Unbecoming: A Novel Read online

  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.

  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

  The 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.”