Dreamland (14 page)

I already felt that way about Rogerson. But I still wanted to take my time, not have it happen in some mad rush or on a random Tuesday afternoon. He seemed to understand this, and when I told him to stop—and even for me, it was
always
hard—he complied, the only protest a little bit of grumbling into my neck as his hands moved back up into the safe zone. But each time it got harder, and I knew I couldn't wait too long.

I was beginning to understand that small smile Rina gave me whenever I asked her what she saw in Bill Skerrit.

Rogerson seemed to almost
like
the fact that I was inexperienced, not just about sex, but most things. He enjoyed carting me around in my cheerleading outfit while he took bong hits or talked business with people who eyed me strangely, as if I was a cartoon, not quite real. This was the same reason, I was sure, that he'd been interested in me the first night we'd met. It was a fair trade. With Rogerson, I was someone else. Not Cass. Not even me. I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second-place finishes had left behind.

There were so many things I already loved about him. The smell of his skin, always slightly musky and sweet. His hair, wild and dreadlocked, thick under my hands as I combed my fingers through it. The way he pressed his hand into the small of my back whenever I walked into any place ahead of him. He was so attentive, with one eye on me regardless of what else he was doing. Even with his back turned, he always seemed to know exactly where I was.

Of course, there were the drugs. Rogerson operated a brisk business selling pot and other various illegals to the kids at Perkins Day and Jackson. Because of this and other distractions, added to the fact that he never seemed to mention school, I was surprised at the pool house one day, when he was on the phone, to find poking out of his backpack not only a calculus midterm (on which he scored a 98) but an English paper entitled “Storms and Sacrifice: Weather and Emotion in King Lear” for which he'd gotten an A-. Obviously Trivial Pursuit was not his only strength. Rogerson was what his guidance counselor called “driven but misdirected” (from a letter home I found under my seat in the car, crumpled and bent). He was a perfectionist, whether it came to measuring out a perfect quarter-ounce or knowing the complete French conditional tense.

I, however, was struggling to keep my grades up, since I was suddenly spending so many weeknights (when my parents assumed I was doing cheerleading squad activities) with him. My mother, now distracted with Cass's
Lamont Whipper
sightings, had eased off on her own involvement in my cheerleading: something that almost would have bothered me, had I really taken the time to think about it. It was so easy, again, for Cass to take center stage.

But it made lying that much easier. It became a given that I rode around with him for all his errands almost every night. It was like he just
needed
me there, even if I was sitting in the car chewing my pencil and working trigonometry proofs while he talked business and divided up bags inside various houses. If I did want to go home early or spend an evening at home, he'd always drive by my house at least once, slowing down and just idling, engine rumbling, until I went outside to talk to him.

“Just come here for a second,” he'd say, rolling down his window and cutting off the engine as I came down the walk. “I'll even let you listen to that stupid music you like so much.”

“Rogerson,” I'd tell him, “I told you I have got to study. You don't understand.”

“I do, too,” he'd say, opening the car door and holding out his hand. Even if it was dark I could tell when his eyes were sleepy, half-stoned, which always made him mushier than normal. “One second. I just want to talk.”

“Yeah, right,” I'd say.

“I'm serious.” And then he'd smile at me, strict honest face. “You trust me, right?”

This was his line. It was what always led to me giving in, regardless of the issue, and coming two or three steps closer to give him my hand.

Which would, of course, lead to him pulling me inside the car and kissing me, which always made me somehow forget about studying the dates for the Italian Renaissance, or the periodic table, or
Mac-beth,
entirely.

There were some nights, though, when something was wrong. He wouldn't talk and just wanted to lean into me, putting his head on my chest while I ran my fingers through his hair until he fell asleep. I always wondered if his dad had hurt him again. But like most things with Rogerson, I was usually given half the puzzle or just one clue, never enough to piece together the full story.

This is what I did know. That he was quiet and never spoke without thinking. That he drove like a maniac. That the only time I saw the small simmering of temper behind his cool demeanor was when someone was late or not where they said they'd be. That he liked his brother, tolerated his mother, and never mentioned his father at all. And that whenever I pressed him for details about any of these things, he would sidestep me so gracefully that I could never find a polite way to ask again.

Still, there was something so strange and tender about those nights when I just sat with him in the car, my arms around him, wondering what had happened at home that brought him here, needing me so much. It reminded me of how I'd felt when Cass and I shared our room, the peace of mind that comes from knowing someone is so close while you sleep that the worst of the monsters and nightmares can't get to you.

Rogerson and I would stay that way until my father flicked on the outside light, bright and yellow and startling in my eyes. Then I'd wake him up, kiss him good night, and he'd drive off, drowsy, while I went back to my own bed feeling warm and content. I'd close my eyes, alone in my room, remembering him breathing and wonder who he saw, or found, in dreamland.

Rogerson's depth of knowledge continually surprised me. It seemed like there was literally
nothing
he didn't know.

One day, he was changing the oil in his car and I was sitting on a lawn chair in his garage, doing my homework. The Biscoe garage was jam-packed with stuff. His mother was apparently addicted to shopping, and there were boxes upon boxes, unopened, of laundry detergent, Tupperware, canned goods. In the back, where Mr. Biscoe kept his fishing supplies, was a graveyard of barely used exercise equipment, including a treadmill, a bike, and some strange contraption that looked like skis attached to a trampoline. Whenever Rogerson worked on his car I could spend hours just walking around, poking behind boxes, excavating things.

But today I was trying to cram American history, as well as complaining out loud about my teacher, Mr. Alores, who gave trivia quizzes each Friday for extra credit. He didn't teach the material on them; you either knew it or you didn't, and lately I'd been falling into the latter category.

“I mean, it's so ridiculous,” I said to Rogerson, or rather to Rogerson's legs, which was all I could see of him poking out from under the car. “How am I supposed to know this crap?”

“It can't be that hard,” he said.

“Yeah, right. Okay.” I pulled out my last quiz—I'd gotten a zero—and unfolded it. “Here. Number 4. The
Victoria
was the name of the first ship to what?”

“Hand me that wrench by your foot,” he said, and I kicked it under the car to him. “Thanks. Circumnavigate the globe.”

“Do what?” I said.

“The
Victoria.
It was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. Magellan. Returned 1522. Right?”

I glanced down at my sheet, where Mr. Alores had written the correct answer in his clear, block-style printing. “Yeah. That's right.”

Something clanked, hard, under the car. “Shit,” he said. “Damn screw's practically rusted on.”

I glanced back down at my quiz. “Rogerson.”

“Yeah.”

“Who was the first person to climb Mount Everest?”

“Sir Edmund Hillary. 1953.” He pushed out from under the car and stood up, walking over to his toolbox.

“The Ojibwa Indians are better known as what?”

He picked up a screwdriver, examined it, and dropped it back in the box. “Chippewa,” he said.

I could not believe this. “The cluster of stars called Pleiades can be found in which constellation?”

He crouched down, sliding back under the car. “The Seven Sisters,” he said.

I looked down at my sheet.

“Taurus,” he added, his voice muffled. “Also known as.”

Right again. I put the sheet down. “Rogerson. How in the world do you know all this stuff?” I walked over and knelt down on the floor, peering under the car while he drained the oil into a pan resting on his stomach. “It's, like, amazing.”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Come on. Nobody just
knows
stuff like the thyroid is located behind the breastbone. It's insane.”

“Thymus,” he said.

“What?”

“The thymus is behind the breastbone,” he explained, shifting the oil pan. “Not the thyroid.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You're like a genius or something.”

He smiled at this. “Nah. I was just really into history and science as a kid. And my grandfather was a trivia addict. He bought me books for practically every birthday and then tested me.” He shrugged. “It's no big deal.”

But it was. There were moments—when
Jeopardy
came on, in the car during radio trivia challenges, or for practically any question I couldn't answer in any subject—that Rogerson simply amazed me. I started to seek out facts, just to stump him, but it never worked. He was that sharp.

“In physics,” I sprung on him as we sat in the Taco Bell drive-through, “what does the capital letter W stand for?”

“Energy,” he said, handing me my burrito.

Sitting in front of my parents' house as he kissed me good night: “Which two planets are almost identical in size?”

“Duh,” he said, smoothing my hair back, “Venus and Earth.”

“Rogerson,” I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, “where would I find the pelagic zone?”

“In the open sea,” he said. “Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.”

 

Rogerson, for the most part, didn't like any of my cheerleading friends. Rina was the only one he could tolerate, and her just barely. He said she was too loud, but he liked her spunk nonetheless. Since she was still hot and heavy with her quarterback, not to mention a developing situation with a college-boy shoe salesman she'd met at the mall, I didn't see much of her other than at practice. When I wasn't there, I was with Rogerson and his friends.

We'd been together about a month when he took me one Sunday afternoon to an old farmhouse out in the country. It was yellow, and kind of ramshackle charming, with a big yard and a dopey looking yellow Lab, curled up in the late winter sunshine, that yawned, uninterested, as we walked up the steps. There were two cars—a yellow VW bug and a pickup truck—parked in the driveway, and when Rogerson knocked on the heavy wooden door I could hear the TV on inside.

“Come in,” a voice called out, and as I stepped in behind Rogerson I saw it belonged to a girl with long, straight blond hair who was sitting on a big couch in front of the TV, her feet tucked up under her. The room was small, with bright white walls, sunshine slanting in through a window with a bunch of plants crowded on the sill. The coffee table was an old trunk, covered with magazines and packs of cigarettes, some bracelets and a flurry of envelopes. There was a fish-bowl on top of the TV with one bright orange goldfish in it, circling.

The girl on the couch was smoking a cigarette and watching the Home Shopping Network, which I recognized instantly from my mother's newfound doll addiction. The jewelry segment was on, with some woman talking up a cubic zirconia bracelet she had draped over her fingers, modeling it this way and that.

“Hey,” Rogerson said to the girl, who looked up and smiled at him. She had a pretty face and cat-shaped eyes.

“Hey yourself,” she said, reaching over to lift a stack of magazines off the couch beside her. “Have a seat. Dave's in the kitchen making lunch.”

“Is that Rogerson?” a guy's voice yelled from the next room.

“Yeah,” Rogerson said.

“Get in here, man. I need to talk to you.”

Rogerson stood up, squeezing my shoulder, and walked to a swinging door, leaning into it to push it open. I caught a glimpse of a guy in his early twenties, in cutoffs and a long flannel shirt, barefoot, standing over a frying pan. On the wall behind him there was a huge velvet Elvis, hanging by a row of cabinets. When the guy saw me he lifted his spatula, smiling, and waved at me before the door swung shut again.