Janie Lee and Gerry help me into the top of Belle’s dress. Gerry handles my zipper, her cold fingers raking up my back. I give Davey the fur pieces for his legs, face, and arms, envying that he will be warm. Makeup time.
My face becomes the property of Janie Lee. She is nearly as close as she was when we kissed. I close my eyes so I am not tempted to make this moment more than it is. Davey turns his face over to Gerry. When they finish, we have three minutes to get to the photo booth.
We hurry on papier-mâchéd legs, take a regal picture, and then set about the arduous task of waiting. Thom and Gerry are off like the cat and mouse of their namesakes, seeing panels they do not have tickets to and promising to meet us later. Fifty, Mash, Woods, and Janie Lee leave us in search of pancakes. Davey and I remain standing near the ballroom because the flaw in this design is that there’s no sitting of any kind.
“What do you usually do with the money?” I ask Davey.
“What money?”
“The winnings?”
“Oh, I put it in savings. Dad always insists. Nice to think we’ll give it away this time, though.”
“Did you make a decision about Waylan?”
“Yep,” he says. “I’m staying in Otters Holt.”
I ask what changed his mind and if he has told his dad.
After a pause, he begins. “The other night in your garage. We were all working on the costumes, and the clock was ticking, and I was thinking, I’m really happy here.” He gives a full smile. “You’re a part of that, you know?”
“I like being part of that,” I say.
“It’s pretty cool that we’ve come full circle.”
“What do you mean?”
“We met when we were kids. It was at a Harvest Festival. Maybe 2007 or 2008. You were playing Wiffle ball with Big T in a Batman mask.”
I have a vague memory of Wiffle ball. And an even vaguer one of Batman. I’d gone around for a week or so in a costume. “At the elementary school?” I ask.
“Yep. And I hate to tell you this, but superheroes suck at Wiffle ball.”
I want to punch him, but if I do, I would put a hole in Beast’s jacket.
His fingers are slim and busy, drumming the wall as he continues. “I assumed you were a boy until you took your mask off. And then you said something about being able to be anything you wanted. I can’t remember the exact words, but it left an impression.”
I don’t remember him. I remember hitting a home run. Memories are lopsided sometimes.
“That’s what started me on costumes,” he says. “You. Batman. It was like I found a piece of myself in Otters Holt then, and another piece of myself there this fall. Waylan is fine. Thom and Gerry are . . . well, they’re Thom and Gerry, we won’t change no matter where we live.”
“Your relationship amazes me. You move so easily around feelings.”
He laughs a raucous laugh. “Not always,” he says.
He tells me their story. A story that changes and rearranges the pieces.
How freshman year, some guys at Waylan started calling Thom and him the Oxford Homos, among other titles. So when Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon, he didn’t have to imagine my confusion; he’d felt it. He spent hours dissecting what made his peers, even some faculty at Waylan, ship them. They both had girlfriends when it started. They never experimented with clothes or makeup, apart from LaserCon. As far as he could tell, they existed outside stereotypes.
“Maybe it’s because we never shied away from physical contact. Thom’s dad is a counselor, his mom a kindergarten teacher; he was raised on a diet of hugs and kisses,” he says, and then goes on to tell me that he has never been naturally touchy-feely. That Thom was his only friend for so long that he grew to enjoy his brotherly affection. “He has a way of disarming everyone.”
I nod at that.
“Looking back, I think people were jealous. Thom was just coming into his charisma, and everyone else was years away from having a personality. He could have lavished his affection on them, but he’d chosen me and they hated me for it.”
To shut up the barrage of voices, Thom, who has since decided he is demisexual, kissed him. No asks. No buildup. They were playing video games one minute, kissing the next. That could not have been easy to do at thirteen. Even for Thom.
“After that when someone yelled, ‘Hey homos,’ I heard them, but I knew I wasn’t gay. I’d . . . well, I’d given it my best go, and I still liked girls. He liked girls too. And boys. And anyone who made him feel deeply. Which I did. So I get why he kissed me. And he gets why I didn’t want us to be that to each other. Most people want puddles to splash around in; Thom wants souls where scuba diving is encouraged.”
That was about the best description I’d heard of Thom. And it made sense why he fit so well with Gerry. They are creatures of equal depth for different reasons. If I knew Gerry for a thousand years, she would tell me a story about herself I’d never heard before.
“You thought we were together,” he says. “That’s why you asked me if I was jealous of Gerry?”
“I . . . yeah,” I admit. “I was trying to get you to tell me in the car.”
“And I was trying to not confuse you. You’d kissed Woods. You were considering Janie Lee. I thought throwing myself in the mix was douche and insensitive.”
“So you let me believe you were gay?”
“I only tried to let you believe that I love Thom. And I do.”
That makes sense. I still wish I’d known. It would have made my attraction to him not feel so ridiculous.
He explains that after their experimenting he stopped caring about everyone else’s opinions and listened when Thom assured him, “They’re shallow, bro,” and “We know who we are.”
“Billie, this shit is murky and personal. You had to be able to explore,” he says as a conclusion.
I tell myself he has a special Billie Edition Telescope that allows him this view. He is sure Janie Lee will be fine, whatever we decide. He is also sure we will win a thousand dollars.
“I mean, look at us,” he says.
Look at us, I think.
Our cell phones buzz with news. We’ve made the LaserCon costume cut.
We kill the next half hour making up things we’d do with a thousand dollars if we weren’t giving it to the Harvest Festival. Buy seeds for Mr. Nix? Get Thom some better rims? Purchase Gerry a shitty car so she doesn’t have to ride the bus to Denny’s when Thom’s at school? Dozens of footballs for the Spandex Junkwagons? Canvases for Mom? A new concordance for Dad? (He’d personally like a complete set of expensive dictionaries.) A couch more comfortable than the Daily Sit?
Davey offers another spontaneous option. “We could give it to the church. For the fire damages.”
“That would be nice,” I say. I’d love for my dad to know that even though I look different than him on the outside, we have similar insides.
“Assuming we win.”
“Don’t go doubting us now,” I say. “I like assuming we’ll win.”
One hour later, we have walked, paraded, posed, twirled, been examined and celebrated by a ballroom full of attendees and judges. This is a competition for nerds. Bonus points for special effects.
Fifty contestants are cut to ten. Ten are cut to two. Gerry and Thom and the Hexagon cheer as we make progress. Our remaining competition stands on stilts, towering over us, and is covered in actual bark from top to bottom. I’m not sure which character he intends to be—I am woefully bad at fandom—but his height alone is extraordinary. We’ve been lamenting our inability to bend and stretch; this dude has to balance.
Regardless, we have made it this far, and I am ready to collect my money and save Molly the Corn Dolly from being a cliché.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” an announcer says. “The judges of the 2017 LaserCon Costume Contest have selected a winner. It is my pleasure to award this check of one thousand dollars”—he reveals a big cardboard check from behind the podium—“to . . .”
“A tale as old as time! David Winters and Elizabeth McCaffrey in their reimagining of Beauty and the Beast,” he yells into the microphone.
In the front aisle, Woods waves his arms like a conductor.
Fifty screams, “We’re walking the beam, bitches.”
Janie Lee blows me a kiss.
30
I like winning. I even like winning in a dress. I like winning next to Davey. I like Janie Lee’s fingers pressed against her mouth and then sending me love across the room.
I like it so much it spills into every fiber, every cell. I twirl. Everyone should feel like this. Even Tawny Jacobs. Ten years of losing can’t be easy when this is what winning feels like.
Back in the family bathroom, Davey and I are cutting ourselves free from Belle and Beast. We’re alone with our cardboard check and costume deconstruction. The others are getting food. Again.
Davey is leaning close to the mirror, removing signs of Beast, applying signs of Davey. He traces dark lines around his lids, and I review what I know about him. Dorky. Passionate. Helpful. He likes good music; doesn’t care if it’s popular. School isn’t hard for him. Making friends is. There’s no such thing as casual contact. He loves his complicated dick of a dad. Loves his best friend. Shares some of the same questions about sexuality and faith as me, despite having grown up in a different household.
He’s a bright, bright soul.
“You’re thinking hard over there,” he says to me.
I sigh at being caught. And then my stomach growls—low and rattling like an animal—because we, unlike the crew, haven’t stopped to eat all day. He pokes me in the stomach, and I poke him back, and then we are grappling, laughing, giddy that we have won.
Then, the six inches of height between the top of his head and the top of mine no longer exist. His lips are inches from mine, paused, asking politely, but longing to kiss me.
“I still don’t want to confuse you,” he says.
The slightest pressure of his body against mine is heavy. And warm. We’re both sweating from the costumes and smelling like powder from the makeup. Buzzing, delirious. The day is a Russian doll, unnesting layers I did not know existed.
I say, “Maybe it’ll help,” because I cannot imagine letting this moment pass.
We both turn our heads, and then our lips are on each other, hungry. I kiss him too hard, too aggressively. As if I have something to prove. There is pride in our tongues from a day spent winning what we want. He matches me stride for stride, and I don’t think he minds that I use my teeth. No one else could have kissed me like that. Not even Gerry, who is freer than anyone I know. This isn’t freedom; this is release. I let myself feel everything, the way I haven’t with everyone else because I’ve been too busy thinking to feel.
And at the end of it, I am a dandelion, and Davey is a gale-force wind. He scatters me everywhere. Part of me lands back in Kentucky, caught in Molly the Corn Dolly’s large hand. Another bit of fluff drifts to Missouri and lands atop the arch in Saint Louis. Another crosses the Mississippi River into Illinois.
Our foreheads are still glued together, both of us catching our breath, when Mash says, “Uh, guys, Woods is out front with the Suburban,” and I think, Damn, one of these days I’m going to kiss someone and no one will interrupt it.
“You okay?” he asks when Mash closes the door.
“I’m . . .” What am I? “I’m not sorry.”
“Good.”
“You’re not gay,” I say, because it keeps occurring to me.
He grins. “Nope. But you’ve got a lot going on, and if you’d rather be with her, I won’t make it hard for you.”
The best thing about Davey in this moment: he doesn’t expect me to say anything else. We pack the rest of our stuff and reemerge as if nothing has happened.
We are annoying as hell on the way home. We honk the horn, which sounds like a dying mule. Twice, Woods pulls the Suburban over, and we run laps around it like hooligans. When he reaches town and drives into Molly’s parking lot, he makes us take a picture saluting her. We are idiotic, happy. I’d like to drive too fast or run through a cornfield with my arms in the air. I am alive and weightless.
“We should bottle this,” I scream.
“No,” Woods says. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“We should share it,” we say together.
“You two are fucking annoying,” Fifty says, pushing at Woods’s head and rolling his eyes. “We’re gonna have to do some new project, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, you are. And I know just the one,” I say.
And there we are, back in my garage, everyone pressed around tables, tearing pages from old, destroyed books, like I did for Belle. Mash straddles the chair backward and whispers, “I gotta get a girlfriend so I stop getting drafted for this shit.” I tell him we’d just draft her too, so he should get right on that.
He pops a Dorito into his mouth, smiles like he knows who he has in mind, and starts folding papers according to my example. “You ever think you maybe have an oral fixation?” I ask. He must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.
His lips search for the straw and he whispers, “You ever think you’re fixated on my cousin?”
I deserved that.
I lean in to Mash’s ear. “Did you know he was straight all along?”
Close to us, everyone is folding paper. We could so easily be overheard, but he is careful, angling his mouth where no one will read his lips. “Are you straight, B?”
“I’m complicated,” I answer.
“Yep,” Mash says, his shoulders already falling before they ever got totally into the shrug. “Guess I knew that already.”
“Secrets. Secrets,” Woods calls, not wanting to be left out.
Mash handles that straightaway. “I was asking if she had more chips in the house.”
Here’s a thing about Mash. He’s everyone’s secret keeper. When he does choose a girlfriend, he’ll have her for the rest of his life.
Here’s a thing about Fifty. He always asks the obvious question. “So are there?”
“Are there what?” I ask, dumbly.
“More chips, asshole,” he says, scoffing.
“I’ll go see.”
“I’ll come with you,” Janie Lee says.
This is the first time she is voluntarily placing herself near me in front of my parents. We have to start somewhere. Mom and Dad are watching/not-watching TV in the living room. Janie Lee flips them a strange wave, and I announce that we’re getting chips.
“What are you all up to out there?” Dad inquires, and Janie Lee blushes.
“Hexagon things,” I say.
Dad, who is in a jovial mood, snuggles closer to Mom and says, “Please do not burn the garage down.”
“There are two things for sure in this world. One, I’ll die in these boots, and two, I will never hurt the garage.”
“There’s my girl,” Mom says.
“Your girl,” Dad repeats. “Yep. But she’s my girl tomorrow for KickFall.”
I am her girl when I’m burning things. His girl when I’m winning. At least they’re excited about the game. No amount of excitement keeps him from watching Janie Lee and me too closely, suspiciously.
All we have are those colored veggie-stick things that taste like air. Mash won’t care, but everyone else will. “Popcorn?” Janie Lee asks, and I agree. We wait on the microwave to ding. As the kernels heat and pop, she says, “Was I weird just then?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay.”
“We’re okay?” she asks.
The microwave dings. “I am if you are,” I say. And then, I don’t know why, I say, “I kissed Davey. I’m telling you because I didn’t want to lie about it.”
She backs toward the dishwasher, grips the counter behind her. I am studying her expression, and she says, “Are you saying I lied about somethin
g?”
“No. I just want to level. Because we’re us.”
“Oh. Okay.” The oh is painfully spoken; the okay shows some recovery. “Thank you. I’ll be glad to be us again.”
I wonder which us she means.
She takes the veggie sticks, and I snag the popcorn, and we gift the Hexagon with these spoils. Fifty’s napping on one end of the Daily Sit. He snarls only a little, either at waking up or my lack of flavorful provisions. He goes back to sleep and the rest of us fold and tape for hours.
I did the right thing in telling her, but that shocked look plays in a loop. When I walk her to the car, she asks to play her violin to me over the phone when she gets home. That tells me her state of mind: keyed up. The Lindsey Stirling piece she plays is flawless. That tells me the state of her heart: aching.
When she picks the phone back up, and thanks me, she says, “Billie, you looked beautiful this morning as Belle. Thank you for inviting me to the Con.”
I tell her I’ll meet her the next morning at the elementary school, and she says good night. I don’t think either of us sleeps.
31
There are so many cars in the elementary school parking lot we have to park them in the outfield. Woods has dressed Fifty in an orange vest and handed him a flag to direct traffic. Everyone in walking distance leaves cars at home. People line the sides of streets because the town doesn’t have sidewalks except in front of the school. Mothers hold small sticky fingers and tote Cheerios and sippy cups. Fathers hoist toddlers up to rest on their shoulders and bump strollers along the road.
The weather is gorgeous. There’s wind coming in off the lake so crisp and strong you can practically smell the fish being caught and cleaned. Mash cut the grass one last time this morning, and the smell of alfalfa clippings rises to my nostrils, tempting me to believe it’s spring instead of fall. Everything is fresh and vivid. We sold eight hundred tickets in advance. Woods swears we’ll get two hundred more at the gate. Maybe three hundred.
Dress Codes for Small Towns Page 19
