How to Be Remy Cameron

by Julian Winters

  “The Lord has blessed the toilet paper industry with job security, because what that food does to your insides—”

  “It’s quality dining, Max!”

  “Silence your blasphemy, Sandra!” Dad says, barely holding in a snicker.

  I watch fondly from the doorway. This is a family tradition—everyone crammed into the kitchen while Dad cooks and Aunt Sandra complains. It’s never serious.

  “You’re lucky the sweet tea is fabulous,” Aunt Sandra says before taking a healthy gulp from her glass. A lonely lemon wedge drowns in an amber sea. Condensation rolls down the side of the glass like raindrops on a windowpane. I shudder: sweet tea, an abomination.

  Aunt Sandra turns to Mom. “Is this your contribution to today’s sacrilegious meal, Abby?”

  If there is one thing Aunt Sandra has mastered, it’s the art of sarcasm with all the southern venom of a drunk debutante. Mom’s from Savannah, which is deeper in Georgia than good old Athens, where Aunt Sandra lives. Mom’s accent is a lithe, sweet melody. Aunt Sandra’s accent is as thick as molasses. She’s as true-blue southern as that Golden Girls character Dad sometimes watches on late-night TV.

  “It sure is,” Mom replies, happily. “Sorry I burnt the quiche and over-seasoned the deviled eggs, Sandy.”

  “It’s Sandra, suga.”

  “Oh, I know,” Mom says with a perfectly timed Disney-princess wink.

  Mom’s slightly better than Aunt Sandra at sweet bitchiness, probably because Mom’s one of seven children. Verbal warfare was a means of survival for her.

  Aunt Sandra ignores Mom. “I certainly hope there’s pecan pie later.” She hasn’t met a pie she didn’t like. Or devoured in one sitting.

  “I could run to Publix for some,” I offer.

  “The devil is a lie!” Aunt Sandra exclaims, hand to her heaving chest. She’s so extra, and it’s not just the overuse of eye shadow and mascara. “No true southerner eats store-bought pecan pie, Remy.”

  I wisely choose not to inform Aunt Sandra that she did indeed eat store-bought pie last summer at Dad’s birthday party. I’m saving that bombshell for another Christmas when Aunt Sandra deems a poorly fitting reindeer sweater and a twenty-dollar bill are acceptable gifts.

  “And, Max, my word, look at my sweet nephew!” Aunt Sandra’s chunky gold bracelets clank as she waves a hand at me. “He’s barely a hundred pounds sopped in gravy. Heavenly Father! He doesn’t need French toast for dinner; he needs a healthy plate of cornbread and country-fried steak and collard greens.”

  Dad chuckles. “Those are things you want—”

  “I’m serious. He’s gorgeous, but give him a biscuit.”

  “I’m fine, Aunt Sandra,” I say through my teeth.

  “Yes, you are,” Aunt Sandra confirms, smiling too hard. “You’re perfect. I’m just teasing.”

  I rub anxiously at my curls; heat prickles my neck. I hate this topic. Message received: I’m not built like Brook or toned like Jayden. But I can’t change that. I’ve tried. It’s this epically loud reminder that my anatomy isn’t like my parents’.

  I know nothing about my birth parents’ genealogy. Maybe my father was weedy. Maybe my mother was tall with a round jaw. Maybe there are three generations of Remy Cameron lookalikes all over Georgia; I’ll never know.

  My birth mother is dead, a too-true fact I learned from my parents when I was in kindergarten thanks to douchebag-in-training David Waller yelling that my carefully crayon-drawn family portrait was “Wrong! You can’t be brown and your parents are peach!” in the middle of class. But he was incorrect. I’d used apricot for my parents and I was damn proud of it. Any self-respecting five-year-old southerner knows peach is for fruit, not skin tones.

  David Waller couldn’t even color in the lines, so his authority on the matter was nil. Also, Katie colored her parents purple, and that was acceptable.

  But I didn’t understand. My parents were mine. I was theirs. Of course, we could be different colors and still belong to each other. Right?

  My teacher, Mr. Allen, couldn’t answer that question. He beamed at me before announcing it was time for recess. Later, he sent me home with a note decorated in gold stars for my parents—REMY IS CURIOUS ABOUT HIS FAMILY TREE.

  That’s how I found out. Over a dinner of chicken nuggets, apple slices, and reality, my dad told me everything while my mom sat quietly, wringing her napkin and blinking way too much.

  I was adopted. My birth mother was dead. My birth father? Who knows?

  It’s always been me, Remy, the one and only.

  There were too many days and nights when I wanted to know more, but I never asked. I was scared. What if all my questions made my parents want me less? What if those answers made me angry? Resentful? Those feelings—the blind inquisitiveness about my heritage—faded eventually. Everything does when you’re five-years-old.

  I didn’t know those other parents. I’m a Cameron. This is my family. But, right now, that familiar crippling sensation chases the sweat down my spine. I’m uncomfortable. I need out.

  On my way to the backdoor, I stop by the breakfast table, where Willow sits on her knees in a chair. I peek over her shoulder. She’s using erasable markers to draw on Mom’s old save-the-date postcards. A superhero, I think? It’s part-dog, part-bird with a cape. Willow’s imagination is out there.

  “Good job, Twinkle Toes.” I peck her temple.

  Clover chases me out the backdoor.

  The world is starting over. That’s how it looks from my current view. Dad and Uncle Dawson built this wooden patio four years ago in a summer of sweat and shouting and shared beers with two-too-many close-calls at the emergency room. The patio is slightly raised, enough for my feet to dangle off the edge, but barely stretches into our backyard. A perfect place for barbeques and sitting.

  Dad calls it his Home Depot victory. It’s a cool place to soak up sun in the spring, so I’m willing to call it whatever Dad wants.

  Clover chases an old, drool-soaked tennis ball I toss for her. Tail wagging ecstatically, she brings it back. We love this game, though it never lasts long. But it’s a moment of innocence—a boy and his dog, a bond not explained by words. I’m in love with how, sometimes, we don’t need words for relationships to exist, just a look, a trust, an action.

  Clover quits to lay out in the sun. I can’t blame her. I recline on my hands to look at the sky. I love how the sky can look like the sea—blue and endless and hopeful—and how water can look like the sky—quiet and gentle and beautiful. My mind is nothing like either of those things. It’s in a tsunami brought on by three earthquakes: the things Aunt Sandra said and Mrs. Scott’s expectations and the Essay of Doom.

  Who is Remy Cameron? Who, who, who?

  How the hell am I supposed to know if I don’t know a damn thing about where I come from? About the people who created me? If I knew, would I be someone different? Would I be more like Father X rather than Dad?

  “Is this hiding spot from the boring adults exclusive to cool teens or is anyone allowed?”

  I look up. There he is standing over me, Uncle Dawson: perfectly straight, pale-blonde hair and acorn-brown eyes squished by his crooked smile. Everything about him is the opposite of Aunt Sandra and Dad; he has sharp features and is tall but thin, a marathon runner’s build.

  I grin as though the sun lights me from the inside out. “Uncle D!”

  “Remy!”

  He settles next to me; his longer legs reach into the grass. “C’mere Clover!” Uncle D is one of the few people Clover eagerly waddles to; her head flops into his lap. Uncle D is also someone who doesn’t need words. He likes quiet. I do too, in doses.

  The afternoon sun flicks gold bars across the yard’s yellowing-green grass and against the cedarwood fence. Giant octagons of light brush over the swing set I helped Dad put together on Willow’s fourth birthday. A funnel of leaves shak
es free from the sugar maple’s limbs like a tornado made of fire.

  We breathe. We sit in quiet. Uncle D, Clover, and I exist.

  “How’s school going?”

  “Come on, Uncle D.” I nudge our shoulders together. “We don’t talk about boring crap like that.”

  “You’re right. We don’t.”

  As far as cool points go, Uncle D has earned them all. He skips the usual adult-to-teen topics—school and money and responsibility—to talk about the latest comic-book movie or my new music finds. He was the first adult to give me The Talk, the first adult to make sure I understood what it meant to be safe, to know where to find condoms, to know about the importance of consent.

  “Let’s talk about boys.”

  “They suck,” I moan.

  Uncle D lifts an eyebrow. I shudder. That’s right—The Talk also came with an e-mail, an online tutorial about using protection during oral attached.

  “I mean, they’re the worst.”

  “Some days.”

  “Some days,” I agree, forcibly ejecting any thoughts of Ian. He’s not an option. Ian is just a guy I’m not getting attached to.

  “We’re not rekindling things with Dimi, then?”

  There’s that “we” thing adults love to use again. No offense to Uncle D, but when Dimi took my heart into his hands like paper—light, easy to shape, easier to rip apart and discard—there was no we to stop the half-hour of shaking under a lukewarm shower. We didn’t help me get out of bed every morning when all I wanted to do was sleep away the pain. We didn’t wipe away all those tears, day after day. There was only me.

  “Nope,” I say. I can feel him studying me. “He’s moved on.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Uncle D!” I say, partly shocked, but also truly laughing.

  “He is.”

  I don’t argue. I used to stand up for Dimi after he broke up with me, because the memories of his affection and attention clouded everything else, because I blamed myself for the breakup. It’s funny how having your heartbroken is always your own fault at first.

  I redirect our conversation: “How are things with Uncle Gabe?”

  Uncle D’s reaction is instant. Brown eyes light up like sunlight pouring through a glass of stout. An upward curve pulls at his mouth. The push of his cheeks forms deep crinkles by his eyes. It’s the kind of contagious thing that makes my stupid heart roar.

  “Good. Things are really good.”

  Our shoulders bump again. I watch the way Uncle D rubs his hands together. His chin is lowered, his mouth twitches. He’s holding something in, something big, something important like—

  “Oh my god, Uncle D!”

  He flinches.

  “Are you gonna propo—”

  A wild look passes over his face. “Christ almighty, don’t let your Aunt Sandra hear you take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  We grin at each other. Uncle D leans forward, legs pulled to his chest, elbows on his knees. He’s an awkward grasshopper—like me, but not.

  “It’s about time, isn’t it? Eight years seems long enough, right?”

  “Eight months is a long time for me, Uncle D.”

  In Uncle D’s eyes, I can see lightning and shadows; love and fear. A million things I thought I knew from being with Dimi, but I don’t. Not like Uncle D.

  “You’re really going to pop the question?” I ask.

  “I—” He cuts himself off as if the words are there, but he’s scared to set them free too soon. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? That’s cool.”

  “You think so?”

  “Uncle Gabe is gonna cry.”

  “I might too.”

  We exhale together, happy and content. I want to stay here forever.

  I was too young to understand the impact of Uncle D’s coming out. He was in his mid-twenties; I was transitioning from crayons to markers. I didn’t know the doors he was opening or the wars he fought inside himself. He’s not like my dad or Aunt Sandra. Uncle D lives in the quiet spaces rather than in the bright and loud center like his siblings. All my life, it’s as though Uncle D was in a battle with who he was and who he wasn’t.

  Then Uncle Gabriel came around. And Uncle D became this Technicolor version of himself. It was like that old movie, the Wizard of Oz, where everything suddenly transitions from black-and-white to vibrant and captivating color. Uncle Gabriel is amazing. He’s always the first to make a joke, he was always the one to let me climb on his back for a stroll through the park. Because of them, gay wasn’t a word I had to incorporate into my vocabulary to understand someone who was different. It just existed, free and normal. I wonder if, for me, being queer will ever mean being free, being anything other than different.

  “Hey,” whispers Uncle D, nudging my knee, “Another guy will come around.”

  “No, Uncle D, that’s not the plan.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No other boys. No relationships.”

  Uncle D rolls his eyes.

  “I’m seventeen, and it feels like that’s all I am. Boys. Crushes. Dimi.” I glare at the grass as the wind bends it. “That’s not who I want to be.” And then, because my mouth is on a roll and my nerves are free-falling, I say, “I don’t know who I am. There’s this essay for AP Lit where I’m supposed to figure all this shit out, but—”

  Uncle D waits, patient and quiet.

  “I have no effing clue.” I press my bare feet into the grass, just to feel the prickle against my skin. To absorb the warmth, push back the cold clenching my bones.

  Uncle D’s hand squeezes my shoulder, then he says, “None of this is easy, Remy.”

  “Is it ever?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How do I know who I am if I don’t know who I was?” I don’t know if that question is for Uncle D or myself, but it’s out in the open, sitting between us like Clover.

  “Remy.” Uncle D’s voice is careful, protective. This is Uncle D, who sat outside my middle school for hours when he heard a few students were giving me hell for being different, for being the black kid with blue eyes that liked to wear his pink “Girls Are Awesome” T-shirt once a week.

  “One essay doesn’t define you,” he finally says. “It doesn’t.”

  But what does? I want to ask. Those three words take up so much space in my chest, I don’t know how to shove them out. I lower my head.

  Uncle D’s hand rests on the back of my neck; his thumb rests behind my left ear. It’s so familiar. When I came out to him, for the longest time, we sat in silence, and he let me cry. He let me breathe. Then Uncle D grabbed a book from my desk and read to me. I don’t remember what the book was about or who wrote it. I only remember Uncle D’s thick accent wrapping around the words. He held me the way Grandpa did. I remember his melodic voice and my shaky breaths.

  “Talk to your dad, Remy,” he whispers now. “He can—just talk to him.” His voice trails off as if to guard a secret, like an answer to my question that he can’t give.

  The back door swings open, and there’s Dad, grinning. “It’s game time, boys!”

  Uncle D turns to look at my dad. I do too. He’s proudly wearing a red sweatshirt with a giant “G” stamped in the middle: University of Georgia, Dad’s alma mater. He’s one of those diehard UGA fans; he never misses a game of any kind. I swear Dad bleeds black and Bulldog red. It took him a while to accept that I wanted to attend Emory instead of UGA. I think he was hoping I’d carry on the legacy of Cameron men there. But I never planned to. UGA was nowhere on my radar.

  I catch Dad’s eyes, his expression. There’s a little, but noticeable, twitch to his mouth, something that releases softness like a stray pencil mark on a clean sheet of paper. I can’t quite put a finger on it until Dad’s eyes dance between me and Uncle D.

  Dad and I have always been close, same tastes
in food, same sense of humor. But my relationship with Uncle D is different. Dad loves me, but Uncle D gets me. It’s hard to explain. Harder to observe my dad watching us with this small ripple in his kind features, this barely noticeable jolt of jealousy. I don’t think Dad knows it’s there, not consciously. I wonder if Uncle D sees it too. Dad blinks a few times, then exhales. And it’s gone.

  “Okay, okay.” Uncle D stands, dusting off his jeans. “Let the suffering begin.”

  Dad blanches, then smirks. “Come on D, say it.”

  “I’m not saying it.”

  “Bro, you have to!”

  Sighing, Uncle D mumbles, “Gooooo Dawgs.”

  “There you go. Also, the French toast is done.”

  Uncle D’s smile is renewed. “You should’ve led with that, Max!” They hook their arms around each other. Uncle D is taller, but Dad’s bulkier. Their voices echo in the kitchen as they step inside.

  I wait a few seconds. I’m not anxious to watch another football game or listen to Aunt Sandra’s choir-worthy rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My phone chirps. It’s probably Rio or Lucy. Or it could be Ian messaging me via Facebook.

  Nope. I’m determined not to get my hopes up—or any part of my body—about Ian Park.

  I punch in my passcode and find a Facebook notification. It’s a message from Free Williams. I almost forgot I accepted her friend request. And I still have no clue who she is. We have zero mutual friends; no common interests, and no geographical connection besides Atlanta.

  But there’s her message: an old, discolored Polaroid photo of a woman cradling an infant. She has deep-brown skin, an afro, a round jaw. She’s looking down. In her arms, is a baby with fawn complexion and Dopey ears.

  Tiny curls.

  Very blue eyes.

  Underneath is another message: “Do you remember her?”

  13

  “That’s enough Tennessee Williams for the day,” Ms. Amos announces.

  A choir of relieved sighs breaks out around the classroom. Paperbacks shut; students shuffle at their desks. I remain slumped, ready to brain myself on my desk. It’s not that Tennessee Williams isn’t interesting; I’m simply not interested.