Unbecoming (6 page)

Mrs. Graham clutched at Grace like a long-awaited gift. She bought Grace dresses, sweaters, books (none of her sons really liked to read, not the way she did, not the way Grace did). When Mrs. Graham laughed, she tilted her face up and her mouth opened in surprise, almost as if she were in pain. When she really laughed, at her husband or at her boys, she bit her lips together, laughing through her nose. Once, Grace, using the master bathroom, had tried on her lipstick, a shimmery plum called Crushed Rose that came in a gold tube, and tried her Mrs. Graham laugh silently in the mirror.

Mrs. Graham even took Grace to purchase her first bra. Grace had twice started to ask her own mother, but stopped—Aiden was screaming, then her father came in—and Mrs. Graham had not needed to be asked. She took Grace aside and said, quickly and softly, smelling like grapefruit, that she needed to exchange a jacket at the mall and Grace should “come with” to “pick up a few bras.” She didn’t even make Grace answer; they just went. Later, curled up in Riley’s bed, Grace would sometimes notice one of those bras strewn on his floor amid the homework and sweaty socks, and she would feel overwhelmed with love for the Grahams, her real family. She sometimes fantasized a whole childhood as one of them—Grace Graham, the daughter Mrs. Graham had wanted—though she couldn’t tell Riley this without making it sound as though she wished she were his sister.

4

R
iley left Garland Middle for Garland High; Grace, left behind, worried that she would begin to seem too young to him, a babyish phase he should now grow out of. After school she rushed to wherever he was, always with Alls and Greg. Greg often accused her, even in front of Riley, of trying to take Riley away from them. She laughed and Riley rolled his eyes, but Greg was right. She was jealous. No matter how long she and Riley were together, the boys
had been together longer. Sometimes, it didn’t seem fair that Grace gave all her love and attention to Riley when his was spread so thin. But he wouldn’t let her in with the boys, not really, even though all of them spent so much time together. When she did the things that she thought would earn her admittance—threw an empty glass bottle at the brick back wall of their middle school, called Greg out for farting—Riley scolded her. There was one time she remembered particularly. It was after Halloween, and they were all sitting on Riley’s front porch eating leftover candy.

“What’s a hillbilly’s favorite thing to do on Halloween?” Alls started.

“What?” Grace asked first.

He looked at the floor, trying to keep a straight face. “Pump kin.”

Riley’s laugh was loudest of all. Then Grace, recovering first, said, “What did the leper say to the hooker?”

“What?” Greg asked.

It was too late; she was already grinning. “Keep the tip.”

Alls cupped his hands over his ears in mock alarm, but he was laughing, and so was Greg. Riley was not. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “I’m bored out of my skull.”

Later, when his friends had gone home, he told her that she’d embarrassed him. He framed his argument generously: “Quit trying to be a guy,” he said. “You don’t have to fake it. Just be yourself.”

She wasn’t faking it, she started to explain. She was just—

“But I don’t like you like that,” he said.

Just-be-yourself had its limits. She adapted to his vision. She liked that girl more than she had ever liked herself before anyway, so that was the self she became.

Starting that year, the boys often went to Greg’s basement after school. Greg was already drinking hard then, stealing booze from his father, who had a wet bar downstairs and drank too much to keep track of his inventory. The first time Greg offered her a screwdriver, she told him to shut up, thinking he was making fun of her. “No, I’m having one,” he said. “You’ll like it, it’s good.” Greg kept his pot down there too, right in the drawer with the party toothpicks and restaurant matchbooks, as though he wanted his father to find it.

One night in early April, the boys were lit to the rafters and Grace was nursing her screwdriver when the boys decided to take Mrs. Kimbrough’s car out for a drive. Greg took the keys from her purse, which was next to the bed where she and Mr. Kimbrough slept. Riley had never driven so much as a lawn mower, and Greg was too bombed to get the key into the lock. Alls had learned to drive a golf cart caddying that summer. Grace protested wildly, in a whisper. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. She had snuck out of her house. Riley told her not to worry; they would drop her off at home. Alls backed Mrs. Kimbrough’s silver sports car out of the driveway, narrowly missing the brick mailbox. Greg pumped up the bass and then locked the windows to hotbox the car. Alls jabbed at the window buttons, trying to roll them down. His dad drove an old car without power windows and he couldn’t figure it out. Grace made them drop her off at the end of her block so her parents wouldn’t wake.

The next morning was Sunday, and Grace biked over at eight thirty, per custom, to go to church with the Grahams. She found Alls, Riley, and his parents in the kitchen, all with their hands over their eyes. The telephone was in the middle of the table, no one touching it. Mr. Kimbrough screamed from the receiver that he would wring Riley’s balls off. Riley’s mother always put angry parents on speakerphone. She wanted neither to spare her sons their fury nor to have to regurgitate it herself.

“Tell him to get over here,” he shouted. “I want your little shithead crying on the floor just like mine is.”

Marmie, the Grahams’ beagle, began to howl at the phone, and Mrs. Graham gestured at Grace to shush her.

“It’s no use letting him lie to you.” It was Tracy Kimbrough now. “Greg told us everything.”

Greg had told his parents that he let Alls and Riley borrow his mother’s car and that they had crashed it. He claimed to have stayed home. Now the car’s front end was bashed in and there was vomit all over the backseat and floor.

“You could’ve killed someone!” Dr. Graham bellowed.

“It’s a miracle you weren’t arrested,” Mrs. Graham said. “Really, I wish you had been.”

“Alls, you need to go home now,” Dr. Graham said.

Riley was sorrowful and self-flagellating as he promised to pay for his half of the damages. He didn’t contradict Greg’s ridiculous story to his parents. But he told Grace later that they had all driven downtown, what there was of it, where they were flagged down by two seniors from school. One of them was a locker-room pills dealer, freshly expelled. His name was a four-letter word on all parents’ lips. They let him drive, playing autobahn on Old 63 until Riley puked on the floor. The older boy plowed the car into the pin oak on Dawahare Street, and they left the car there, bashed in and full of vomit. Alls went home with Riley, who discovered on his doorstep that he’d lost his keys over the course of the evening. Alls didn’t even have a key to his own house—his father was always losing his keys and borrowing his son’s—so he’d learned to pick the locks with paper clips when he needed to. He got them into the Grahams’, and they collapsed on the couches in the family room.

Grace couldn’t understand why they had let Greg off the hook, but Riley shrugged off her questions. She figured it out on her own: Greg had been buying the pot and supplying all the alcohol. He stole money from his parents all the time: He sold his belongings and claimed to have lost them, collected money for fake tutors and fake field trips. He paid for most of the damage to the car in exchange for Riley and Alls taking the blame.

But the blame assigned to Alls and Riley was not equally distributed. Mrs. Kimbrough focused her rage on Alls alone, and when his father tried to pay for the damages, the Kimbroughs refused his money.

Charlie Hughes was “having a hard time,” everyone knew, meaning he was an alcoholic whose private struggles had become public. His wife, Alls’s mother, had walked out on them just two months before, after Charlie’s third DUI. Paula Hughes had worked at the United Methodist day care in the mornings and babysat the younger Turpin children in the afternoons, and when she left, Jeffrey Turpin started a rumor that Alls’s mother had been deported. Alls was reconsidered by his peers: His complexion, though pale, had a strong olive cast that they now remarked on for the first time. Other than his coloring, he looked like a younger Charlie, long-nosed and lanky and ready to get into trouble. But Alls didn’t correct the rumor. He must have preferred it, in its loud stupidity, to the truth that few knew: His mother had promised to return when her husband got sober. She had given up.

The Friday before the boys wrecked Mrs. Kimbrough’s car, Charlie Hughes had made a scene at the boys’ baseball game.

Riley didn’t play, but since Alls and Greg did, Grace and Riley were there, hanging out with some other kids under the bleachers. In the third inning, they had heard Charlie hollering, “How’s my boy doing?” as he ambled from the parking lot. He struggled up into the bleachers and began to loudly speculate about why Bradley Cobb, the third baseman, was still so small at fourteen. Grace and Riley scooted out from under the bleachers to watch Charlie. He made Grace nervous. Riley loathed him, bitter on his friend’s behalf.

“Got a weak chin too. Must have been a preemie,” Charlie Hughes said to no one in particular. The Cobbs were sitting two rows down.

“Come on, Charlie,” Mr. Kimbrough said. “Let’s just watch the game, okay?”

“Maybe his daddy didn’t get a good toehold.” Cackling, Charlie lurched forward, clapping the woman in front of him on the shoulder. “What do you say, Cobb?”

Grace couldn’t see the Cobbs, but no one laughed. Charlie rummaged in his pants pocket and a bottle slipped out, clanging against the bleachers and then falling through the gap until it broke on the asphalt below.

“Whoops,” Charlie said, looking down through his legs. “Careful, kids.”

Grace looked out to Alls at first base. He was focused on the batter, his jaw tensed, and she couldn’t tell if he’d seen. The broken vodka bottle hadn’t been much bigger than a flask. That Alls’s father was a
vodka
drunk was worse in Garland, where men drank beer or whiskey, and they drank it at home, jiggling squat glasses of ice on their porches, not at their kids’ baseball games. Alls’s father was usually working on Friday evenings. He shouldn’t have been there anyway.

Charlie left silently after the next inning, and Grace and Riley cleaned up the broken glass before Alls came out of the dugout. Grace felt newly grateful for her own parents’ disinterest.

When Riley, Greg, and Alls wrecked Tracy Kimbrough’s car a week later, Grace was sure the episode at the baseball game was connected to the Kimbroughs’ treatment of Alls. Mrs. Kimbrough, whose every surface was always affluently packaged, was in no hurry to have her car fixed. She ran the crumpled car all over town for weeks, telling anyone who asked that Alls Hughes had stolen her car and driven it around at night smoking marijuana. She omitted Riley’s involvement as readily as she did her own son’s, and this seemed to be her preferred form of compensation. Shortly thereafter, Alls was kicked off the baseball team for failing a surprise drug test administered to no one else.

“You have to tell them,” Grace begged Riley. “This is all happening because of Greg’s crazy mom. She can’t tell when he lies to her because he
always
lies to her. She’s ruining Alls’s
life.
”

“His
life
? This isn’t that big a deal. Everybody’ll forget about it in a couple weeks, and next time it’ll be Greg’s turn. You take turns getting the shit—you have to.”

It’s not like that for us
, she wanted to tell Riley. People would forget about Riley’s mistakes and Greg’s mistakes because of their nice families in the background, but Grace and Alls didn’t have backup. She didn’t know how to explain this to Riley.

He put his arm over her shoulder. “Don’t worry so much.”

The cost of this mistake had ballooned, and Grace knew Alls couldn’t afford it. She understood then how tenuous her own position was. If some grown-up decided that Grace didn’t belong with Riley, her life could be gossiped right down the toilet.

Years later, when Greg ratted out his friends for a plea bargain, Grace was probably least surprised of anyone. She knew the rules.

 • • • 

While Riley practiced his chiaroscuro, his depth of field, his achievement of photorealism, Grace practiced the craft of love: cupcakes, mix CDs, impassioned encouragement, her fingers against the inside of his biceps, doubled joy at his victories and indignation at any slight. She loved the roaring crackle of his laugh and how it seemed to raise the temperature in the room. She loved that he was kind to his mother and kissed her on the cheek when he came and left, that he and his father talked at length, like old friends. She loved that his father gave him money to take Grace out to dinner. She loved the red-gold hairs on his arms and that he drove a stick shift. The way his body jerked right as he fell asleep and how he always woke up looking cross and petulant. She loved how people waved to him from down the block and called his name. And the sound of his name in her mouth, and his signature, how the R seemed to be kicking the rest of it off the page. She loved when he drew her. She loved when he left his friends to be with her. Even at fourteen she knew that she had him locked down and she loved that too. She had won—everything.

Only once had Grace worried about losing Riley. When she was sixteen, a bored blond nightmare named Madison Grimes showed up at Garland High as a senior, kicked out of her Virginia boarding school, and scared the devil out of Grace when she made it clear that she wanted Riley. Deanna Passerini and Colby Strote told her in biology, and not out of kindness. Then Grace heard it herself, approaching Riley’s locker: Madison’s low, husky laugh at something Riley had said.

“Can’t take her home to Mother,” Greg muttered within her earshot. Grace knew he didn’t mean to threaten her—he was never that specific—but goose bumps prickled down her limbs.

By then Grace was often sleeping over at the Grahams’ whenever Mrs. Graham decided it had gotten too late for Grace to go home. Mrs. Graham had fixed up the small guest bedroom in the attic for Grace with flowered quilts from her own childhood and a toile-shaded lamp. Riley snuck up the stairs at night, delighted at the creepiness of sex in that little rosebudded room. He sometimes grew frustrated at Grace’s relationship with his mother and needed reminding that their closeness was exactly the thing that enabled his comfortable and unobstructed sex life.