Upsy Daisy: A First Love College Romance

by Smartypants Romance

  Daisy Payton had a powerful father. (That poor man.)

  Daisy Payton was a rich girl. (She’s not, but it doesn’t matter if people think you are.)

  She had a dead brother, who got murdered in Vietnam. (What a useless war.)

  Daisy Payton had a mother who was there and then—poof!— was gone from breast cancer. (Poor Daisy.)

  Daisy Payton went from rich girl to poor girl. Poor little rich girl that everyone looked at with pity.

  And she hated it.

  She hated that everyone, everyone thought they knew her.

  She hated the assumption that if they hurt with her, or worse, for her, then it made the pain better, as if that made it the entire community’s pain; but it absolutely didn’t.

  She hated that she still read and reread the letters from her brother. Some of the pages had wrinkles from being crumpled in fits of anger because oh, she was so angry when he left. And then she felt guilty and stupid and horrified that she’d almost destroyed his letters when they were all that was left. Some were starting to show signs of age, yellow in some spots and the ink fading in others, and she hated that too because how could so much time have passed without him?

  And she hated that her mother had been helping her shop for homecoming dresses and was buried before Thanksgiving. It had spread so fast.

  No junior prom dress shopping. No junior prom.

  She barely remembered her senior year.

  She hated that her friends and family and perfect strangers spoke to her in hushed tones and assumed she was broken.

  She hated that they were right.

  Because the ache inside her was relentless. It constantly missed her brother. It constantly missed her mother. It would not abate. It could not be moved. She was thoroughly, horribly broken and all that brokenness was put up for examination by an entire town. That just couldn’t happen here.

  For the whole of her life, the whole of Green Valley had treated her differently, and she absolutely hated it.

  But she wasn’t in Green Valley now.

  And Daisy Payton had a plan.

  She would have a roommate, her father’s meddling be damned. No one would ever know she was the daughter of the owner of largest lumber mill in eastern Tennessee because she was going to do what everyone else did with their influential connections: hide them.

  And she was going to do what everyone else did with their hurts and disappointments: tuck them away and ignore them till they didn’t hurt anymore.

  She was going to be just like everyone else.

  But first she was going to get rid of Dolly.

  Chapter Two

  Daisy

  Dolly had to go but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get rid of her without a fight. Just as I was about to spout a wildly ridiculous lie like, “I think I’m having an asthma attack!” Or worse, fake a fainting spell during which Dolly would rush to find someone to help and I would hastily write a note explaining that I’d left to explore the campus alone and that Dolly should not wait for me, I was saved from having to resort to subterfuge.

  There was a soft rap-rap-rap at the door and I bounded from the bed.

  I opened the door to see two girls. One was tall, wearing a picked-out afro that was perfectly spherical, a blue and white infinity scarf over her bosom that left her midsection on full display, and a pair of hip-hugging dark denim bell-bottoms. She was rail thin with an oval face, strikingly high cheekbones, deep set brown eyes, and satiny skin that seemed to shimmer like it was freshly oiled even under the dim hall light. She was drop dead gorgeous. The other was shorter and more buxom. She was softly pretty with a perfect face of makeup—perfect half-moon, coal-black eyebrows and blue eyeshadow expertly applied—and wearing a bright orange shift dress with yellow trim that stopped just above her knees.

  “Hey! We’re all about to head to Spence to grab something to eat before orientation,” the tall one said. “I’m James Jones, by the way. Before you ask—yes, my parents wanted a boy. Yes! I am named after my papa. And, yes! I know the alliteration is amazing!”

  James rattled this all off at a sonic clip and paused ever so briefly to throw me a knowing grin. I liked this girl instantly. She didn’t just talk, she acted as she spoke, her hands fluttering, her face animated; it was fascinating to watch. There was something about her presence that just drew your eye to her. “This here is Odessa Mae Boyd!” she said, hands fluttering in the other girl’s direction.

  “Daisy Pay—erm, just Daisy,” I said, not wanting to potentially relive the mess of being recognized from earlier.

  She raised her eyebrows at me and exchanged a quick sideways glance with her friend. “Okay. Daisy, just Daisy. Odessa is from Charleston and I’m from Murfreesboro.”

  Oh great. Now they thought I was a nut. I would need to get my story straight about who I was and was not sooner rather than later.

  “I’m from Green Valley,” I volunteered, wanting to avoid embarrassing myself any more than I’d just done with the Daisy, just Daisy nonsense.

  The shorter one, Odessa, spoke up. “My friends call me Odie. You should too,” she said with a smile. Odie had the most distinctive voice; it was very soft, slightly smoky, and lingered the way barbecue smoke lingers even after you’d walked away from it.

  “Bye, Dolly!” I shouted.

  I threw my hand over my shoulder waving goodbye, then I hazarded a glance behind me. My sister looked not at all like herself; she looked . . . flummoxed.

  But it was not enough to deter me. I headed out with my two saviors, leaving her behind on my bed.

  On the way to the cafeteria we seemed to pick up another two or three girls every ten paces as word spread around the dorm. We made our way down the drive in front of Jubilee and by the time we reached the cafeteria there were probably thirty-five of us total; we’d even picked up some guys along the way.

  We were stopped short outside the doors to the building. A petite, elderly woman wearing a starched blue collared shirt with “Dining Services” written in yellow on it barred our entry.

  Her shirt was layered with a royal blue apron that read “Mrs. Dot” in script over her heart.

  Her mouth was snapped shut into a firm line, gray whiskers jutted from her chin, and the hairnet atop her head let no curls or strands escape.

  When she spoke it was not what I was expecting from a lady that frail looking—her voice thundered.

  “Nah lissen here! Make this the first and last time you show up to Spence Dining Hall without your dinin’ coupons. I know you ain’t got your coupon books because none of y’all showed up to sign them out.”

  I was bewildered. The faces of my new classmates looked equally puzzled, but it was Charlie from South Carolina, a boy who’d joined us on the walk from the dorms, that voiced our thoughts. “Excuse me, ma’am. No one told me to come here to pick up a book.”

  She stared at him like he was a bug in her soup before she responded slowly, speaking so it was perfectly clear she thought Charlie was a simpleton.

  “But you’ve got to eat, son, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied.

  “And how you think you were supposed to do that?”

  He opened his mouth again, but she shut it.

  “Let me tell you something.”

  She pointed her finger at him and then waved it toward the larger crowd. “Let me tell all of youse something. Your mamas, daddies, memaws, nanas, and aunties ain’t here no more to think for y’all. You need to open your mouths. You need to ask questions, and if the good Lord ain’t gave you enough sense to ask how youse supposed to eat, well . . .” It hung in the air for a second before she delivered her final barb. “Maybe you ain’t Fisk material.”

  Her words pressed on us for just a second longer before a voice sniggered behind us.

  I turned and I saw him: tall, lithe, and a face full of mirth.

  His smooth black waves glistened in the sun as he easily maneuvered through the crowd.

  He was acco
mpanied by another guy who was just as handsome; black horn-rimmed glasses, reddish-brown, wavy hair that was cut lower on the sides and transitioned into loose curls at the top. The cut made him look a bit like a boyish Malcolm Little. He was laughing even harder than the Trevor boy.

  I could feel the girls on all sides of me eyeing them, and I was quite suddenly enveloped in a cocoon of swooning.

  Life’s not fair.

  “Have mercy, he’s handsome,” James whispered beside me, reaching over and squeezing my hand. She averted her eyes from both guys, and when she looked up again she looked dead calm, totally unaffected.

  “Yes, he certainly is,” I said benignly.

  They moved like a pair of homonyms—the same kind of fine, sounding two different ways, and it was patently unfair to every female in observation distance.

  Trevor sauntered right up to the cafeteria lady, scooped her up in an embrace, and kissed her cheek.

  “Mrs. Dot! Mrs. Dot! I been thinking about your candied yams all summer long!”

  She broke into a big grin. “Trevor! I ain’t know you was coming back so soon or I’d have them ready for you.” Releasing Trevor, she reached over to give the other boy a light pat on the cheek and then a hug.

  “That’s all right, I can wait till next Thursday.” He glanced around as if he was just noticing the cadre of freshman standing in line trying to get in.

  Of course he’d just noticed us. He hadn’t just cut the line, he’d charmed it. Even the boys with us had parted like the Red Sea for the two of them.

  Our eyes briefly met, he winked at me and I looked away quickly, feeling unsettling flutters low in my tummy.

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “You getting the newbies straight?”

  She nodded her head and looked back at us with dagger eyes.

  The boy with the glasses picked that moment to speak up. “Let me guess. None of y’all have your coupon books?” he said mockingly as he reached into his breast pocket and theatrically extracted his and handed it over.

  “Why thank you, Jules,” Mrs. Dot said equally dramatic.

  “Jules,” James whispered at my side. “His name is Jules.”

  I gave her a sideways glance.

  Interesting. Her Mr. Handsome was not Trevor.

  I felt oddly relieved by that.

  “You two may enter,” Mrs. Dot said giving them another of her genuine smiles before adding, “Tell Jimmy to pull the pecan pie out the freezer. I popped one in this mornin’ and was gonna save it for the uppers next week but seein’ as how I know you both love it, y’all can eat it today.”

  “Mrs. Dot, you’re the sweetest,” Trevor crooned, giving her another kiss on the cheek and stepping toward the dining hall. As he passed, she stared at us—lips pressed together, arms crossed, and chin jutted.

  Sweet was not the adjective I would have used.

  Before he slipped through the doors, Trevor glanced over his shoulder and met my eyes again for a second before he called back to Mrs. Dot, smile still in his voice, “Be easy on them—they know not what they do.”

  We were treated to the grace, wit, and charm of Mrs. Dot for another fifteen minutes while she detailed the dos and don’ts of the dining hall.

  And when I say detailed, I mean detailed.

  “Y’all are welcome to get more juice but for Pete’s sake, don’t use the same cup to stick under the juice fountain! No one wants your spit rim touching on the lever or the juice spout. Same goes for water and soda.”

  The entire lecture could’ve been summed up in about thirty seconds with a succinct, “Use common sense, don’t be gross, don’t be rude, don’t steal.”

  I finally signed my coupon book out from a table in front of the cafeteria and by that time I was well and truly starving.

  As I entered the cafeteria doors, I noted Trevor was holding court on the far side of the cafeteria near the windows with Jules at his side.

  They really were an unfair vision.

  We moved through the line selecting from the dishes then descended on the tables all at once. The saying “there’s safety in numbers” had never felt truer and I was grateful for each of my freshman classmates in that moment.

  I end up seated between Odie and James with three guys sitting directly across from us: Maurice, Rufus, and Charlie.

  Someone had crammed the tables together and soon we became a rowdy, boisterous bunch.

  It felt more like a family reunion than the first meeting of a bunch of strangers. That instant acceptance was a big welcome contrast to the cafeteria of Green Valley High, where I’d mostly eaten quietly by myself.

  My high school had been integrated but that didn’t mean that the Black kids and white kids sat together at lunch.

  Oh, no.

  Quite the contrary; while we were content to sit together and learn together, we did not socialize together. With the exception of a handful of brave souls, the smattering of Black kids congregated at three tables and the white kids ate everywhere else.

  Neither of those groups ate with me.

  Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t picked on, and I wasn’t an outcast.

  No one was dumb or daring enough to do that directly. I just wasn’t included.

  I was to be examined, not included.

  I didn’t blame them. I didn’t.

  As far as my classmates were concerned, they may as well have been eating with their teacher.

  As it was, most of them would’ve been eating with their parent’s boss’s daughter. I eventually got why they’d wanted to avoid me.

  After all, would you have wanted to take the chance that you’d let it slip that when your dad called out sick last Thursday, he’d actually taken you on a surprise fishing trip to the very best water hole in the Great Smokey Mountains for your birthday? Or that your mother came home complaining about her job every day?

  No. You wouldn’t have risked it. No one wanted to take those kinds of chances.

  Besides, the few times I was invited to join of my peers, I’d had to decline anyway. My mother and father had fielded the requests as delicately as possible, declining sleepovers, birthday party invitations, and picnics on my behalf when I was younger.

  I’d been angry and confused. It felt like I was being punished for something I had little to do with.

  Dolly had been the one to add perspective and per usual, Dolly was right. She’d succinctly summed up my parents’ actions. “Daisy, trust me, it’s better if you don’t. You never can tell folk’s motivations for these kinds of things.”

  It wasn’t until I’d been a tad older that I realized what she’d meant. The thing about being the child of everyone’s boss is that everyone thought they could get something from you.

  Ev-vor-ree-bod-ay.

  Like that time I was discussing my grade with my English teacher and she causally mentioned that her husband was hoping to pick up extra hours at the Mill to be able to afford a new medicine their infant daughter needed for her asthma. Medicine that was “unfortunately, not covered by the insurance offered at Payton Mills.”

  Or who could forget the time in fifth grade when my class presented their annual “All I Want for Christmas” essays and every single person had included a line hinting that their Christmas morning joy was contingent upon their momma or daddy’s Christmas bonus being issued.

  Yeah, that one had been particularly painful.

  I took a sip of my juice, aware of the chatter around me but suddenly a little melancholy at the memories.

  At home—my siblings, my momma and daddy, and I—we were as regular as any other family.

  But in public?

  Well, there were a lot of spoken and unspoken rules to being a Payton in public.

  Never let them see you cry. Never let them see you sweat. Never let them see you unkempt.

  I realized even at that age that some of my actions weren’t about me at all. They were always tied to the larger mythical Payton family narrative.

  Therefore, inst
ead of crying as each classmate implied that my family was personally responsible for the success of failure of their Christmas, I’d sat there placidly doodling in my notebook, and after each one finished, I’d briefly looked up at the speaker and clapped.

  Because if I had cried, there’s a good chance that one or more persons would’ve assumed this meant that their parent was not getting their Christmas bonus. When in fact, ten-year-old me was simply overwhelmed by being implicitly tasked with a request I had no power to grant.

  I knew sitting in that classroom that when I got home to a safe space, I would cry. But by that age I’d already gotten really good with deferring my feelings for an indefinite length of time. It was a useful life skill.

  The great Christmas debacle ended up teaching me another useful life skill—handle it on your own.

  Because my parents? They were wonderful yet terrifying. Dolly words, not mine. Coincidentally enough those were the same words I now used to describe Dolly.

  It was best not to involve them in whatever was happening unless you were prepared for things to escalate. Quickly.

  I had gone home and I had wept mightily, asking my father—pleading with him really—to give people extra money to buy their children gifts at Christmas. I’d offered to forgo my own gifts if it meant it would help. It wasn’t that I was so good and charitable. I just didn’t want to have to face the disappointment of my classmates and the knowledge that it had been my fault if their parents didn’t get that money.

  My father had looked bewildered but had hugged me and kissed me on my forehead and rocked me until I calmed down and then he’d sat me in a seat and asked me what in the world was going on.

  So I’d told him.

  And then my father calmly replied that Payton Mills had never in all our years of existence failed to give employees a bonus at Christmas. It was built into the budget.

  That moment of relief and elation was pierced by my mother’s voice saying in a tone I hardly recognized, “I’m having Gloria LaCroix fired tomorrow and don’t you”—she’d pointed at my father—“‘kindness, Kendra’ me.”