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He smiled back at her, but it was the smile she didn’t like, and her face fell. He crossed his arms and shifted from one foot to the other.
He wasn’t fine.
Roman was so far from fine, he doubted he could find it on a map.
CHAPTER FIVE
They camped that night at a park near Richmond.
State campgrounds all looked the same: a looping gravel drive through a patch of forest, a series of sites like lollipops branching off, each with its picnic table, its electrical hookup, its fire ring and numbered post.
Roman pulled into the parking spot feeling leaden and doomed.
They unloaded the back of the truck. Ashley had bought all kinds of supplies at a store in Raleigh while Roman was picking out a phone. She also had the curtains from Prachi, as well as a variety of other things her friend had found in the basement.
“You need me to do anything?” he asked.
“Nah. You just sit there and look pretty. There’s not really room for two people in the trailer right now.”
He got his new phone set up, but it had no reception. He sat on a log and drew patterns in the sand beneath the leaf litter with a stick while Ashley popped into the Airstream, came back out carrying a thin mattress, and draped it over the picnic table. She sang along to a Spanish love song on her portable radio while she beat the dust out of the mattress with a broom handle.
He tried to push back against the pressure building inside him by playing tic-tac-toe against himself, best two out of three. Best five out of seven. The X always won. He tried various opening moves, hoping to find a way to ensure the demise of X, but nothing worked.
It was impossible to throw a game against yourself. You always won.
You always lost, too.
Ashley appeared behind the wraparound windows of the Airstream. She picked off the electrical tape that held the tinfoil in place, squirted Windex on the pane, wiped it off with a soft rag. She’d exchanged her T-shirt for a hot pink bikini top. When she made vigorous circles with the rag, her breasts bounced. Her skin gleamed.
Her belly button was an outie.
Too much pressure.
Roman stood. He walked around the trailer, stuck his head in the door, and watched her ass bunch, her back muscles tense as she twisted to look at him.
“I’m going for a walk in the woods.”
“When it’s the woods, you call it a hike.”
“I don’t hike.”
And it was true, he didn’t. He couldn’t. It wasn’t possible to hike in a dress shirt, suit pants, tie, and loafers. His clothes insisted on dignity, but there was no dignity in what he was doing to himself and no way for him to stop doing it.
A mile up the trail, he gave in to the relentless press of memory.
He’d joined the Boy Scouts to get Patrick’s attention. His foster father had been an Eagle Scout, and Roman had found all his scouting things in the attic. He used to leaf through the old handbooks and study the artifacts of Patrick’s years of scouting as though he’d unearthed them with a toothbrush and had to investigate them gently, to puzzle out their mysteries so he could discover whatever clues were hidden in this joined-together fork-knife-and-spoon set. These two shallow plates that
sealed into a clamshell and could be opened with the twist of a wing nut.
Now that it no longer mattered, he could see how wrong he’d been to think Patrick’s heart—always locked down to Roman—could be accessed and transformed, if only Roman located the right angle, the right pressure to loosen the wing nut.
But it had seemed possible then.
Roman wore his uniform to school on meeting days, never neglecting the neckwear or committing the sin of tucking his uniform shirt into jeans, as the other boys did. He took Patrick’s Swiss Army knife and carried it in his pocket, running his fingers over the smooth red plastic, the Swiss Army insignia, the ridges of blades and scissors and can opener. A classmate had noticed his fingers moving and accused him of touching himself.
After that, he kept the knife in the outer pocket of his backpack, until someone stole it.
Patrick bought him another one. He signed off on the work Roman did toward his badges, made sure his uniform got laundered in time for meetings, asked questions at the dinner table about Roman’s progress. Encouraging signs. Patrick was taking an interest.
