmen are making up boy names to go by.”
“Hardly all of the underclassmen, Bugs. Only the ones so far up Immy’s ass they bump their heads on her tonsils.” This from Hadley, a curvy, doll-faced girl I was getting to like more by the second. “Have you ever heard her call anybody by anything but the name she gives them?” Hadley asked as she attacked her food. She was built like a brick shithouse, and had a mouth on her like the worst of Reenie’s trucker buddies, though she came from more money than God. Her last name wasn’t du Pont, but she was somewhere in that family tree—not that she went around broadcasting it. Hadley’s standard wardrobe of sweatshirts and flannel pajama tops was about as ostentatious as Dot’s mac n’ cheese. She had a massive Coca-Cola addiction and could belch an entire verb conjugation on demand, yet somehow underneath all of that flannel she exuded an oblivious sexiness. It came off her like smoke from a griddle, but it wasn’t uncomfortable to be around in the way my loose teenage neighbor Debbie Early was, with her tits hanging out and her Bedazzled thong riding up out of her capris.
Hadley was a killer on the field hockey field, which I learned the first time I went up against her in practice and ended up flat on my back counting stars. After-school sports or gym was required at Winchester, even for artsy types with two left feet. I felt like an idiot out there on the field that first day in my short, scratchy kilt and dorky polo shirt. As soon as I got to practice, I saw that I’d put my shin guards on wrong, pads over socks, and damn if I didn’t almost start to bawl from sheer embarrassment. All day, I’d roamed the halls of the academic building—clueless, late for every class, lost in every way. I bent over on the field to fix my shin guards, grateful for the short shorts that kept me from flashing my briefs, then hiked the tight knee-high socks up over them. During warm-up laps, the pads made my legs sweat so bad it soaked my socks as I dragged ass behind the perky, bobbing ponytails of the other girls. When we stretched I couldn’t touch my toes, and when we dribbled, I kept tripping over my stick. Until Hadley plowed into me during three-on-three scrimmages, I was contemplating hoofing it back to Wayside and locking myself in the trailer until Oscar graduated FSU. She hit me hard with a cheery “Sorry!” and won the ball, scored, then dusted me off and kept me laughing for the rest of practice with dirty jokes about sticks and balls. I decided my Wayside hermitage could wait.
Why Hadley hung out with Imogen was unclear, but pickings were slim. There were only thirty-one girls in the whole junior class (ten of whom spoke English as a second language, and only five of those spoke it well). After eleven years in the Benbow school system, I only had Oscar to show for it; not that he was anything to sneeze at. Once you found the best, why bother with the rest? But the hole his absence left was going to take a lot more than one person to fill. Having Oscar attached to my hip since grade school, Dot and Leon’s trailer to tromp in and out of like it was my own, plus the little bubble of Wayside with its familiar cast of characters hadn’t set me up to fly solo. So much for my Lone Ranger image. At Winchester, I needed someone to watch my back, a reality brought home one day on my solitary way to lunch. I’d decided to cut across a flagstone patio encircled by topiaries set just off the dining hall entrance. I’d barely taken two steps on it when a pale redhead sitting with a gaggle of other girls stood up from a wrought iron table and planted herself in my path.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” she said, smirking over her shoulder at her friends.
“Huh?” I asked brusquely, hungry and annoyed. The girl stepped closer. Too close.
“You’re a transfer, aren’t you?” she asked.
I nodded, rendered speechless by someone putting themselves in my space like that. Most people could read my “don’t mess with me” vibe without printed instructions.
“Then I’ll give you five seconds to get off this patio, instead of blackballing your ass right now.”
Blackballing my ass? I laughed. It sounded like some kind of kinky sex thing, but the girl was wearing a Talbot’s twin set, so that couldn’t be right. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
The girl squinched her face into something distinctly sphincter-like. “Senior patio,” she hissed. “Get. Off.” I was starving and late to lunch already. I told myself that was the reason I didn’t knock Big Red’s teeth into the back of next Tuesday, but when I thought about it later I realized that she, with her posse of friends and superior knowledge of the arcane clauses and subclauses that dictated life at Winchester, had actually intimidated me. Me.
“Five seconds?” I confirmed. The redhead jerked her head in a nod. Rather than retrace the two steps it would have taken me to back off the patio, I took one tiny step forward until our noses just about touched, then took four more big ones past her, counting off as I went. Just enough to get me off of the patio. I kept walking straight into the dining hall, head high, but I still felt defeated, and more alone than ever.
“Roy’s a great choice,” Bugsy chirped, cutting a chicken breast into baby-bird-sized portions. Hadley’s comment about Imogen’s devotees had bounced right off her. She obviously didn’t see herself as one of them, though the only time I’d seen her out of Imogen’s reach was during riding lessons, and that was just because they rode separate horses. “Nobody has ‘Roy’ yet,” Bugsy prodded when I didn’t respond. “Did Moe suggest it?” I laughed at the idea, not bothering to answer. If anybody thought I was another one of Imogen’s disciples because I went by “Roy,” that was their problem. I had nothing to prove.
“Of course she didn’t.” Hadley yawned, causing the large breasts molded into a hefty ledge by her sports bra to strain at her pajama top in a way I found weirdly distracting. I could care less about my own, but Hadley’s boobs commanded attention. “Don’t you remember Mr. G. showing off Roy’s artwork at the end of last year, Bugs? That was way before Immy started in with this ‘Moe’ crap. If anything, Roy inspired Immy. And will you stop going along with it? You’re just encouraging her. The whole thing is so annoying. Her name is Imogen, Immy, or Im. I’m not calling her ‘Moe,’ for fuck’s sake. If we just ignore it, it’ll go away.”
“People have a right to be called what they want, right, Roy?” Bugsy said, taking a swig of iced tea from a glass almost as big as her perfectly shaped head. I’d never seen an Asian person up close before. Benbow came mostly in white, with a narrow streak of black and the dash of brown of the immigrant families. I admired Bugsy’s poreless skin, and the way her geometric haircut fell toward her face like the flaked obsidian arrowheads Oscar and I used to find in the mown fields around Benbow. Nothing about her hinted at the reason behind her nickname. Her teeth were as uniform as Tic Tacs, although the girl did freeze up a little when Imogen was around, like a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow. Bugsy blinked at me, and I realized I was just sitting there like a bump on a log, not giving her anything to work with in the conversation department. Be polite, I reminded myself.
“Yep, she seems like a real piece of work.” I tipped my head toward where Imogen was standing in line for the frozen yogurt with a stocky, bow-legged girl I recognized from field hockey.
“You mean Moe?” Bugsy asked, shooting Hadley a defiant look. Hadley just rolled her eyes and demolished her turkey tetrazzini. “She’s great and she’s, like, the most loyal person in the world. She’d do anything to help a friend, and she knows everything about everything. Her mother is a human rights lawyer who runs marathons, and her dad used to be a photographer for National Geographic. Now he lives in the Philippines or something and covers Southeast Asia as a photojournalist for Time. She’s got these older twin brothers who are, like, the hottest guys I’ve ever seen, and that includes Jason Priestley and Luke Perry from 90210. They’re both at Georgetown, and you wouldn’t believe the feeding frenzy when they show up for events. People wear makeup, even.”
“Im’s not bad,” Hadley conceded, sipping a stray, creamy noodle into her mouth. “She just takes things too far. No wonder, though. Her brothers are these mega humans who are awesome at everything, her dad’s a lush who only calls her drunk and sends her weird statues and shit from Asia, and her mom’s a total type A control freak who treats her like a therapist. One minute she’s telling Immy what kind of face cream to use, the next she’s telling her all about her latest fuck. It’s gross.”
“Hadley!” Bugs squeaked, waggling her eyebrows in a not-so-subtle attempt to silence her. “Don’t gossip. It’s nobody’s business.”
“I’m not gossiping,” Hadley argued. “I’m helping Roy not murder Immy in her sleep for being so annoying.”
I scrambled for something to say to get them both off the topic of Imogen. I already knew way more than I wanted to. Sure, I could probably cut Immy a little more slack, but that was as far as I was willing to take it.
“So how’d you get the name ‘Bugsy’?” I asked. “Is that your ‘boy name’?” Bugsy shook her head, tucking a liquid ebony hank of hair behind one ear.
“No. Moe gave it to me.”
“Oh, come on,” Imogen said, plopping down her bowl of vanilla frozen yogurt and swinging her long legs over the bench beside Bugs. “You know you love it. Who’s my wittle Bugsy, huh? Who is it?” Imogen reached out and tickled Bugsy under her chin. Hadley grumbled something that I didn’t catch. Bugsy’s smile looked a little forced, but she giggled and blushed on cue. “I started calling her Bugsy freshman year, because she always chewed her pencils in class and left these little teeth marks on them,” Immy explained as she stroked Bugsy’s hair. “Plus she’s adorable. I mean, look at her. Isn’t she the cutest?” She rained kisses on Bugsy’s face as the girl squirmed under the torrent of affection. It was awkward. One sixteen-year-old girl calling another adorable sounded demeaning and stupid, and the last thing I wanted to do was encourage it.
“Hey, how about you sit for me sometime?” I asked Bugsy. “I’m always looking for new subjects, and I’ve got to do a portrait for Mr. Gaines’s class anyway. I’d love to try to capture your kickass haircut and that true black. It’s almost blue. Totally punk rock. What do you say?” Bugsy flushed and giggled again, and I noted the little white line of displeasure that formed around Imogen’s mouth. Good, I thought. Suck on that. The girl was getting way too familiar. After lunch she actually tried to link arms with me as we left the dining hall and made our way to Furnham House, where all of the academic classes were held. A lot of the girls went around like that, like they couldn’t walk unassisted. Sometimes I thought the campus resembled a nursing home on visiting day. “Look!” I exclaimed, slipping my arm out of Immy’s and pointing up at the sky. “That cloud looks like a dragon riding on the hood of a car!” Immy put her face really close to mine so she could see my perspective.
“Totally. I love the way you see things!” She rubbed my back, and I tried not to flinch. The girl had no concept of personal space. I sped up my pace.
“Better get to class,” I said.
“Hey, Roy,” she said in a low whisper, pulling me off the sidewalk into the grass so the foot traffic from the dining hall to Furnham could flow past. I wanted to shake her off, but didn’t for the sake of making nice. “G.’s having a sala tonight at his place.”
I blinked. “Um, okay.”
“He lives at Warren Cottage over behind the headmistress’s grounds. You should come. He told me I could invite you.”
“To… have salad?” Was there no end to the weirdness of this place?
Immy tossed back her head and howled, slapping one spindly thigh. “You are a delight, Roy Watkins. Through and through. No, not salad. Sala. Like a salon.” I blinked again, too stumped to care how grating it was to be at Immy’s mercy yet again. If Mr. Gaines wanted me somewhere, I wanted to know about it. “A sala is, like, an event or something where artists exhibit or try out their stuff for an audience. Less formal than a show. It’s really just a chance for students to get together and talk about art and the creative process, you know? G. started them my freshman year, but I only got invited this year. It’s an upperclassmen thing. Invite only and very hush-hush, though admin knows about it. They let G. do anything he wants just to keep him on staff, and he convinced them it’s, like, an art theory seminar or something, which it basically is. Just more fun.”
