All of us look so ridiculous. Like, we’re here for a job interview and the one requirement is that you wear one of your mom’s polyester suits.
I watch as girls with last names starting with A, B, and C file in and out of their interview. Some come out with broad smiles. A few are shell-shocked. And a handful in tears. It sounds horrible, I know, but a small part of me sees the girls in tears as eliminated competition. I don’t even want to win, but I think there’s this survival instinct inside all of us that clicks on when we see other people failing. It makes me feel gross and incredibly human.
Since we’re in alphabetical order, Ellen and I—Dickson and Dryver—are sitting right next to each other. Every time our shoulders so much as touch, she moves an obnoxious distance away from me, like she’s been electrocuted.
“Dickson? Willowdean Dickson?”
I startle a little, and instinctively look to El. Our eyes meet for a second, and I see a slow smile linger on her lips before she catches herself and glances away.
I am going to bomb.
Mallory holds the door open for me. “Remember,” she whispers. “You never get a second chance at a first impression.”
“Well, that’s encouraging,” I murmur.
The four judges—who until now were anonymous—sit in a row at the front of the room behind a long buffet table.
They each introduce themselves. But I know exactly who they are.
Tabitha Herrera—owner of not one, but two beauty shops in Clover City: Tabitha’s and the cleverly titled Tabitha’s #2. Tabitha does everything from highlights to perms. She’s the type of hairdresser with mind-control abilities. You can sit down in her chair and swear that you came for bangs, but leave with a bob. And because it’s part of her charm, Tabitha lets you think the whole thing was your idea. She’s got huge boobs and the hair to match. When people up north think of Texas, it’s Tabitha they think of.
Dr. Mendez—I know little about him except that he’s the only orthodontist in town. He’s from Philadelphia or Boston or one of those places where people are always yelling, and he always looks a little jarred by everything. I mean, I guess if I move to this small-ass town from Philadoston, I’d be a little on edge, too.
Burgundy McCall—I shit you not. That is her real name. No, she is not a porn star or the leading lady of a soap opera. Her parents are Texas A&M graduates (technically, their colors are maroon and white, but I guess “Burgundy” had a better ring to it), and she’s a Miss Teen Blue Bonnet turned kindergarten teacher. She made it all the way to the statewide Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant, and came in as second runner-up. My mom—who only ever competed in the local pageant because she had me—has never outright said she resents Burgundy, but whenever she says her name, it sounds like she’s eaten something too hot and is about to spit it out.
Clay Dooley—Clay Dooley Ford. He is probably the richest person in Clover City. His hair is always perfectly coiffed and his jeans are a smidge tighter than a tourniquet. His belt buckles are huge and gold and probably cost more than our mortgage. Clay Dooley is all Texas. He is the stereotype Dr. Mendez’s Bostadelphian parents warned him about. He’s so rich, in fact, that he has time to judge stuff like this because he doesn’t make the money. He has people to do that for him.
I sit down in front of them, and no one looks up except Dr. Mendez. The other three shuffle papers back and forth and murmur something about the previous contestant dodging questions.
Burgundy finally glances up and upon seeing me, one of her perfectly groomed eyebrows raises. Clay and Tabitha both have the same kind of reactions, but are more successful at masking them. It is then that I realize that I am the first of the . . . I’ll call us the unlikely suspects.
I think of all the good advice I’ve ever gotten in my life. Most of it is from Lucy. But nothing clicks. Nothing prepares me for this moment. So I channel my mother. If my mother were standing here in this room right now, what would she say? If she weren’t running this whole show, and she was just my mom, what would she tell me to do?
Smile, she would say. And don’t you dare sigh.
I smile. So hard my cheeks hurt. And I do my best not to sigh.
“Willowdean Dickson?” asks Tabitha.
I nod. I smile. I. Don’t. Stop. Smiling.
“Dickson,” says Burgundy. “You’re not Rosie’s daughter, are you?”
“Yes,” I say. I hear my mother: manners. “Ma’am,” I add. “Yes, ma’am.”
Clay clears his throat. “Okay, let’s get this show rollin’. Willowdean,” he says, holding up a crisp dollar bill. “If I were to give you this dollar, what would you do with it?”
This is a trick question. Still smiling. A dollar. What could I do with his dollar? Okay, I could give it to a homeless guy. I could buy a donut. Yes, sir, please, I would love to buy a donut with your dollar.
No, no. I’ve got to think bigger. Charity feels too obvious. “I would go to the dollar store and buy a box of pencils. Then on the morning of the SATs, I would roam the halls, selling them to the slackers—I mean, the students who forgot their pencils. For three bucks apiece.”
It’s quiet for a moment, and then Clay lets out a hoot of laughter.
Beside him, Burgundy purses her lips. “And what would you do with the money?”
“Buy more pencils,” I say. She begins to scratch something down on her score sheet. “And then, once I had a nice chunk, I’d donate it to charity. Or use it to buy a holiday meal for a family in need.” Creativity? Check. Savvy? Check. Selflessness? Check.
Tabitha smiles to herself, and I think maybe she even winks at me.
Once the judges finish writing down their comments, Tabitha looks up. “We have one other question for you. Define loyalty.”
The adrenaline is sucked from my body like a vacuum. I am not smiling. “Loyalty.” I take my time with each letter, trying to stretch out how long I have before I’ve got to give an answer. “Loyalty is . . . loyalty is being there for someone. It’s selfless. It’s about standing by someone’s side even when you don’t want to.” Ellen. All I see is Ellen. “Because you love them.”
That night when we lay in her bed, talking about the first time she had sex. It was so hard. I felt like there were nails in my stomach, but I stayed there with her. I listened to every detail because that’s what you do for your best friend. I can feel her out in that hallway, thinking of me. For as angry as she is with me, I know she’s sitting out there wondering how I’m doing in front of these judges.
“Loyalty isn’t blind.” Even when I wish it was. “Loyalty is telling someone they’re wrong when no one else will.” It embarrasses me to know that I told El she couldn’t enter the pageant. Like us competing alongside each other would somehow ruin the point I was trying to make. When, really, with her, I am only stronger. I am the best possible me.
I think that my whole world has cracked into all these little pieces, and the only way I can go about fixing it is one shard at a time. For me, the first piece is always Ellen.
FIFTY-SIX
They serve us barbecue for lunch. I think that maybe lunch is some secret component of our final score because there is no higher achievement for a southern woman than the ability to eat barbecue and walk away stain free. After lunch we all have to sit through a keynote from Ruth Perkins, a seventy-eight-year-old former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet, who decides not to use the microphone because it gives her feedback in her hearing aid. Which means we’re all left smiling and nodding as she talks at a secret-telling level of volume.
After a while, there’s this awkward moment where she’s waiting for applause and none of us can tell if she’s done talking. We eventually clap and Mrs. Clawson takes the stage to thank her and offer her a bouquet of flowers.
“All right, ladies,” she says into the mic. “None of you can leave until you’ve had your picture made for the paper. There are chairs along the wall, so sit in the same alphabetical order you were in today. You’ve got five minutes to touch up
your faces.”
I turn to Hannah, who sits next to me, and bare my teeth. “Anything in my teeth?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Me?”
“Nope.”
We part ways and go to our respective chairs as everyone else storms the bathrooms. I wait for El to sit down beside me. I can’t make my brain concentrate on what I might say, but I’m going to talk to her. I have to.
She plops down in the chair next to me, and licks her thumb as she tries to rub off a barbecue stain on the lapel of her blazer.
“I bet they can take it so the stain’s out of frame,” I say. “Or Photoshop it.”
She keeps on with the stain, diligently making it worse and worse, but says nothing.
They begin to call us one by one and we scoot up a chair each time they do.
With two girls ahead of me, I say, “I don’t want us to be mad at each other anymore.”
I wait for her response. We move up a seat.
“I was wrong.” We move up one more seat. “I was really wrong, and I can’t do this anymore. I can’t not talk to you every day. Please don’t be angry with me.”
“Willowdean?” calls Mallory.
I glance back to Ellen before standing up. She’ll crack soon. She has to.
“Willowdean?”
“It’s not that easy.” El’s voice scratches, like she hasn’t spoken in days. “We’re turning into different people.”
“That doesn’t mean we’re not good for each other.” I think the parts of me that are built on memories made with Ellen are some of my favorite parts of myself. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I was stubborn.”
I sit down on the small stool in front of the backdrop. My mom stands behind the photographer. She motions with both her pointer fingers like she’s pulling a smile across her face.
I pull in one deep breath and beg myself to smile. Smile. Smile. Smile.
Ellen sits there against the wall, still rubbing her barbecue stain in circles.
I don’t smile.
After photos, we’re released to set up our backstage dressing areas. The community theater downtown was designed with the pageant in mind, which means the women’s dressing room is four times the size of the men’s.
Each seat is labeled. I find my name on a piece of paper taped to a small stretch of mirror. Except over my name in black marker in all caps is DUMPLIN’. Scrawled in a hurry like someone had to say my name and couldn’t resist. I look right and then left to see if I can spot the culprit.
Ellen plops all her stuff down next to mine. I see her name taped to the mirror. We’re in alphabetical order again.
In the reflection, her gaze catches mine. She digs through her purse for a minute before coming up with a pen. Stretching over me, she reaches for the paper with my name on it. I watch as she scribbles my name sans Dumplin’ on the back, tears the piece of tape off and reapplies it before sticking the sign back on the mirror.
“Thanks,” I say.
She sits down on the stool next to me. “It’s just a word. Doesn’t mean anything unless you let it.” She turns to me. Her eyes don’t quite meet mine. “But if it hurts you, it hurts me.”
My whole body relaxes, but my chin trembles. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I shake my head. “No. No, I am.”
She looks up then, notices my quivering chin, and takes my hand.
The room begins to swell as more girls file in.
“Come on,” she says.
I follow her, and she holds my hand and leads me to a beat-up leather love seat a few feet from the stage manager’s desk.
We sink into the sofa and without making a big deal of it, El swings her legs over mine. “Okay, talk.”
“Okay. I got mad at you for entering the pageant. And then you got mad at me for being mad at you. And then I stayed mad at you. And then you stayed mad at me.” I shake my head. “I know this was a long time coming. We’ve been drifting.”
She nods. “It scares me. I don’t want to feel apart from you. But maybe we’re not supposed to do everything together? Maybe we’re supposed to have some space.”
“It’s hard to accept.” I look for all the right words. “I want to see you be happy. And make new friends. Even if they’re people like Callie. I want to not be jealous of you.” I’ve never said it out loud. I think I’ve even been scared to let myself think it, but I know it’s true the second it leaves my mouth. “I don’t mean jealous in a weird stalkery way, but sometimes I think our lives are moving at different speeds and it’s hard not to feel like you’re gonna lap me.”
She laughs, and it sounds like a hiccup. “I’m not lapping you anytime soon. And if this is about sex . . . I love Tim, okay? But know that there’s been a learning curve.” Her shoulders bounce as she adds, “Maybe I’m jealous of you sometimes, too. You don’t care about people like Callie or any of the girls I work with. But I need them to like me. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I don’t even think they’re that cool. My mind keeps this kind of tally of how many people like me and I care. I don’t want to.”
I smile, and the knot in my chest unwinds a little. “You’re my best friend. Even over these last two months, it’s always been you. And you never treat me any different. Not like other people do sometimes. And I know I’m good at being who I am. I’m good at saying, ‘This is me. Back me up or back the fuck out.’ Ya know? But—” Oh Christ. There’s so much I haven’t told her. I start at the beginning. “But I met a boy over the summer. Bo. Private School Boy. At work. And we kissed.”
“You didn’t tell me?” She smacks my arm. “The hell, Will?”
I shake my head. “I know. I’m sorry. But we kissed some more. And then it just kept going.”
“Oh my God. You had sex with him. Was it amazing? I’m still mad at you for not telling me.”
I laugh. “No. No. We didn’t. Have sex. But I liked the way being with him made me feel.” My head feels like a spool of thread unwinding. “But then . . . did you ever get freaked out when Tim would touch you? Like, at first?”
She drops her head against my shoulder. “Shit. Yeah, I did. He’d touch my waist or a spot of acne on my chin or something and I’d clam up like a total psycho.”
The warm relief of recognition spreads through me. “That’s what happened when Bo touched me. Like, I felt straight-up drunk when we would kiss. But then he’d touch my backfat or my hips and I would totally shut down.”
“I can’t believe you hid this from me.” Her voice is soft. “I should be so pissed at you.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. But, like, all of this was happening, right? And you’d told me that you and Tim were going to start having sex, and it made me feel like I might explode. It wasn’t all jealousy. It was more that I felt young and inexperienced. And I couldn’t—and kind of still can’t—imagine myself letting someone else see me like that.”
“Oh, Will.”
“And that pissed me off. It was like I was losing you. But I felt so gross about myself at the same time. It all made me so mad because I didn’t want to be one of those girls who felt bad about themselves because of some guy.”
She sits up and I lay my head in her lap as she pulls her fingers through my hair. I tell her about every little thing. About Bo at the mall, and how he didn’t tell me he was changing schools. And Mitch. And the dance. Halloween. Going back to Harpy’s. Bo. I tell her all about Bo. And how she’d like him so much. And how he wants to be my boyfriend.
“He wants to put this label on us,” I tell her. “And you know we won’t even make it one day at school without being ridiculed. He doesn’t get that.”
“Listen,” she says. “Lots of people are assholes, okay? I won’t lie to you there, but look at Tim and me. He’s way shorter than me. You think people don’t laugh at us? They do.”
It’s true, but until this moment, it’s not anything I’ve even heard El mention.
“But you don’t
always get to choose who your heart wants. And even if we always did get to choose, I’d choose Tim. I’d choose him every time. So you gotta think: a relationship is between two people. All those assholes at school are bored spectators. You and Bo behind the Dumpster at Harpy’s. That was y’all’s hearts talking. But you and Bo dating. Being exclusive. That’s your head. Your heart is all in, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get to choose. From what it sounds like, he’s already made his choice.”
It’s so easy, I think, to say so in my head. Even out loud. But doing. Taking his hand and saying I deserve this. We deserve this. That’s terrifying. “I was scared y’all broke up,” I say. “You and Tim. I saw you crying in the hall the other day.”
Her hand stops for a minute. She sniffs. “My parents are fighting again. My dad went and spent the night on Uncle Jared’s couch. He’s back. But I don’t know. This feels like it might be it.”
“God. El, I am so sorry.”
“I wanted to tell you so bad. But I was being stubborn. And dumb.”
“No, I should’ve gone up to you when I saw you there.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “This isn’t the first time. Some things just can’t be fixed. Not forever.”
The thought makes my heart flinch. I sit up and we stay put for a little while, entwined like a set of cats.
FIFTY-SEVEN
I end up hanging out with Ellen and Tim for the rest of the afternoon. As we drive up to my house, I see that Bo’s truck is parked out front. “Um, is that who I think it is?” asks El.
He stands outside my front door with a huge metal toolbox at his feet.
Tim pulls into my driveway, and El hops out so I can drag myself out of the backseat of the Jeep.
I walk across the yard, and can feel Ellen at my heels. I turn abruptly. “What are you doing?” I ask her.