Dumplin' (14 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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On Monday, Ellen ignored me. And I deserved that. I expected it. We're both quick to anger, but Ellen is always ready to forgive. It's something I've come to count on. But then came the weekend without even a text. On Tuesday, not even Tim acknowledged me. And that's when the knot in my stomach turned into panic.

Today, I have to talk to her. I don't know who's wrong and who's right, but I'm not prepared to go through this without her. I catch her in the hallway, after second period. It'll be fine, I tell myself. We're like an old married couple who can't even remember what they were arguing about to begin with.

“Hey, Ellen! Hey.”

She stops and turns to me. Her whole body is taut and closed off.

“What the hell am I even going to do for my talent?” I ask, trying to pretend like nothing happened.

She opens her mouth, and my heart raps against my chest as I wait for her to say something. But then she shakes
her head and walks off.

Callie pushes past me and gives me a dirty look before running after my best friend. “El-bell!”

The tears well up behind my eyes all day long, waiting to burst. I leave school as fast as I can. My mom has decided to let me take her car to and from school as long as I drop her off at work every morning. The second I am outside of the parking lot, I let the tears run. Dripping down my cheeks. Big, thick, and heavy. Like angry drops of rain against a windshield.

She should understand. Of all people she should know. I roll to a stoplight and close my eyes for a moment, but when I do, the only thing I see is that day when we were fourteen. It's selfish and it's wrong, I know. But I'm not perfect and neither is she. When you love someone enough, you accept their flaws. You make sacrifices to keep them sane. I need her to keep me sane. I need her to sacrifice this for me.

Behind me a horn blares, reminding me that I am behind the wheel of a three-thousand-pound hunk of metal.

At home, I pull into the driveway. I've got two hours to kill before I have to pick my mom up.

I yank my rearview mirror toward me and dab at my eyes.
Dab
, my mother would say.
Wiping only makes your eyes puffier
.

I get out of the car, but pause with my hand on the door handle. “What are you doing here?”

Mitch stands on the crack where the driveway meets
the street. His jeans are half tucked into his boots and his baseball cap is fraying and trimmed in sweat stains. “I saw you crying.”

I slam the door shut. “So you followed me?”

His cheeks flush red. “To make sure you were okay. Not to be, like, creepy.”

“Right.” I hike my backpack up on my shoulder. “Well, I'm okay.” I realize that outside of awkward small talk, we haven't really spoken since the ordeal in the hallway. I owe him an apology. “Aren't you supposed to be at practice?”

He shrugs.

“Come on,” I say.

He follows me through the backyard, and I tell him to sit down on one of our rusted lawn chairs.

“You want some peach tea?”

He pulls his cap off to reveal a matted head of hair and uses his forearm to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Sure.”

In the kitchen, I drop my bag on the table and pour us each a glass. We're in that weird time of year where we experience every season all in one day. I guess most people might call it autumn, but in the South it's this unruly combination of winter-spring-summer-fall. Regardless, iced tea is a year-round delicacy.

I sit down across from him and hand him a cup. “My mom's tea,” I say. “My gram's recipe.”

“Thanks.”

We sip for a few moments.

“I'm sorry about that day in the hallway,” I say. “When
someone said something about us dating.”

“It's fine.” He rubs his fingers up and down the back of his neck. I think every girl has a spot—a spot on a guy that makes her melt. For El, it's hands. For me it's that place where their hairline meets their neck. I love that feeling of brushing the tips of my fingers against a guy's buzzed hair. And when I say a guy, I mean Bo with his slim silver chain peeking out from the edge of his collar. Because he is the only guy.

Except maybe he doesn't have to be.

“I don't know why people have to go on dates,” Mitch says. “If we called it hanging out or something, there'd be so much less pressure. But a date, God, that's like some huge thing to live up to.”

“Yeah, it is.” Bad first date aside, there's something so comforting about Mitch. He feels like the kind of person you don't have to ask to stay because he probably won't ever leave. I reach down, tug a flower from my mom's flower bed, and twist it around in my fingers until it's limp in my hands. “I entered the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant.”

“You know,” he says, “if you try smiling, you might win that thing.”

I smack his shoulder. “You don't think it's weird?”

“That you entered?” His mouth slips into an easy smile. “Why would I think that?”

“I don't know. I guess I'm not much of a beauty queen.”

“Well, the whole thing doesn't really strike me as your type of scene, but if you ask me, you're overqualified for the job.”

Heat stains my cheeks. “Thanks.”

“I want us to be friends,” he says.

I need a friend. I need one so bad. “I want that, too.” I stand up.

He gulps down the rest of his tea and stands, too, tucking his hands in his pockets. “I oughta get to practice.”

“Saturday,” I say. “I'm off work. Let's hang out.”

“I'm sorry for whatever made you cry,” he says.

I wait for him to ask what happened, but he doesn't, and I like that about him.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Me, Amanda, and Hannah sit in a tiny booth at the back of Frenchy's with Millie at the end of the table in a chair. As we were seated, Millie took one glance at the booth and said, “Well, that looks like a squeeze.”

The waitress's lips turned into a deep frown, but Millie shrugged it off and asked for a chair. It's the type of thing that would have stopped Lucy from eating here, but Millie doesn't seem all that bothered.

After we place our orders, I say, “So, have y'all thought in terms of the talent show?”

“I kind of want to do something having to do with soccer,” says Amanda. “Like, some kind of trick.” She bounces her legs so hard that the whole table shakes. She's one of those people that just can't sit still.

“You play soccer?” I ask as Millie leans forward with both elbows on the table. I just never really thought someone with uneven legs would be as into sports as Amanda is.

“Well, I mean, I'm not on the team. But I kick the ball around with my brothers.”

Millie gives her an encouraging smile. “I don't see why
you wouldn't be able to do that. I remember a few years ago Lacey Sanders's older sister did a first-aid demonstration.”

Hannah leans back with her arms crossed. Her bangs are overgrown and hang above her eyelashes so that she's all hair and mouth. Like a talking wig. “Maybe I should dress up like a horse and trot around the stage for five minutes.”

Millie turns to me, discomfort in everything but her smile. “What about you, Will?”

“I don't know.” I never stuck with dance classes or did violin or any kind of organized sport. My talents consist of watching television, being Ellen's best friend, sighing, and knowing the lyrics to nearly every Dolly Parton song. “But we need to figure out things like dresses and pre-interview stuff, too.”

“I'm not spending any more money on this shit,” says Hannah. “I'll wear jeans up there if I have to.”

“Maybe we could make you a dress?” asks Millie, her voice creeping so high it almost cracks.

Hannah doesn't answer. It's hard for me to look at her without wondering how much she really gathered from that day with Bo in the girls' bathroom. We've said no more than a handful of words to each other and she knows a secret so big that I've not even told my best friend.

“So what do we need to know?” Amanda asks as she chews on a piece of hair. “Like, last time everyone was dressed up and we looked like friggin' idiots. It was like amateur hour.”

“Well,” I say. “There's the dress, the talent, and the interview. I mean, there's not that much more to it. The whole point is to walk up there and not fall on your face and to try to make it look like your fake eyelashes aren't stabbing your eyeballs. Oh, and swimsuits. We have to figure those out, too.”

Millie chews at the skin around her thumbnail.

Hannah crosses her arms and stretches her whole body out, eating up more and more of Amanda's booth space. “We are so fucked. Your mom runs the thing and that's all you've got?”

“It's not like I'm some pageant groupie, okay? I never gave a whoop about the whole thing until last week. I'm sorry if this is something you feel like you can't do, but too late now, sweetheart.”

Millie makes a long slurping noise as she finishes off her soda. “Well, um, Will, if you don't mind, I have a few things to add.” She places her soda down and sits up straighter. “There's more to pageants than dresses and talents. It's about showmanship. Or showwomanship. And pride. So many pageant winners go on to do big things. Look at Miss Hazel”—our local talk show radio hostess—“and Dr. Santos. It's about the full package.”

That's when it hits me. Millie buys into this stuff. This isn't a joke for her. This is the real deal.

“None of us are the perfect contestants,” she says. “I think we can all agree to that. The key is playing to our strengths. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I've got
the interview in the bag. Amanda, when you wear your corrective cleats, your soccer tricks are awe-inspiring.”

I almost hold my breath, waiting for her to get to me so that she can somehow enlighten me.

“Hannah, don't take this the wrong way, but I've seen you in a swimsuit, and well, you go, girl.” The edge of Hannah's lip quivers, and I swear to Christ, if Millie can make her smile, it will be nothing short of an act of God. “So, like they said at orientation, it's the eighty-first anniversary of Miss Teen—”

“Wait. What's
my
strength?” I ask.

She smiles. “Your confidence, of course.”

I zone out completely. How can she see something I can't feel? And what's the point in acting confident if I'm not? I never thought I cared about what I saw in the mirror. But Bo ruined that. It's supposed to be easier to like yourself when someone else likes you.

But that can't be true. No matter how much I tell myself that the fat and the stretch marks don't matter, they do. Even if Bo, for whatever reason, doesn't care, I do.

Then there are days when I really give zero flying fucks, and I am totally satisfied with this body of mine. How can I be both of those people at once?

“Do you have anything else to add, Will?” asks Millie.

I blink once. Twice. “No. No, I guess not.”

Hannah slides out of the booth. “I'm out of here.”

Amanda slurps her soda until the straw screeches loudly.

I turn and call after Hannah, “What changed your mind? When Millie first asked you, you said no, right?”

She turns back. “I get called a freak every day. I might as well make a show of it.”

“Straight from the horse's mouth,” mumbles Amanda after Hannah's a safe distance away.

Millie kicks her underneath the table. “That wasn't very nice.”

“Well, neither is she,” says Amanda.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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This time I tell Mitch that we can meet at his house. He invites me over to watch movies and I guess I just assume that his parents will be out for the night.

When the front door opens, I find the female version of Mitch wearing a light yellow T-shirt with kittens rolling in yarn. This woman who can only be Mitch's mom throws a dish towel over her shoulder and brings me in for a hug. “Oh my word!” she says. “Mitch said you were pretty, but he didn't say gorgeous.” She lets go of me for a second before grasping my cheeks and pulling me in through her front door.

The entryway of Mitch's house is a bottleneck. Small and congested. But his mother doesn't move. “Let's get a look at this face.” She slides her thumbs across my cheeks like she's wiping away tears.

“Mom!”

She steps back and I see Mitch there in the narrow hallway, his cheeks a deep magenta.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Will.” Mitch clears his throat. “Uh, Mom, we're
heading upstairs.”

His mom nods. “Leave the door open.”

“Mom, we're fine!” Mitch waves for me to follow him up the stairs.

“For the Holy Ghost!” she calls after us.

Hanging on the posts at the head of Mitch's bed are his mum garters from freshman and sophomore year homecoming. Mums are one of those things that are so specifically southern that I both love and hate them. The best mums are homemade with giant artificial chrysanthemums on cardboard backing with huge streams of ribbon hanging from them. Since they're for homecoming, they're made in school colors and the ribbons usually have glitter letters that spell out different things, like you and your boyfriend's names or your school mascot. It used to be that girls would pin them to their shirts, but, like most things in Texas, they've only gotten bigger. Now, mums are so heavy that they have to be worn around your neck. And guys—especially football players like Mitch—wear miniature versions of garters around their arms. It's all pretty ridiculous, but in a Dolly kind of way.

On the walls of his room are a few random video game posters, but one in particular sticks out to me. A girl's torso takes up most of the poster. She holds a machine gun with a chaos of zombies behind her. Taped over whatever she might be wearing is a knee-length dress made out of a paper grocery bag. I point to the poster. “What happened there?”

“Ugh, my mom. It's my favorite game—or at least it
was before the sequel came out—and she always hated the poster.” He lifts the paper bag dress to reveal a low cut crop top and olive green shorts so tiny they could be underwear. “She wasn't too crazy over me having a half-naked girl in my room. Even if she was 2D. This was her compromise. Every time I take it down, she cuts a new dress.”

“Why don't you just take the poster down?”

He sits on the edge of his bed. “I don't know. I like the game. I don't really care about the naked girl.”

“Okay?”

He waves his hands, like he's trying to erase what he said. “Not that I don't like naked girls. I mean, I don't go looking for naked girls. I”—he takes a deep breath—“I meant that I play the game because she's a badass. Not because you can see her ass cheeks.” He whispers those last two words.

“It's okay,” I whisper back. I pull out his desk chair and sit down because it's too weird to sit on a boy's bed.

“So you want to hang out here and watch a movie or something? We could go out, too. I figured keep it low-key?”

“A movie sounds good.”

“Okay. Cool. We can watch in here on my laptop. Or in the living room.”

“In here is fine. Or the living room.”

“We can sit on my bed or I could sit on the floor and you could sit on—”

I sit down next to him on his bed. “Calm down.” I'm so used to being the spastic one, the one who needs to take a
deep breath. It's sort of a relief to not feel like I could fall off a cliff at any moment. “This is fine. It's not like sitting on your bed is going to get me pregnant.”

“You should tell my mom that.”

I laugh. “Well, at least we left the door open for the Holy Ghost.”

He dims his lights and pulls out his laptop, which he sets up on a pile of pillows in front of us. “So if you want, they made a movie out of that video game or we could rent something online.”

“I kinda want to see what this zombie movie is all about.”

We settle back as the glow of the laptop washes over us. The movie is just as the video game poster advertised except the main character doesn't wear a brown-bag dress. I can tell that Mitch has seen this thing hundreds of times. His lips move with the actors as they say his favorite lines of dialogue. He laughs a few beats before every joke and grimaces before every scary part and, seeing as I've never much liked scary movies, I can appreciate the warning.

I almost miss most of the ending, because instead of the movie, my eyes focus in on Mitch's hand as it inches toward mine.

I should pull my hand away.

His pinkie brushes mine.

Then the laptop explodes.

Well, actually the hospital full of zombies in the movie explodes, but since I'm not paying attention, it scares me so
much that I scream.

“What in baby Jesus's name are you subjecting that girl to?” hollers Mitch's mom.

“
Final Death 3
!” yells Mitch.

“I'm fine, ma'am!” I call back.

The credits roll, sending his room into a near pitch-dark. “You hungry?” he asks.

I am starving. “I could eat.”

“There's that taco stand down on Dawson. We could walk and hang out for a little while before you go home.”

I follow Mitch to the kitchen where his mom is tallying up receipts on one of those old calculators with the receipt paper. “You two hungry?”

“Actually, I think we're going to walk down the street to Taki's Tacos.”

She takes her reading glasses off and they hang around her neck, bouncing against the kittens and their balls of yarn on her shirt. “Well, why would you do that when I went grocery shopping this morning? I'll make salami sandwiches. Or there's some leftover chicken spaghetti casserole, too.” She turns to me. “Not to brag, but my chicken spaghetti casserole is something to behold.”

“We want to get out of the house, Mom. Why is that such a big deal?”

“It's wasteful is all.” She puts her glasses back on. “But it is a Saturday night. Be home before midnight.”

The taco stand is on an old car lot. Weeds creep up through
the cracks in the pavement as a reminder that the focus here is tacos and not landscaping. Next to the stand is a rusted playground set that looks like it was plucked from a city park and dropped in this parking lot. We sit on a bench at the edge of the circle of light put off by the taco stand to get as far away from the mosquitoes as possible.

After we eat, we wander into the playground. I sit on a swing and so does Mitch. The chains groan against his weight.

“Good tacos,” I say.

He nods. “Did you like the movie?”

“It was . . . bloody. But I liked it.”

“So you really entered the Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I'm pretty screwed. I need a talent and I've got nothing.”

I walk back in the swing and let the momentum push me forward as I pump my legs. “Not to mention these other girls ended up entering because I did. It's like I'm supposed to be guiding them or something. But I don't even know what I'm doing. And I feel responsible for them, ya know?”

Mitch stands up behind me and gently pushes me every time I swing back. “Maybe if you worry about you figuring your own stuff out, you can help them with their stuff.”

He pushes me back and forth a few times while I let that thought simmer.

“Hey, Mitch?”

“Yeah?”

“You're really good at football, right?”

“That's what people tell me.”

“I bet you'll get a scholarship out of here.”

For the first time, Mitch doesn't respond.

“What?” I ask. “You don't think you will?”

“I don't know. I guess I will.” He stops pushing me and sits down again in the swing beside me facing the opposite direction. “I never really like doing the things I'm supposed to like. I'm good at playing football. But the whole season feels like something I have to get through.”

It's a hard thing for me to grasp. The idea that you can be so good at something and still not enjoy it.

“Being a guy in a town like this people expect things from you. You're supposed to play football and hunt and fish. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of friends, but I had Patrick. We'd go hunting on the weekends with our dads.”

“You hunt?” I ask. I shouldn't be surprised. Tons of people hunt here. It's disgusting, but it's not like I've sworn off meat, so I'm not one to talk.

“Well, sort of,” he says. “I've been hunting since I was a kid. I'd go out with my dad and he'd let me have half a beer while we waited for whatever animal was in season to show itself. But whenever it came time to shoot, I always missed. For a while, I blamed it on me being a bad shot. My dad would get so mad at me. I'd miss the mark. Just barely. Then he started to realize that it was on purpose.”

I feel this prickle of warmth in my chest for him. I think maybe it's the things we don't want to talk about that are
the things people most want to hear.

“We were in seventh grade, and my dad was harping on me real bad. Patrick and his dad were there. It was deer season. I hit one.” His voice trails off. “It was an accident. He was a big proud buck. My dad slapped me on the back. I remember feeling like I was choking.”

“I'm sorry.” The words sound so lame. Like they did when people said they were sorry about Lucy.

He stands and pulls my swing back by its chains. I feel him let out a long breath against my neck. “I know guys aren't supposed to cry, but I cried a bunch that night. And I guess that's when I decided being good at something didn't mean you had to do it. Just 'cause something's easy doesn't make it right.” He lets the chain go and I kick my feet out into the stars.

That night, I dream that I am inside Mitch's video game, wearing the tiny shorts and a shredded shirt. My body isn't some Photoshopped dream version of itself. My thighs are thick with cellulite and my love handles hang over the waistband of my shorts. My golden waves are done up big and high in an old-school Dolly perm. Like the girl in Mitch's game, there are guns, ammo, and knives strapped to my back and thighs with a bazooka resting on my shoulder. I am a total badass. A fat badass.

I run into an abandoned civic center. The revolving door pushes against months of debris as I enter the building. They come slowly at first, but then they multiply. Zombie beauty queens. Everywhere.

I wait until they're almost too close before I fire the bazooka. Gone. Particles fly. I duck. They're dead. Like, really dead this time.

But there's still one left. One graying zombie, dressed for the best day of her life in a torn red gown. Her crown is bent and broken and her sash is too faded to read. She walks toward me, one foot dragging as it scrapes against the marble floor.

I reload my bazooka.