Cass and her friend Lisa Pinto were the two other members of their team. Ned had asked Dorry, shyly, if they could come – he and Dorry had cracked the code and found the money, but Cass and Lisa Pinto had organized the Black Cats; it didn’t feel right to leave them out. Plus, Cass was his sister. And a better chaperone option than his parents. What could Dorry say but yes? Nothing else about this date was normal, so why not bring along two other people? Lisa Pinto introduced herself to Dorry using both names, and when Ned talked about her (and he did, a lot; he’d for sure had a huge crush on her once), he used both names too. Lisa Pinto was dressed as the back half of a two-person horse costume. “It’s sort of abstract,” she’d told Dorry, snapping the suspenders on her shoulders as she leaned back against a pole on the Green Line. “But surprisingly comfortable, warm—” She raised her eyebrow at Cass. “And practical. It’s basically a kangaroo pouch. I’m holding a great deal of useful stuff.”
“That’s Lisa Pinto,” said Cass. “Always thinking with her ass.”
Cass and Lisa Pinto had been showing off from the second they boarded the 88 bus. Like Dorry was someone special, someone they needed to impress, or at least make laugh. It took half the ride to Lechmere for her to catch on. At first she was just amused, because they were obviously good friends, the kind of friends who were fun to watch, they were so easy with each other, quippy and quick. But then Tuesday’s name came up, and came up again, and something inside Dorry snapped into place, like when the eye doctor was showing you different lenses: a window, clear, that showed her what she was really looking at. She was looking at two game players. Two players who looked at her, Dorry, with hunger. She wondered what they thought she knew that they didn’t. She wondered if the only thing they saw when they looked at her was a clue, and what they might do to get it out of her.
It was an echo of that awful feeling she’d had at Tuesday’s. That urge to compete, to protect what she had – to keep what she knew secret, to be a spy, to lie, even to a person she … but could she say she loved Tuesday if she felt like this? Tuesday had scared her. She had been – strange. Tuesday had reminded her of that horrible sinking, that woozy dark place, that, once upon a time, Tuesday herself had seemed capable of vanquishing.
Dorry hadn’t seen her since that day. She told Ned what she’d found out – Tuesday’s queen of diamonds – and though Ned was full of other questions (What’s her costume? What does she think is going to happen at the funeral?), Dorry deflected. And she sure as heck didn’t mention Tuesday or the funeral to her father. She built the details of a lie around the truth. She planned to tell him she’d been invited to a slumber party at her new friend Nadine’s, and Nadine was really into Halloween, so it was sort of a costume slumber party. Fifteen minutes before she had to leave to meet Ned at the bus stop, she’d dressed and gunked up her hair; she’d gotten the lie all ready in her mouth, had rehearsed it – not too much, she didn’t want it to sound rehearsed – but when she’d walked into the living room her dad was flopped on the couch, watching a scary movie on TV; there was screaming, someone was being chased, and Dorry was pretty sure he was drinking. The last time she’d seen him drinking was after her mother’s funeral, and he got so drunk he couldn’t stop crying. He rolled into a ball and made a terrible sound like he was dying, and Dorry hid in her room and called Gram, and Gram came over and took care of him. Now, on the floor, within reach of his curled hand, was a bottle with a red screw-top cap. His other hand was balancing a glass of clear liquid on his stomach.
“Hey,” she said, and he pressed his head against the couch’s arm to look back at her. He didn’t say anything about her outfit.
“I was invited over to someone’s house,” she said. “They’re having a party.”
He turned back to the TV. “Curfew’s at ten,” he said.
“It’s a sleepover,” she said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he said.
She left.
She walked down the hall, past Tuesday’s silent door, down the curling stairs to the lobby, feeling relieved and guilty, guilty and relieved. She should probably tell someone, call Gram – but then again, Dad was a grown-up, he could do what he wanted, and the fact that he wanted to drink tonight was none of Dorry’s business. The more important fact was this: Dorry had done it. Dorry had made it. She was closer to winning than she’d ever been, and even if her father were sober, and could drive, and cared enough to come get her – she would get to the funeral first.
Dorry felt – it was crazy, right? She knew it was crazy. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt close. Close to her mother. Close to seeing her again. The closest she had felt since her mother died.
And now she was standing with Ned and his sister and his sister’s friend, watching Vincent Pryce’s funeral come to life all around her. There was a big, black-and-white-striped tent where people could get drinks and snacks, a stage with a band playing a song that sounded familiar but twisted up, remade. The field was lit with bonfires in tall metal stands with colored glass panels that threw red and blue and purple and orange and green firelight across faces, feathers, wings. There were – Dorry counted – twelve stands, all in a circle.
She nudged her elbow against Ned and he nudged back. Twelve, she wanted to say. Twelve like a clock.
But she didn’t. It was a dream, and in a dream you don’t have to speak to be understood. Everyone seemed happy. Buzzing and laughing, talking too loud, louder than they would have if they were wearing their nondream skins. It didn’t feel like a funeral, or at least not like either of the funerals Dorry had been to before. It wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t a blurry, surreal blank. It was a party with food and dancing and strangers hugging each other.
A wish flickered across her mind: that her mother’s funeral had been like this. A party. A concert. A place she could imagine her mother grabbing her hands and asking her to dance, and even though her mom could be sad, and angry, and sometimes she had been so painfully uncool it made Dorry’s teeth hurt, her mother had known how to be happy. And when she was happy, it sort of radiated out, like a campfire, and could make you happy too. Yes: if her mother’s funeral had felt like remembering it was possible to be really happy – that, Dorry knew, she never would have forgotten.
The blue bonfire burning above them snapped and threw down sparks. Dorry ducked and then laughed, embarrassed. Ned put his arm around her shoulders and asked if she was okay.
She leaned against him and felt new and brave.
“Where are we—” he started.
The fire snapped again.
“What?” said Dorry, leaning closer.
“Where are we meeting up with Tuesday?” Ned said.
“She said she’d find us,” Dorry said, automatically, because the more lies you told, the more secrets you kept, the easier the lies and secrets became.
Dex squinted at the crowd through the scrim of his false lashes.
He knew – he knew that girl. The little girl dressed all in black, with the Horus eye painted on her face. Well, she wasn’t a little girl, she was smack in the middle of the Britney Spears Venn diagram (not a girl, not yet a woman), but he knew her, and he couldn’t figure out how. Maybe it was costume distortion. And his false lashes and the jangle of the band against his nerves. The singer was a skinny white kid with perfect skin and raccoon-blacked eyes and legs like swizzle sticks, and he was merely a shade above decent, by Dex’s admittedly exacting standards. The crowd jostled him from all sides. He wasn’t far from the park bench where he once drank coffee from a borrowed tumbler and contemplated the high of having only just met one Rabbit Hatmaker, but he might as well have been on another planet. Boston Common was teeming. Overrun.
And he was all by himself, alone in a crowded funeral.
He shivered.
He was supposed to meet Rabbit by the food tent in fifteen minutes. No – he checked his watch. Thirteen minutes. He took a step toward the tent and lost sight of the Horus girl he thought he knew,
and as soon as she was gone, swallowed by the throng, he forgot he’d even seen her. His mind was having trouble holding on to things. There was so much to see. To hear. The air was dense with distraction.
“Girl,” said a deep voice to his left, and Dex twitched and spun toward it. “That mug is beat.”
The voice belonged to a stunning six-foot-something drag Cher. Dex took it as the extreme compliment it was, and drew his fingers back on either side of his cheeks, contoured and blended. He batted his eyes, dark and false-lashed, traced his filled brows, pursed his red lips. He was painted for the very back of the house, and it felt good, better than good, to be noticed by a professional.
Dex had discovered, when he was a freshman in high school, after someone’s well-meaning but tragically Revloned mom botched his makeup for his first featured role in a drama production (Bottom), that he loved the way a little colored paste and powder, skillfully applied, gave him an entirely different face, and that he was naturally skilled at applying it. Because it was the early nineties, deep in western Mass., he knew to hide that talent; he carefully fixed his makeup in a bathroom on the other side of the school, far from the bustling preshow auditorium – reddening his lips, blending his foundation so it didn’t trace his jaw blunt as a coastline. He lined his eyes. Tamed his brows. When he was in full costume later, that same well-meaning mom told him gosh, she’d done a great job! He was beautiful! Dex gave her the butchest thumbs-up he knew how to give.
He was a headliner (Rolf the Nazi, Nathan Detroit, and Henry Higgins, for the record) who did his own eyeliner for the rest of high school. He refined it in college, on the stage, at parties. But adult life had less space for this face; he painted it only a few times a year. It made him a little sad, now, to see this other face he had, that he showed to no one but his mirror and the infrequent dark club. This face that he had never shown to Patrick, or to any of his exes, unless they happened to be dating on Halloween. It was a face for occasions – it was too much work, to put on and take off, to wear every day. But that was part of why he loved it. It was dramatic and haunted, his own face but better, the face he wore when he wanted to feel more alive.
Or feel like Madonna, an urge that overtook him like gay clockwork every Halloween. Over the years he had been club-kid Madonna, Evita Madonna, Marilyn Madonna, and once, memorably, pleather bondage Madonna. This year he was wearing a short blond wig with finger waves, a wireless over-ear mic, a blue pinstriped pantsuit with enormous shoulder pads – the top of his body was an inverted triangle – and a pale pink bustier. And a monocle, of course, dangling between the fabric cones of his faux breasts. The irony was consciously unintentional, but Dex’s subconscious was a dire conflagration these days: in his business suits, he couldn’t express himself.
“Put your love to the test,” sang Cher, disappearing back into the crowd. Dex’s gut trembled.
A gust of cold wind whooshed. Cloaks and wings fluttered. People shrieked, chilled but happy. Dex shivered again and decided to just go to the food tent and wait. Milling made his anxiety worse. He needed somewhere to perch and something to drink. He needed—
Tuesday.
Tuesday was standing about twenty feet away. Not looking in his direction, but it was unmistakably her – her dark head and her pale cheek and her tall body, all dressed in black. Her hair looked beyond fantastic, shining over her shoulders. So that was her costume: woman in black. Dex snorted. Typical, typical Tuesday. The last thing she’d want to do after getting fired was spend money on some dopey dress-up clothes. Even though he was still pissed at her, and sore, and awash in anxiety about Rabbit seeing him in drag for the first time, he knew it wasn’t her fault. But she certainly hadn’t helped. Tuesday had shone a klieg light on his naked need for attention, and what was drag – what wasn’t drag, really? Drag was punk, drag was protest, drag was performance and art and fantasy, drag was as many things as there were people who practiced it – though for him, what was drag but a sequined scream? Look at me. Really look at me, please. I dare you to look at me and know me and love me.
Despite all that, seeing Tuesday in her un-costume gave him a small bump of amusement.
Nice effort, babe.
A tall drink of dark and damaged was standing next to her. Archie. What Dex could see of his face was a ruin. Bruises, yellow and purple, going sour along his jaw. A fat lip, split. If it was makeup, it was fantastic. If it wasn’t, something had happened that Dex half wanted to know, half wanted to stay comfortably ignorant of. Maybe he was dressed as – Dex didn’t know, a fight club playboy or something, in a ratty red smoking jacket. Archie leaned down to whisper in Tuesday’s ear. Something about the way he touched her shoulder and she curled toward him made Dex inhale.
No wonder her hair looked fantastic.
It was sex hair.
Dex was a mess and he didn’t know how to sort himself. The fact that they were obviously sleeping together, and Dex could read it from across the crowded Common, rose as a gleeful silent cackle in the back of his head. The fact that Dex hadn’t even tried to contact his supposed friend since she’d been an asshole – when she was blind drunk after one of the worst days of her adult life – drained some of that glee. But whose job was it to be the better friend right now? Who was responsible for making the first move?
Dex looked at his watch. It was time.
He addressed the first bartender under the Beetlejuice-striped tent and ordered a gin and tonic, hold the tonic, and stood, sipping quietly, waiting for Rabbit to appear. Dex hadn’t told Rabbit what his costume would be. Since it wasn’t going to be the bespoke suit of armor – well, Dex sniffed, it was still a suit of armor, in a manner of speaking – he told Rabbit he’d have to wait and see. Which had the potential to be a little brutal, perhaps.
To both of them.
Dex saw Rabbit before Rabbit saw him. He came around the corner from behind the tent, eyes searching. He was dressed in a swallowtail coat, top hat, white spats, and red bow tie, with his pockets turned inside out. A luxuriously fake white mustache crouched on his upper lip. So Vincent Pryce’s plan was for the banker to dress as the Monopoly man. Because, clearly, Vincent Pryce had known how dashing Rabbit would look in a tuxedo.
Dex sipped and watched Rabbit search.
It didn’t take long.
Rabbit covered his mouth with his hand and walked over. Dex didn’t know how to read that. Rabbit’s eyes looked like they wanted to laugh.
Maybe?
“What do you think?” said Dex, and realized he was going to just do it, say it. Force the issue. “Too much?” He gestured to his wig, his face, his entirely other body.
Rabbit lowered his hand. He was blushing furiously above his mustache.
They beheld each other, a fake old man and a fake young Madonna, until Dex couldn’t take it any longer.
“Does it freak you out?” he asked.
Rabbit’s mouth went up, down, worky without actually working.
“It has, in the past, and I won’t name names. Let’s say Drag Dex has been received with varying levels of enthusiasm.” He felt his throat close a little.
Rabbit smiled at him. It didn’t feel like enough. But then, that was one of Dex’s problems, wasn’t it, that for whatever reason, logical or il-, the world, in one way or another, never felt like enough. This Dex was his favorite. This Dex, painted for the gods (or at least the Madonnas), was a dead-serious joke, the ghost of who he thought, once upon a time, he was supposed to be. A singer. An actor. A light on a stage who could share infinite other lives for a moment with strangers, easing the sting of being so very finite indeed. This Dex was a reminder that he had lived long enough to have known other versions of himself, that the self he was now wasn’t permanent, or didn’t have to be; this Dex was many, and could become someone else still. The gulf between this Dex and the other Dex Howard, the Dex who shaved his face in the morning and knotted his Armani tie and slid feet into his Gucci loafers (every bit an act of drag as what he was currently weari
ng) – that gulf was deep and wide and dark. Every time he passed through it, every time he remembered the cost of all those hours spent being that Dex, Office Drag Dex, Part of the Problem Dex, Cynical Dex, it was that much harder to go back. But to stay, to be, to remain this Dex – too open, too loud, too femme – was terrifying too. He was never in more danger than when he allowed himself to be most himself. When he was most himself, he ran the constant risk of being entirely Too Much.
The kind of Too Much that could get the literal shit kicked out of you.
“I know, I know,” Dex said. Pop the moment, he thought. Pop it like a balloon. “Just another needy queen, begging for attention.”
Rabbit’s white-gloved hand slipped into his own and squeezed. “You’re astonishing,” he said.
Dex wanted desperately to believe him. But that would have required believing it himself first.
“Madonna at twelve o’clock,” said Archie.
Tuesday turned to look.
“That’s him,” she said. Her voice was small. She didn’t move. Dex looked at his watch, closed his eyes as if bracing himself for a blow, and about-faced to the food tent.
Tuesday’s face was very flat. Then she twitched, and tilted her ear forward like she was trying to catch a voice in the crowd. She’d been doing that, tilting and listening, for the past two days – in her apartment, when there were no voices other than their own. When Archie asked her about it, she said she was thinking, not listening. Archie decided if she could agree to (mostly) stop badgering him about his family and Vincent Pryce, then he could stop badgering her about this tic.
So he did. But he didn’t stop wondering. Or worrying.
Or aching. His body was wrecked. He touched his lip, amazed that it was still so swollen (making out like insane teenagers probably hadn’t helped). And something was wrong with his neck now; he couldn’t turn all the way to his right without feeling a sharp pinch. But his bruises were fading. And he wasn’t dead, which meant he probably hadn’t been bleeding internally this whole time.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 30
