Rudy and Justin stepped forward, poised in position.
“Ms. Ruth Ann Golden, daughter of Charles and Katherine Golden, escorted by Mr. Justin Patridge.”
At the sound of her name, Rudy stepped gracefully out onto the field and proceeded through the human tunnel.
“Ms. Golden serves as the secretary of the Ogden chapter of National Honor Society and as Photography editor for the Ogden Academy yearbook. She is a member of the track team, Ogden Cares volunteer organization and the Spanish language club. After she graduates, Ms. Golden plans to attend college and major in photography, sociology or women’s studies. Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Ruth Ann Golden.”
The applause was uproarious as Rudy, now a speck at the other side of the field, stepped up onto the platform of the stage. Luke and I moved forward. He wove his arm through mine, and I held my clammy palm in a fist against my ribs.
“Next, Ms. Jillian Marie Matthews, daughter of Todd and Melanie Matthews, escorted by Mr. Luke Bruggeman.”
We stepped into the grass. I smiled as we walked through trumpets and flutes and fluttering pom poms. Please don’t fall, please don’t fall, was the mantra on replay in my head, so loud I didn’t hear the rest of my short bio. Suddenly, we weren’t walking anymore. Luke helped me up onto the stage.
We stood in our spot, marked by a tiny strip of white tape, on the opposite side of the stage from Rudy. She made eyes at me while Deena was making her way across the field. We applauded at the right places.
Ages later, when all ten of us stood nervously across the platform, the announcer paused. We waited. I drew breath, which is notable, as I hadn’t done it much in the fifteen minutes before. I felt my stomach growling and wondered if Luke could hear it.
“It’s my pleasure to announce that this year’s Ogden Academy homecoming queen is Ms. Jillian Marie Matthews.”
Shocked would be an appropriate adjective to use here. So would floored, flabbergasted or horrified. Horrified was appropriate because that’s how I felt as my feet stepped forward, possessed by what I assumed was a misguided belief that I had won. I could not have won. Rudy won.
My ears were numb to the applause, and I clung to Luke’s arm as he half-drug me down to the lower platform. The student body president handed me a bouquet of white roses, and the football captain presented me with a signed football. Heidi Payne approached me, a jeweled tiara outstretched in her hands, and I squatted awkwardly so she could place it on top of my head. I tried to arrange my facial features into a gracious smile. Around the track again we rode, this time faster.
“Congratulations, Jill.” Luke put his arm around my shoulders. “You deserved it.”
No, I didn’t, I thought, even in that moment. How could you “deserve” something like the title of homecoming queen? You deserved an A on a test when you were up all night studying or you deserved to lose ten pounds when you’d been eating nothing but lettuce and baked chicken for a month. I didn’t earn this. I wasn’t extra generous or kind, I didn’t smile at strangers in the hallway. There was probably at least half of the student population at Ogden to whom I had never spoken. And yet, something about the person I was had compelled them to choose me. I think that was what made it both so unbelievable and so meaningful.
“Thanks.” I smiled. As we approached them, I could see the four other couples standing with their arms crossed at the edge of the field, watching us. They came into focus as we got closer. Deena and LeAnn wore polite smiles. They each held a single rose. I felt a small pang; a part of me would’ve gladly traded places with any one of them while another part of me wanted to beam and do back flips down the track.
“Congratulations, Jill!” They all hugged me lightly, hunching to avoid my armful of trinkets. We posed for photos, Luke and me standing in the center, my tiara glittering in full effect.
And then it was over.
Rudy and I put on sweatpants underneath our dresses and jackets over them and our limbs began their slow thaw. She refused to let me take off the tiara, and so I wore it for the remainder of the game, sitting in the student section of the bleachers, sandwiched between Luke and Justin.
We lost the game, but that didn’t really change the dynamic of the after party.
Rudy and I arrived at midnight, far past fashionably late, drunk and with our escorts in tow. After the coronation, our Homecoming group dynamic had been fractured. We went our separate ways, Rudy and I to Justin’s parents’ basement, the other girls to who knows where. We were still wearing sweatpants with our dresses, the skirts bunching over top of the thick fleece. Luke was wearing my tiara, and I was watching him carefully, fearful it would disappear.
The first thing our foursome did was to head straight for the keg and fill up our cups. Then we walked the house, collecting congratulations and stares and mingling among our classmates. We smoked, for the first time in months, on the porch with a group of juniors we hardly knew.
At 1:30, Luke pulled me in close. He had relinquished my tiara to Rudy hours before, and now his hair was flattened where it had sat.
“Do you want to go out to my car and talk?”
Talk. He could have at least come up with a better excuse.
I nodded, and he took my hand and led me down the lit sidewalk. We climbed into the back and we kissed, contorting our bodies awkwardly in the small space, and I was especially glad for the bulky fleece barrier my sweatpants created between us because I wasn’t ready for anything further just then. After five minutes, my phone rang and it was Rudy.
“What are you guys doing,” she whispered coarsely.
“Nothing. Talking in Luke’s car.” I sat up.
“Like, talking or just talking?”
“What?”
“Are you really just talking?”
“Yes,” I nodded my head, though she obviously couldn’t see me through the phone. “Where are you?”
“I’m outside.”
“Outside where?”
“Outside the car.” She rapped her knuckles on the tinted back window and Luke jumped. “Can I come in?”
Luke pushed the door open and it hit Rudy in the stomach. She dropped her phone.
“Sorry,” she mumbled and bent over to pick it up. My tiara fell forward, got caught in her hair and hung off the side of her head when she righted herself.
“Sorry for what,” Luke muttered under his breath.
“You know, sorry…for whatever.” Rudy sighed. “Jilly, can I talk to you?”
“Yeah, sure.” I climbed over Luke’s lap and out onto the yard. We stumbled a few steps away from the car.
“Are you happy?” She stared at me.
“Yeah. Are you?”
“Of course. I mean, yes. Definitely.”
I paused and waited for her to continue.
“Were you guys doing something? You and Luke?”
“Just kissing.” I blushed in spite of myself. Was she scolding me?
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s really not a big deal. He was kind of…slobbery.”
Rudy laughed and the tiara clattered onto the sidewalk.
“Oh, God.” She scooped it up and examined it. “It’s okay; it didn’t break.”
She set it on top of my head, then patted my cheek.
“Congratulations, homecoming queen. I’m so happy you won.”
She wrapped me in a bear hug, lifting me off the ground.
“You should have won,” I whispered into her disheveled hair. She couldn’t have heard me, but I felt relief just saying it aloud.
“Let’s go back inside, okay,” she said once she’d put me back down. “I missed you. I was afraid you guys left.”
“I wouldn’t leave without telling you.”
“Yeah. I know.”
We linked arms at the elbows and walked back toward Luke’s car, but he’d already gone back inside the party.
Thomas Hart asked Rudy to the Fall Ball. It couldn’t have been more obvious – they’d been friendly with each other a
t track for four years, flirting during warm ups and cheering for each other at meets, and both of them worked on the yearbook staff – but for some reason during the years I was in high school I was under the impression that the most obvious things would always mislead me. I was apprehensive of sure things and distrusting of absolutes. And plus, Rudy hadn’t yet confided in me she was interested in Thomas, and how could she come to that conclusion without first discussing it with her best friend?
She told me over homework at her kitchen table.
“Did you say yes?” I asked, tracing the eraser side of my pencil over the page in front of me.
Rudy nodded. “He was really sweet when he asked, too. He came by the house with roses.”
“Wow,” I said. “What’d your mom say?”
“She was upstairs, so she didn’t meet him, but she was impressed with the flowers.”
“Do you like him?”
“I’m not sure.”
I stared at her. How could you not know if you liked someone?
“I mean, we’re great friends. I’m just not sure if I want to chance ruining that by dating him.”
“I think you should. If you like him. He’d be a much better boyfriend than Houston was, in my opinion.”
“But Houston wasn’t Thomas.”
Was that a riddle for me to solve? I drummed my eraser in a steady rhythm against the table. Sometimes her vagueness could grate on my nerves.
She chewed her bottom lip. “Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do about dating him. But I said yes to the dance.”
They started dating in October, two weeks after the ball, and I was right about one thing: Thomas was a better boyfriend than Houston had ever been. He held Rudy’s hand in the hallway at school and he called her every night before he went to bed, she gushed to me one cold morning on the drive to school.
“Every night?” That sounded stifling, almost parental. Luke and I had been spending more time together lately, but we spoke on the phone twice per week at most.
Rudy smiled and nodded. “Right before he goes to sleep, so I’m the last person he talks to.”
Hm.
“I was thinking about inviting him to Thanksgiving with my family,” she added.
“Seriously?” I’d never been invited to the Goldens’ for Thanksgiving. Easter, Independence Day and Christmas Eve, but never Thanksgiving dinner. “It’s only been a couple of weeks though.”
“I know, but I think he’s a serious one. He’s so interesting to talk to, you know? Did you know he’s planning on going to Yale next year? He’s already applied early.”
“Wow.” I reconsidered my first impressions of Thomas. The things I knew about him were largely superficial. He was the fastest sprinter on the track team, he was kind and funny, he was one of the more popular boys in our class, liked by both the students and the faculty, though he wasn’t one of the guys who girls usually dated. He was in AP classes, but we all were. I didn’t know he was smart smart.“That’s impressive.”
“It’s really impressive. Speaking of which, did you send in your UCLA app yet?”
Abruptly, my neutral mood sank.
“No, not yet. I’m still working on the essay.”
Since the state track meet the previous spring, I had begun to receive solicitations from colleges about their track programs. I was flattered but also disappointed – the schools that sought me out were schools I’d never heard of and schools I wasn’t particularly interested in. I kept the opened letters in a tray on the desk in my bedroom, and they glared at me while I sat in front of my computer screen, ate chips and tried to think of inspired essay topics for my applications to places like UCLA and USC and Boston College, my father’s alma mater.
“How far have you gotten?”
“Um, halfway.” I had one paragraph written. One shitty paragraph. “What are you going to do if Thomas goes to Yale and you guys are still dating?”
“It would depend on how serious we were then, and whether or not I got into any schools on the east coast.”
My heart lurched. “What schools did you apply to on the East coast?”
“Dad wanted me to apply at some private schools out there. Since I know I want to do liberal arts.”
I still had no idea what I wanted to study. The only thing I loved was running, but obviously I couldn’t major in running and I couldn’t stomach the chemistry it took to be an exercise science major.
“But you’re still applying to MU, right?”
We had agreed over the summer it would be our safe school. If we didn’t share any other acceptance letters, we could at least have Missouri in common. And I didn’t think it would be so bad to go there; I would still be a two-hour drive away from my parents, two hours they would probably seldom travel.
“Duh. I sent that one in last week.”
“Good,” I said as we pulled into the Ogden parking lot. We parked in an empty spot between Deena’s Jetta and Justin Patridge’s Denali.
The sight of the building, its angular brick exterior, the familiar stone crest over the main entrance, the green vines and pretty fall flowers that crawled up the walls and scattered the front courtyard, set me at ease.
Normally I would have just let myself in the side entrance, the one the Goldens’ always used, but when I arrived at Rudy’s for Thanksgiving dinner, I rang the front doorbell. I could hear it tinkling through the foyer, and I stood and waited patiently in my dress and sweater and boots, until finally the door swung open.
“Hey.” It was Kent.
“Hi,” I blushed. “Happy Thanksgiving!”
“You, too.”
I stepped inside, and he closed the door behind me. The whole house smelled of roasting turkey and melted butter.
“You look nice.”
“Thanks.” I smiled.
Rudy had asked me to be a buffer for her parents’ first time meeting Thomas and though I didn’t quite understand it, I had jumped at the chance to spend a holiday with the Golden family. And because I was eighteen and an adult and maybe because I had argued and begged for an entire half hour, my parents agreed to hold our Thanksgiving meal at noon, giving me enough time to celebrate with both families. What I considered both of my families.
I followed Kent into the kitchen. Mrs. Golden had her back to us, stirring a huge, steaming pot on the stove. Rudy was wearing a checkered apron and chopping carrots and peppers for a salad.
“Mom’s letting me use a knife. Can you believe it?”
“So you’re saying prepare for a hospital trip?” I laughed.
“Hello, dear,” Mrs. Golden looked over her shoulder and smiled. Her hair was frizzed over her forehead from the steam.
“Happy Thanksgiving.” I took a seat at the island, where Rudy was attacking another carrot. “Can I help with anything?”
“No; no we’re just about finished, but thank you for offering,” Mrs. Golden spoke into the pot.
Kent had disappeared, and Mr. Golden was nowhere in sight. They were in the den, I suspected. I thought I could hear the sound of televised football.
My stomach growled audibly, but I was the only one who heard it. I’d barely touched my lunch, saving room for what Rudy bragged was the best pumpkin pie on the face of the Earth. Emelda had made two of them the day before she left to spend Thanksgiving with her family in New Mexico.
“Mom, is this enough?” Rudy stepped back and Mrs. Golden leaned over the salad bowl, examining. She nodded.
“Just stir it in. And pour some of the dressing into the glass server, please.”
Rudy did as requested and I watched, fiddling with my thumbs.
“Rudy, when is your boyfriend arriving? I thought we’d eat around five. Kent has to drive back to Columbia tonight.”
The inflection in her voice was different, but I couldn’t determine exactly what the change was. She was still looking into the potatoes.
“He’ll be here before then.” Rudy untied her apron, wadded it up and set it on the stool be
side me. “I’m running upstairs with Jill to change my clothes.”
Upstairs in Rudy’s room, I sat on the bed, my booted feet swinging off the side, while Rudy undressed.
“Thanks for coming. My parents are kind of freaking out about meeting Thomas.” She stood in her open closet in just her beige underwear and a white satin bra, sifting through clothes.
“Really? Your mom seemed fine.”
“That’s because I blew up at her earlier. She’s been bugging me about him since I woke up this morning.”
“What about your dad?”
“I don’t know. Unreadable, as usual.” She stepped into an emerald green dress and pulled it up over her flat stomach.
“Well, I’m ready to buffer. Use me.” I spread my arms and gestured the length of my body.
Rudy laughed, but it was stilted.
“I’m so hungry,” I said while she put on jewelry. “My mom made this low-carb, no sugar gravy that tasted like ass so I didn’t even get to eat good turkey. I’m dying to get my hands on some pumpkin pie.”
Rudy didn’t respond so I kept talking.
“What does Kent think about Thomas?” It felt devious to bring Kent’s name into the conversation that way, but I couldn’t help myself. I was still curious about him. “He has an older brother that’s Kent’s age, right?”
“His brother didn’t go to Ogden, though.”
“Oh.”
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. We heard it chime up through the, stairwell and Rudy froze for a second before rushing down the stairs. I followed, reaching the bottom of the steps just as she was opening the door.
“Hey.” Thomas wore a black sweater over his button up and tie. His shoes were so shiny I wondered if they could double as mirrors. He leaned in and pecked Rudy’s cheek.
“Hi!” Rudy took his arm and pulled him into the foyer, letting the heavy door slam shut behind him. “We’re eating in, like, fifteen minutes. Let me introduce you to my family, and I’ll give you a really quick tour of the house before dinner.”
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