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Roger is three.
He wakes up sometimes to find green eyes staring at him, the exact color of his own. Right after waking up and still groggy, he wonders if it is, in fact, himself looking down at himself. Then he shakes his head and realizes that it's Mom, checking to see if he's sleeping. Silly of her to do so, Roger thinks to himself, when her very presence wakes him up. It's not Mom's fault, though, he tells himself, because probably anyone else would wake him up by standing over him and breathing loudly and just interfering with his dreams.
When Roger dreams, he imagines himself in a big house, with big, fluffy beds and steady furniture and a Dad with a tie made of pretty colors and soft material. When he wakes up, he is in the same trailer that has always been his home, just him and Mom with nowhere to look but at the life ahead of him. Mom says this sometimes, that there's nowhere to look but up, and Roger stares at his feet and tells her that he has no idea what she is talking about. That's when Mom flushes and goes back to her little room and talks to people on the phone. When she does that, Roger curls back up in his ratty bed and pretends he's back in his dreams.
Once, he asks Mom if dreaming for something can make it happen – just so Roger can know what the stakes are like. When he asks, a flicker of something flashes across Mom's face, so fast that Roger misses it, before she calmly answers that anyone can do anything, anyone can be successful and have a happy life and find perfect love, if only they want it enough. Just as Roger prepares to ask another question, Mom tells him to go back to dreaming of whatever future he wants, because she's going back to sleep. Instead of dreaming, Roger wonders why he and his mother's hope for a big house hasn't made it happen already. Or maybe, he thinks, he just isn't trying hard enough.
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Roger is four.
Four means that he's a big boy, right? That's what Mom says at three-thirty in the morning as she and Roger strip the sheets off Roger's bed. Roger doesn't know. Every child, he knows, likes to say that he or she is a big kid, but being big scares Roger. He doesn't want to be a grown-up like Mom without anyone to play with or talk to. At four, Roger isn't such a big fan of playing or talking, but he's sure that grown-ups like Mom are. He wonders what he could do that would make people like him better, and the answer is obvious.
Mission "Dry-Night," as Mom calls it, should by all means be a success. Roger has strong will, determination, and not enough water during the day to even really need the nighttime bathroom break. The only reason he ordinarily finds himself in a wet bed is because his dreams are so fiercely intense that he cannot wake up from them in the middle of the night for something as silly as peeing. (The worst part about this is that as soon as whatever dream he is having ends, Roger's eyes flutter open and he realizes that he is just finishing up the job he should've been doing in the bathroom.) So with his eyes on the prize, Roger goes to bed one night immediately after using the bathroom, having had very little fluids during the day, and expects to wake up dry – for once.
At first, he cannot fall asleep. His eyes gaze into the ceiling, cracked and flawed and interesting. Then, after a little while, Roger's eyes droop shut, eliminating the last source of color from the dark room, and he falls asleep.
Six hours later, a delighted mother creeps into the room to see how her son is faring, and cannot keep herself from revealing a soft smile. Roger, so determined not to wet the bed again, has his legs squeezed over one another tightly, trying to keep himself from letting go. Feeling utter compassion for her child, Mom shakes Roger awake and escorts him to the bathroom.
Never again does a drop of urine touch Roger's bedsheets.
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Roger is five.
Shoved into a tiny room with a bunch of little brats who pick their noses – a habit of which Roger insists he has relieved himself long ago – is not Roger's ideal way to spend a day. He always suspected that Mom's threats to send him to some dreaded place called school were, in fact, all talk, but it seems that he was wrong. In fact, according to the lady with gray hair and long earrings – who obviously has not yet learned of children's desire to pull shiny things attached to people's heads – it is unlikely that Roger will escape this torture for quite some time. She tells him that he has thirteen years left, and Roger, who cannot yet count up to thirteen, simply knows that if he is five years old, he probably has quite a while left.
In the cramped classroom, Roger has little to do but sit and sulk. A bright-eyed boy with glasses asks Roger if he would like to play with him, but Roger merely growls menacingly and manages to scare the other boy into leaving – exactly his intention. When the boy leaves, however, he takes the toy trucks with him, and Roger had wanted to play with those. It isn't worth socializing to get them back, though, so he continues his sulking.
Cookies are distributed. Roger, whose mother has never quite managed to afford cookies, shies away with the air of a five-year-old placed in front of spinach. Then again, Roger has no prior knowledge to assure him that cookies aren't spinach, so when the mean teacher approaches him and offers one to him, Roger makes his "icky" face and turns away. It isn't long, however, before the cookie is snatched away by a tiny girl in an equally small skirt. Roger looks at her and makes brief eye contact with her before turning the "icky" face on her as well.
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Roger is six.
Perhaps prematurely, he develops a defiant streak. When, after a bad day, Mom goes to stroke Roger's hair and sing him a lullaby, angry little Roger rolls over in bed and glares at the pillow. He refuses to speak when he is angry, and even when he wants to talk, he keeps it to himself or occasionally scrawls something illegibly in his notebook. His messy handwriting is something that earns him many a berating in school, where he is supposed to be learning how to write the letters. Roger is long past the stage of learning letters – at six, he is already experiment with rhymes. I hate you, Mom, I hate you, Dad. / You make me really, really mad.
Mom maybe looks at Roger's rhymes sometimes, when he isn't careful and leaves his notebook on the kitchen table. He can tell she doesn't like them, because sometimes pages are torn out and reappear beneath the notebook days later, looking innocently up at Roger as though protesting, I was here all along. When these things happen, Roger crumples up the papers and reopens them, looking at the smudged graphite and wondering if that's all his words boil down to.
One day just after Roger's half-birthday, he is taken by Mom to a big, shiny building that took forever to drive to. He looks up just outside of it and wrinkles his nose, hating it already for its shininess and the fake smiles of people looking out windows. When he is escorted inside and up a flight of stairs by Mom and a lady with yellow hair, Roger frowns. He can tell this will not be a fun day.
When he is seated in a chair too tall for him, his legs kicking back and forth, Roger is made to answer endless questions, very easy ones like what his name is and whether he is a boy or a girl and things like that. After just about a million forevers of this, Roger crosses his arms over his chest and refuses to speak anymore. "Anger management," or something like it, is what he hears from the strange woman as he jumps down from his chair and storms out. He stomps down the stairs and finally comes to a stop just outside the building, where he sits under the awning and makes up rhymes about why he doesn't like stupid buildings in the city, even if sometimes they're pretty. The ones that aren't as sparkly hold more appeal to him, but that is something he doesn't realize until years later, when, on a budget, he seeks somewhere to live.
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Roger is seven.
Second grade is overrated, so sometimes he decides not to go. It is a perfectly simple decision and, unable to believe that nobody has thought of it before, Roger finds himself not going more than he does go. He lurks behind his school, curled up in a winter coat Mom got cheap – or free – at someone's yard sale. (In Roger's neighborhood, a yard sale is the equivalent of throwing things outside, in front of the trailer. Although it relies on the honor system – people placing the appropriate sum of money where the items initially were – it works strangely well. The one exception is when it comes to the Davis family. When it comes to Roger, Mom is too caught up in buying everything the boy needs to actually think about paying for it.)
Hiding, or lurking, or whatever it is Roger does behind the school, he gazes past the schoolyard and watches high-schoolers doing much the same thing he is doing, but with odd rolls of paper clasped between their lips. Roger recognizes these things, sees them scattered around the trailer all the time, but isn't entirely sure what they are. Mom says not to worry about it and never to use them, but Roger just shuffles away to work on his rhymes. He isn't the best conversationalist – even Roger himself will admit that.
This behind-the-school rebellion is brief. After what feels like "ten forevers," still Roger's favorite measurement of time – a "forever" having no set value, but changing in "real-time" length depending on whether or not he is enjoying himself – he is sent home from school one day with an envelope in his sweaty palms. Roger is not yet conditioned to read Mom's mail, and so does not even consider slitting the envelope to read his teacher's message. When he is thrown over Mom's lap as she tells him to never skip class, Roger wonders if perhaps he should have torn it to shreds. What's done is done, however, and Roger resolves to conceal future problems the way he didn't quite manage to hide this one.
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Roger is eight.
One day he asks Mom why he doesn't have a dad. Roger considers this a valid question; everyone he knows from school has a father, and as far as Roger knows, he hasn't done anything to make himself not deserve one. Mom, inhaling deeply on the cigarette in her mouth, calmly tells Roger that his lack of a father can be accredited to the fact that "a certain Roy Davis is an asshole and doesn't deserve to fucking live." She then adds, "Roger, if you ever have kids, don't just fucking leave them – be a dad, okay?"
Roger, who cannot imagine having kids if it would put him in his mother's situation, tells his mother flatly that he would never want them. Mom looks at him in confusion for a moment before turning away to do other things, and Roger sits in silence. What does he want, in terms of a family? Well, he's always wanted a brother. From what he knows, however, he deduces that brothers probably aren't things that a boy can acquire later in life, and Mom agrees – apparantly, one needs a dad in order to have kids. That sucks, according to Roger.
Maybe friends can be a family. Maybe Roger could grow up to live with friends instead. He needs friends, though, and doesn't know how to get them without being social. And Roger hates being social. Maybe he can get friends without being nice. Or maybe friends just come along when you're a grown-up, and you don't need to do any work. Roger decides that's the answer he likes best, so he happily curls up in his blankets and goes to sleep. Problem solved. Or rather, problem eliminated the moment Roger manages to find a decent way to hide it.
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Roger is nine.
Following his mother's usual policy of "don't pay for anything unless there's a price sticker on it," Roger casually snatches a bicycle from just outside the school. He figures it's the fault of the bike's owner for not locking it, and probably also the fault of the school for not having some kind of rule about not accessing the wall that serves as everyone's bicycle rack unless you actually have a bike there. So it's not Roger's fault he takes it; no, it is by all means the fault of the shrimpy blond kid who watches him in horror as Roger pedals away.
Roger recognizes the kid from his class – he thinks his name is Mark, or Mike, or something. He's a fairly decent writer, though not as good as Roger, and has managed to procure a spot on the list of the top three students in the class, along with Roger and some Jewish girl with stringy brown hair and a star necklace. Roger isn't so good at learning names, but he knows that Mark or Mike or whatever his name is probably doesn't need the bike, since his family's rich – proof? Mark's oft-replaced glasses whenever they break in class, which is a frequent occurrence – whereas Roger would really appreciate having something to speed up the hour-long walk home from school. Buses aren't too fond of taking kids to trailer parks, so Roger has to walk. And now, he has the bike.
When he gets it home, the last thing Roger expects is to be chided by his mother. By some bizarre twist of fate, however, just as Roger carefully leans the bike against the half-wall separating the living room area from the kitchen, Mom pokes her head out and asks him exactly where the fuck he got the bike. Roger explains that he took it from the school, and Mom, with a deep sigh, tells Roger that if he's going to be a delinquent, he'd better not get caught, because she "sure as hell can't afford bail." Roger mumbles something in acquiescence before slipping into his room and, as per usual, working on his rhymes.
As a matter of fact, he suspects that no matter what is going on in his life – be it a stolen bicycle, newly in his possession (just as long as he doesn't get it noticed at school), or troubles at school, or just about anything – rhymes are always where Roger will return. And strangely enough, the mini-prophecy of a nine-year-old turns out to be absolutely right.
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Roger is ten.
For a ten-year-old, he knows a surprising amount about the world. For example, just about a week after his birthday, Roger comprehends at last what he couldn't quite understand at three: the fact that things are never going to be the perfect fairy-tale he wanted them to be, and any complaints about this would be officially classified as whining. He does not share this observation with Mom, because he's still praying that it isn't true, but just in case it is, he takes all of his questions about why this and why that into his notebook, rhyming them and making them sound pretty.
It's called songwriting, Mom tells Roger – carrying one's emotions into a notebook, and then singing them, is called songwriting. Of course, the ten-year-old has heard music before, but never quite made the connection between his music and just music. When he realizes that what he does is the same as what people on the radio do, he tells Mom solemnly that he doesn't want to write stupid songs like they do, he wants to be different and unique and remarkable. Mom kisses Roger's forehead and tells him not to worry – he will be. And yet, his worries continue to plague him.
Every young artist, whether or not he is aware of his status as an artist yet, will at some point experience this fear. At some point, every creator will wonder: Am I the real thing? Or just a cheap imitation? When these thoughts haunt Roger, his eyes lose their sparkle and his rhymes deteriorate. He sometimes finds himself well on his way to a masterpiece when suddenly he is reminded of his fear, and he will resort back to music with poor quality. It terrifies him beyond belief, and the only cure for it is reminding himself that, well, he's never heard a ten-year-old on the radio before. So obviously he has something that other people don't.
Then again, he's never heard himself on the radio, either.
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Roger is eleven.
When Roger tears three scrawled-upon pages out of his notebook and waves them in the air frantically, he is not pleased. He is overjoyed. "Mom! Mom!" he howls, racing into his mother's bedroom to find her lying on her back, leaning up occasionally to take sips of the glass bottle on her nightstand. "Mom, I wrote a song!" he exclaims. His mother, not in the least bit startled, takes her time sitting up. When in a fully upright position, Mom gives Roger an expectant look, wordlessly telling him to go on, then.
Roger does not hesitate. He opens his mouth and, as Mom predicted when his infantine cries were tolerable and almost crooning, out comes a beautiful sound. The boy is clearly destined to sing, and to anyone listening to Roger's beautiful singing, it would be hard at this point to make out any actual lyrics. A few stand out, however: "Meeting your eyes, I can promise you / No harm will ever make it through / To scratch against and touch your soul / I'll protect you from the pain and cold." When he finally closes his mouth and lets his too-long hair fall in his face, waiting for a response, he scrunches up his nose. "Did you like it?"
Mom doesn't answer at first. She takes a long sip from her glass bottle and lets Roger have one as well before at last she asks him, "Roger, was that for me?"
Roger nods hesitantly and lets his mother's praise wash over him. Rhyming, he decides, can be frustrating – but obviously immensely rewarding. As soon as Mom tells Roger to go make history with his music, Roger scampers back into his room, props his notebook on his lap, and scratches out a title of his next song. When he looks back on this moment years later, Roger does not remember the title of the song. All he knows is that it had something to do with love – because doesn't everything, after all?
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Roger is twelve.
Everything is about love. Because sure enough, twelve-year-old Roger finds himself in love with a pretty girl, probably about sixteen, whose wild hair and celery-colored eyes can often be found beside a boy just Roger's age. He finds that hopelessly unfair. Boys his age always just know that relationships with older girls can never happen, and yet this nerdy kid is always right next to this gorgeous teenager, sometimes even getting picked up from school by her and hopping gleefully into her car. Roger longs to tag along, but knows that there's nothing April Ericcson would see in him anyway, just a twelve-year-old boy who can sort of write songs and lives in a trailer park.
As sorrowful as it is to say, Roger is absolutely correct. Sometimes, inspired by hope, he sidles up to the girl, his hair greased down with water from the bathroom as he tries to imitate "sexy." Wearing a pretend-smile that Roger usually tries to avoid, he greets April. At the very least, he thinks, she'll call him cute. But he does not even manage to achieve even that, because the girl has a deep loathing for people who wear masks – or people whose masks are not securely fastened. April wrinkles her nose and walks off, back to the little kid whose bike Roger stole years ago. With some pleasure at having done that, Roger tells himself that the boy deserved it – although now, in the absence of his bicycle, Mark has the great honor of riding in April's car.
Jealous, Roger writes a little song about why he loathes Mark so much. He performs it outside the school one day after dismissal, watched by a horrified Mark and disgusted April. When he concludes, April storms forward and slaps Roger's cheek. She then gets into her car and speeds away "into the sunset," with an irritated Mark making immature faces at Roger as the car passes by. Roger, feeling hopelessly alone, touches his cheek and realizes two things. One: The song sucked. If April had thought the song was well-written and mean, she probably still would have complimented it. Two: He really, really likes this girl.
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Roger is thirteen.
Because Roger watches people, he knows the exact date on which April and Mark disappear.
He didn't see the car pull away, didn't hear the screaming of the Ericcsons and the Cohens, and didn't know about it until a day later. But all the same, he knows when it happened, because Mark wasn't in school that day and the next day, his name wasn't even called on the attendance list. Deeply envious and positive, in his thirteen-year-old mind, that they must have left to get married in some weird state that allows that kind of marriage, Roger sulks behind the school that day. Why does Mark get April when he – Roger – wants to be with her so badly? It isn't fair.
He turns his attention to the question of why, which is the same reason anyone leaves Scarsdale: to have freedom and be one's own person. Of course, none of that ever happens in Scarsdale – in fact, to be exactly geographically correct, Roger doesn't even live in Scarsdale. He lives just past the line separating his home city from the rest of the world, although letters sent to the Davises fo Scarsdale will, in fact, reach him and his mother.
Where did they go? Roger might wonder. Well, there's only one place anyone ever goes after leaving Scarsdale, isn't there? To the city, of course.
It isn't fair. It isn't fair that Manhattan was Roger's dream long before it was Mark and April's reality.
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Roger is fourteen.
He knows he needs money, if he is ever to leave the fake smiles of Scarsdale (or just outside of Scarsdale, as applies to Roger) and get to New York. Now, he writes his songs with a fiery passion, using all the emotions he can muster, fearing that if his songs aren't real enough, they won't have any meaning. Again, he is struck by the terrifying fear of being unoriginal, uncreative, or generic. In a flat-out refusal to sing something written by someone else, he twists away from convention during the community talent show and, instead, and sings one of his own songs, "Nowhere's Land," a song about Scarsdale and desperate desire to break free. His standing? Third place. His prize? A measley twenty-five dollars.
Mom apparantly expects to be given Roger's prize money, but with his scorching defiance, Roger refuses, on the grounds that he won it by singing and all Mom ever won was a "fucking one-night stand with a bastard who wouldn't even stick around to tell you his name." For a moment, she looks prepared to slap Roger, but instead she sighs deeply and tells him that he may as well do the same as his father, financially abandoning her until she has naught to her name.
Feeling slightly ashamed, but not enough so to give Mom the money, Roger leans over and kisses her. "Mom," he promises, "when I hit it big, I swear I'll make sure you have a mansion."
The funny thing is that, while Mom does not expect Roger to so much as remember his promise come morning, when he leaves for New York later that same month, he places a crisp ten-dollar bill on the counter for Mom to keep. It isn't much, but ten dollars is, for Roger and his mother, enough for dinner and breakfast the next day. Besides, the fifteen dollars Roger still has to his name is enough to buy him a one-way bus ticket to New York and a cheap notebook, and that's all he needs for now, anyway.
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Roger is fifteen.
After securely finding the official "crappiest part of the city," Roger is hardly surprised to discover a familiar pair of Scarsdale veterans flirting with a pair of bouncers at what is known to be a relatively tame city bar. It isn't particularly difficult to convince them that he's not the asshole Roger they remember, because they're already drunk – Mark more so than April, if Roger's guess is anything to be trusted. When he is invited to their ratty street corner to spend the night, Roger supposes he has no choice, and curls up on the ground.
In the morning, when jade eyes flicker open to meet celery-colored orbs and eyes the color of a suburban sky, April sighs heavily. "Are you gonna behave, Roger?" she asks, sitting up and leaning against a building. Roger's only answer is to smile weakly and nod, and within hours, the three have a loft all lined up. Now all they need is a way to pay the rent, and Roger is fairly certain that New York City talent shows should pay better than Scarsdale ones.
"Nowhere's land," he sings softly to himsef as a sort of lullaby, the first night in his apartment. "I'm living rough in nowhere's land, craving for escape and longing for a break and hoping that someday I'll get out of here and make it. Everyone's so fake, living here in nowhere's land…"