Unbecoming (7 page)

Grace was lying awake in this bed one morning at dawn, Riley asleep next to her, when she felt a space open up in her imagination: What if Riley stopped loving her? What if she lost her room in this house? When she was at home, she was always waiting to come back here; her parents and brothers were strangers milling around while she sat watching the clock, looking for a reason to go. And if there were no reason for her? She felt suddenly haunted, the ghost the threat of becoming a ghost herself.

She watched Madison at school. It was the matter-of-factness in her demeanor—she never crossed her legs; she smoked at lunch—that Grace, in her yellow sundress, found particularly menacing. Grace had been challenged not by someone she could best, but by her opposite.

Grace contemplated anal sex, which she hadn’t done and didn’t want to do. Had she unconsciously saved it for a time like this? But then, late on a Friday night when Grace, Riley, Greg, and Alls were drinking amiably in the woods behind the Kimbroughs’ house, Riley erupted with laughter. He handed his phone to Grace. There was Madison, tits out, begging for his attention from the screen.

“Christ,” Riley said. “Some people have no manners.”

Grace peered closely at the picture, comparing Madison’s breasts to her own until she felt Greg’s breath on her neck.

“The Kimbroner likes her,” he said.

Grace smacked him away.
You stupid whore
, she thought, relieved and delighted as she watched Riley laugh.
You don’t know him at all.

Greg hooked up with Madison the next week—the perfect end, really—and intermittently until her graduation, when she vanished to the coastal South. Sometimes, Greg would pine for her a little. “It was more than it was,” he would say thoughtfully. It wasn’t, but his friends allowed him his delusion. Grace was especially generous, now that she felt certain there was no contest for Riley’s love that she could not win if she stayed true to herself, the good girl, naked in the attic, sundress heaped on the floor.

5

T
he boys went to college together, though they didn’t really
go
anywhere. Of the hundred students in their graduating class, twenty-two had enrolled at Garland College. Children of GC faculty or staff received tuition waivers or reductions. Riley and his brothers went nearly free.

Alls had banked on basketball paying his way. He had every reason to think he’d get a scholarship to GC: The college had given a full ride to the two best players on Garland High’s basketball team for the past twenty years, and Alls was the Ravens’ star point guard. But in December, the Court Vision Committee offered its two scholarships to Clay Atkinson and Jeremy Bullock. Even the coach could not conceal his shock. Jeremy absolutely deserved the scholarship, but Clay was mediocre. He cracked under pressure and was easily pushed around by bigger players.

Grace was less surprised. Clay’s father was Ike Atkinson, attorney at law, and his mother was Caroline, Realtor and breeder of labradoodles, and they lived in a big white house with green shutters. Jeremy Bullock, one of eleven black students at Garland High, had been raised by a single mother, and Grace had seen Jeremy’s smile tighten when the committee chair, announcing his scholarship, mentioned this among the “difficult circumstances” Jeremy had “overcome.” But Alls must not have fit the vision. His mother had never returned. She called him yearly and asked him to visit her in Michigan, but he had gone only once. Good Time Charlie worked at a big-box sporting goods store in Whitwell between benders. Their story had no lift.

“You’re calling them
racist
?” Riley asked. “But they picked Jeremy.”

“And
Clay
. Look, what was that ‘single mother’ bullshit? They like that—on a black kid. It’s very true to their vision. But on Alls, not so much. And Alls’s mother is Colombian.”

“Doesn’t that make
you
the one who’s fixated on—”

“It should have been Jeremy and Alls.” She struggled to explain herself. “You know they are so happy with themselves right now, patting their backs for helping Jeremy. But then they look at Alls and see the town’s most obnoxious drunk, the Latina babysitter he conned into marrying him, and a kid who’s a
mix
of them. The one who refused to sell candy bars because he made more at his real job.”

Riley groaned.

“Why else would they pick Clay? Clay sucks.”

“Because he’s a little shit,” he said. “Because he never pisses anyone off, and Alls does.”

“And why is that?”

She wished she hadn’t said anything at all. If Riley was blind to Garland’s social stratification, it was not in her interest to enlighten him.

What she didn’t mention to Riley was that she had seen Alls get the call from Coach Backus. They had all been at the Grahams’ house, pawing through the basement for discarded housewares they could take to the house the boys were going to rent for college. Greg had found a cache of old babes-with-cars posters belonging to one of Riley’s brothers—Jim, they guessed, based on the vintage of both subjects—and they’d crowded around them, cackling, when Alls pulled his buzzing phone out of his jeans pocket. He looked at the number and ran up the stairs; there wasn’t enough reception in the basement.

Grace went upstairs a minute later to get a drink. She filled her glass at the kitchen sink, and from the window, she saw Alls in the backyard, phone to his ear, pacing. She knew she was seeing something private but she didn’t know what. He stopped and crossed one arm over the other under the walnut tree, his back to the house. Grace realized she was holding her breath. Even twenty feet away and from behind, she knew she’d never seen him so upset. When his arm dropped, it just hung there, limp, until he stuck his phone back in his pocket and stooped to pick up some rotting fallen walnuts from the ground. He began to whip them at the paint splotch on the fence, an old pitching target.

She wanted to go outside, to ask him what had happened or if he wanted to talk. But she couldn’t talk like that to Alls. They didn’t have that kind of friendship. He sometimes made her self-conscious and uncomfortable: When she was combing her hair with her fingers or laughing a not-awful laugh, he would give her this knowing look, a squint and a suppressed smile, as if he’d caught her at something.
You don’t know shit
, she’d want to say.

Grace watched him until she heard the thunder of footsteps coming up the basement stairs. Greg and Riley blew past her into the backyard, where they, too, began to pick up fallen walnuts and pelt them at the fence, as if they were all obeying some boy command from above.

 • • • 

“What about other schools?” she asked Alls several days later. They were sitting on the back porch steps at Riley’s family’s house a few days after Christmas. Grace sat a step below Riley, leaning between his legs. When she said this, he squeezed his knees a little, telling her to hush.

“There are no other schools,” Alls said.

“I mean UT, or State, Belmont—”

“I’m not good enough for UT,” he said. “But I’m good enough for Garland.”

“What about other sports? I mean, you’ve played pretty much everything.”

Riley put his face in his hands. Grace knew that getting another scholarship was not as simple as she was suggesting, but Alls was the most graceful person she knew, long and leanly muscled. He moved with the careless elegance of someone always at ease in his body. She had never seen Alls Hughes trip. His body could learn, she thought, anything he asked it to.

“I’m going in,” Riley said.

“You don’t have to go to college,” Grace said when the door had shut.

“I’m fucking going to college,” he said.

She’d touched a nerve. “What do you want to be?” she asked.

He snorted. “What? Like, when I grow up?”

“Yeah,” she said, glad he had laughed. “When you grow up.”

“Uh,
away
.” He rubbed the crooked bridge of his nose. “Out of here.”

“
Here?
” Grace said, disbelieving.

“Garland,” he sighed.

“So go work on an oil rig. Or go to college in Kansas.” Marmie hobbled up the stairs and parked her graying head on Grace’s lap.

“Is that what you’re planning? What do
you
want to be?”

Grace Graham. Smart, rich, mother of future Grahams. “I don’t know,” she said, stroking the dog’s ears. “But my family is here.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never even met your family. You know how weird that is in this town? There’s nobody who sees me coming and doesn’t think of my dad.”

“I meant
here
,” she said, tapping her finger on the porch step. There wasn’t any reason she shouldn’t say that, and yet she felt it had been a mistake.

A Riley whoop rang out from inside. They turned to the bay window and saw him dancing his mother across the living room floor, showing off for them, for her. They could hear Dr. Graham’s Steely Dan through the glass. Riley gave them a goofy thumbs-up. Grace waved.

“Well, same,” Alls said to her then. She was relieved. She could tell that he’d thought she just meant Riley.

Grace smiled. “You just need to figure out what you want.”

“Like you did,” he said, the corner of his lip twitching.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You did good, and you know it. I fuck up, but you never do.”

Grace laughed, out of both habit and self-defense, and Alls nodded, looking at her in a way she did not want to be seen.

“Stop it,” she said, standing to reach for the icy doorknob. She could hear the opening chords of “Deacon Blues,” and she wanted to join the dancing.

 • • • 

The next week, Alls quit the basketball team, right in the middle of the season. He couldn’t see faking it through February, he said, with all those people pitying him. “I don’t owe anybody anything,” he told his coach.

Shortly after that, he started going to the college after school for fencing practice.

“Of all the sports that could get you a scholarship, you’re going for one you’ve never done before,” Riley said. “Makes sense.”

“Like, with the mask and shit?” Greg asked.

“Yeah,” Alls said. “And shit.”

“What about track?” Riley asked. “You can run.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Alls said. “See, they
have
a full track team. They have a full basketball team. GC has
one
available scholarship, and it’s for fencing, so I’m going after it. They had a junior transfer up north midyear. Your dad’s the one who told me.”

“I didn’t even know they had a fencing team,” Greg said.

Alls nodded once. “Now you get it.”

 • • • 

Alls won the scholarship, possibly with a quiet assist from Dr. Graham, and would begin college only a semester behind Riley and Greg. In August, the boys rented the falling-down house on Orange Street. Riley gave her a key, and Grace made herself at home in his room upstairs, Alls in the room below and Greg down the hall.

At first, they all basked in the freedom the house afforded them. No one had to smoke out in the woods anymore; no one hurried to push the empties under the couch at the sound of footsteps on the stairs; no one needed to wear proper clothes, buttoned and zipped. Grace lived with her parents only technically now. She spent most nights at the house on Orange Street, and though her parents didn’t like this arrangement, they were too late to intercede with any meaningful authority. When her mother protested that Grace spending the night with Riley all the time didn’t “look right,” Grace feigned confusion: to whom? The Grahams didn’t mind that she stayed over, she said. She had her own room in their house. Mrs. Graham was only grumpy that she saw less of them now. Grace dragged Riley home for dinner once a week, and she sometimes visited on her own, too.

“Whose opinion are you worried about,
Mother?” Grace asked with airy chill.

In the house on Orange Street, Greg ambled around stoned in his shorts, not even bothering to hide his morning Kimbroner. Alls left his pipe on the kitchen table and made out with Jenna from Ginny’s Ice Cream on the sofa, not caring who saw them. Riley and Grace were as loud as they pleased. For the past four years they had been sneaking around together, and now there was no sneaking to do.

Grace planned to start at Garland College the next year. She was graduating second in her class and she’d scored very well on the SAT, and she was confident that she would get a scholarship. She would major in art history, a complement to Riley’s talent. After college, they would get married. That was the plan.

At night she looked through Riley’s coursework, greedy to learn something, anything. With the boys graduated, there was nothing left for Grace in high school. She’d already read
Beowulf
and
1984
; she’d read them last year, when Riley had, and now she had to listen to her peers’ slow-motion jawing—“it’s like our world, but
not
”
—
as if they were underwater. She should have petitioned to graduate early, she knew, but she hadn’t, and now there was nothing to do but stare at the horizon and wait, both for graduation and for the three o’clock bell.

 • • • 

In December, Grace came back to the house one day after school, wheeled her bicycle into the shed, and went inside thinking that no one was home. She took a can of High Life from the refrigerator and flopped down on the green plaid couch in front of the picture window with
Macbeth
and a highlighter. She unzipped her jeans to get comfortable and flexed and pointed her bare feet in the sun. It was warm for December, warmer on the sun-soaked couch, and she drifted off with her highlighter in her hand. She woke suddenly, and she didn’t know why until she saw, through the doorway, Alls in the kitchen on the floor, cleaning up the aftermath of a dropped take-out container. Sticky brown food was strewn across the vinyl.

“I was trying to be quiet,” he said. “I spilled some on your book.”

Macbeth
was still resting on her stomach. Now she moved it to cover her undone fly. “What book?”