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There’s sweat dripping down her back.
She stares, up at the pop corn ceiling, watches the shadows warp, flashes of light dancing in time with the cartoon on the TV screen.
Ash and vinegar fill her mouth. The hotel smells like mildew.
And despite it all, the curtains drawn to block out the midday sun, the mold growing in the damp carpet, the thick, oppressive heat that clogs up her throat and sits on her chest like a fever, he’s laughing.
Roxy is nineteen now. Her birthday passed quietly, on a rainy day in February, in the back of her father’s station wagon. It’s catching up to her now, months later, how different it feels to be a year older.
Her shoes are the perfect size, have been the perfect size for the past three years. Her legs don’t ache from growing pains anymore. She isn’t as hungry, doesn’t eat as much. Eyes linger on her bare skin, now.
And there’s no joy in it. In the way her hair frizzes in the humidity, in the Looney Tunes reruns that have been playing for hours now. Her eyes focus and unfocus, stinging as smoke seeps into her clothes. The fabric of her T-shirt and shorts cling to her damp skin, and bile mixes with her saliva, eats at her enamel.
She lays on her back on the sofa, less than a foot from the cheap, opened beer bottle abandoned on the side table. The cushions smell like body odor and semen, and the cheap faux-velvet pressed against her is all the wrong kinds of familiar.
Roxy tips her head to the side, lets the armrest cradle her cheek, looking right at the tube television and seeing nothing but a filmy haze on it’s surface.
In front of her, laying on his stomach on the threadbare area rug, Superboy giggles. Again and again, endlessly amused by the cartoons. His head is propped up in his hands, sock-less feet swinging idly. There’s cigarette ash and dog hair clinging to the arches.
For once, he’s taken off that leather jacket, his love for it losing out against the rolling heatwave July has brought. They’re in Georgia, halfway to Atlanta, and it’s too hot to think, let alone don unnecessary layers.
Roxy lent him one of her tank tops. It fits, and that shouldn’t be such a big deal, but it is, because it’s the first time she’s seen him in anything but his costume.
Two weeks. They've been on the road for two weeks, and it’s the first time he’s changed out of it.
It’s hard to look at him now, swimming in a pair of Rex’s shorts, the drawstrings wrapped around his waist and tied in the back just so they’d stay up. His legs, his arm pits are hairless. His eyes are still too big for his face.
And Looney Tunes, of all things, has had him enraptured for hours.
Roxy wants to find it cute. It is cute, but in a way that kind of makes her stomach twist when she remembers kissing him.
Her throat hurts, a little, and she blames it on thirst, the lump that she can’t seem to swallow around. She doesn’t bother sitting up, reach out blindly, until her fingers skim against warm glass.
The beer tastes like hot piss, cheap and watered down. She purses her lips against the bottle, stops it from flowing into her mouth, and holds it there, braced over her head like the sword of Damocles.
She breathes, closes her eyes, and contemplates getting drunk.
It wouldn’t be the first time. And Rex is already there, in the attached room sleeping off his hangover from last night, snoring loud enough to rival the television. He’s surrounded by empty bottles and cigarettes probably, and if Roxy were a better daughter, she’d go in there and help him out. Make him drink water so he won’t get dehydrated, clean up the soiled clothes and dump out any alcohol left in the motel.
If she were a better daughter, she wouldn’t have let him get this bad in the first place.
Roxy takes another sip, imagines a nice buzz to go along with the listless, weighty feeling. She’s always preferred nicotine to booze, but it’s not like she has anything to do today. The heat will be more tolerable with something to take her mind off it.
And she’s almost justified the decision to herself, grip firming around the neck of the beer bottle, when Superboy says, “Can I have some?”
At some point, she’s going to learn her lesson and finally stop repeating her mistakes. Just not right now.
Roxy opens her eyes, sits up. Superboy is looking at her expectantly, head tilted, still smiling.
“Yeah okay,” she hears herself say. “Just a sip.”
She doesn’t sit up, just holds out the beer, watches with one eye open as Superboy takes it from her curiously. He tilts his head, is more tentative than Roxy, sipping at the beer and flinching at the taste.
He had the same reaction to soda. To the lemon served with his iced tea. To the bitter aftertaste of Roxy’s coffee. Shock and confusion, the slight uncertainty that comes from trying something new.
Roxy laughed the first time, and the second, but by now it’s grating. Incongruous. To watch someone nearly her age experience the world with the wide-eyed wonderment of childhood.
“Ugh, jeez Rox,” Superboy says, practically shoving the bottle back at her. “That’s nasty.”
She remembers saying the same thing. She remembers being nine years old in her father’s lap, watching dejectedly as he played poker and schmoozed with people far too expensive for them, sedated with alcohol once she got too whiny.
Superboy screws up his nose, kneeling in front of the sofa, haloed by the light of the television. There are fine, blond freckles scattered over the bridge of his nose and the breadth of his shoulders, only visible this close.
Roxy drops the bottle of beer. It slips out of her hands, tumbles to the ground, shatters. The sound it makes, the breaking, echoes.
“Roxy?”
She kissed him. It was a con, just a fucking job, but it’s not anymore. Rex isn’t just selling the kid off to a label or getting him a contract. They’re touring, together, for the foreseeable future. This is the long haul.
This is Superboy’s childhood.
It’s hers, too.
She sits up, and thinks maybe she’s a lightweight, because her head spins with it. The edges of the room blur into the narrow walls of the trailer she grew up in, the apartment in Metropolis, the station wagon. It might be the heat, but suddenly she can’t breathe.
“Roxy, are you okay?” Superboy asks, sitting back on his heels, making room for her to move. She gets off the couch, stands and hears her back pop.
“I’m fine,” she says, miserable. “Just need a smoke.”
Roxy brushes her hair out of her face, grimacing at the greasy, sweaty curls. She can feel his eyes on her, tracking as she grabs her father’s cigarettes off the table and ambles barefoot to the door.
The motel’s second story walkway is empty when Roxy stumbles out onto the balcony, squinting at the sun overhead, sucking in a thick, stifling breath of fresh air.
There’s broken glass and cigarette butts underfoot, the ground is littered with soda cans and condom wrappers, congregating in a little pile by the stairwell, so she climbs up onto the railing. Perches there, leaned up against one of the support pillars, looking down at the barren parking lot.
The sun is oppressive, almost malicious, beating down and heating her exposed skin. It feels good though, like she’s sweating out an illness.
She hooks her foot on one of the posts in the banister, leans back to light up, holding the cigarette up to her lips and fumbling with the disposable lighter, her fingers graceless on the spark wheel.
By the time Superboy joins her, she still hasn’t managed to get a flame. Frustration bleeds into her shoulders, and the kid doesn’t really help, inching closer tentatively. Cautiously. Like she’s a short fuse.
Roxy is. She knows she is. Gets her attitude from her dead mama. But knowing it doesn’t help the building, twisting irritation. The anger that bubbles up her throat and threatens to spill out in way the kid probably wouldn’t deserve.
“Hey, are.” Superboy stops himself, inches closer, and all Roxy can do is lift his shoulders higher, turn her face to the side so he won’t see the look on it. “Look, Rox, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you—It really wasn’t that gross. I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
She blinks, freezing up for a minute. Forgets the cigarette in favor of startled confusion. “What are you talking about, kid?”
“The drink?” Superboy says, sounding just as perplexed, and Roxy can’t help it. She tips her head back, huffing out a laugh that hurts more than anything.
The drink. As if she need a reminder.
“It’s fine.” She sighs, breathes a little deeper. Wishes talking to Superboy didn’t make her feel better. “No one likes that stuff, SB. ‘s cheap.”
“Oh,” He says, sounding significantly happier. Chipper, even, like Roxy was butt hurt about beer of all things. He scrambles up onto the railing beside her, leans out instead of back, hovers in the air. His curly, blue-black hair falls into his face, catches the sunlight, and he might not be Superman’s actual clone, but he’s still a little out of this world. His eyes actually sparkle, a real-life twinkle to match his dimple.
“Are you still mad cause of the show?” He asks her, swinging his legs, tilting his head at her. His voice is mock-reproachful, playful, and he lets go of the railing to put his elbows on his knees. Cups his face in his hands and aims those baby blues right at her.
Roxy finally gets the lighter going, and keeps her gaze on the cigarette, on the hot, burning end as it smolders, so she doesn’t have to look at him.
“Next time,” he assures her. “You can catch me fifty feet in the air.”
She huffs, rolls her eyes, because she knows it’s what Superboy wants to see. She’s spent a long time in this business, charming people out of the money in their pockets. Playing damsel might not be the most dignified role, but she’s… she’s used to it.
Today’s show was a little humiliating, though. She fainted off the roof of a clocktower, in front of town’s square, screamed and flailed the whole way down while Rex sold T-shirts in the background.
Roxy inhales, holds it for a second, until the minty taste fades into acrid, burning paper, and exhales. Feels the way her shoulders ease, the tick in her eye fading, like a Pavlovian response. “I’m not mad,” she says, on an exhale. Even though it doesn’t feel true. “Just.” Head thudding against the pillar, Roxy shuts her eyes, takes another long drag. “D’you like it here, SB?”
“S’alright,” he says, relentlessly happy. Sometimes she can’t stand how lighthearted he is. How immature. “The people are a lot nicer than in Metro.”
“Yeah.”
They’re silent for a while. Roxy smokes, purses her lips and hunches against the building. Superboy tilts his face into the breezes, eyes creasing.
It should be soft. It should be peaceful. There should be an arching, painful nostalgia. A southern summer, cigarettes and booze and the sun on her skin. Instead, Roxy feels sick to her stomach.
Every so often, Superboy will open his mouth. That carefree, unbothered look will crack a little, until he’s glancing at her from his periphery, brow furrowed. But every time, he backs down. Doesn’t bring up the quiet, grim mood Roxy’s in.
Not until,
“Hey, Rox?”
She hums at him. Flicks what remains of her cigarette at the ground below them, watches it crumble to the ash before it hits.
“Wanna fly with me?”
She doesn’t get a chance to answer before he steps off the balcony. Right into open air. Toes pointed like Peter Pan; arms held open to her. Roxy stares.
“C’mon,” He says, teeth flashing. “It’ll be fun.”
“Just…” She pockets the lighter, tips forward, until they’re pressed chest-to-chest, and she can wrap her arms around his neck, her feet still on the balcony. She lays her cheek on his collarbone, says into his ear, “Don’t drop me, Superboy.”