by Julie Murphy
Hattie reaches up and gathers my hair before pulling it over my shoulder. “I know that. Of course I know that. But what if she could have it all? What if she could have a great grandpa and a badass aunt and a sort of flaky grandma and a mom and a dad?” She pulls my hand back to her belly. “Her little foot has been kicking out all day.”
I wait for a moment, but nothing.
Suddenly, I yelp. There’s a ripple of movement under my sister’s shirt. “Holy shit!”
My sister laughs. “I lie around all day and wait for her to kick. She’s stingy with her love. Just like her auntie Ramona.”
“I’m not stingy,” I retort.
“You’re like a cat,” says Hattie. “Territorial, too.” She pulls herself up, using the railing. “You coming in?”
“Not yet. Just give me a few minutes.”
She leaves me there on the porch, and I wonder what the logistics of all this means. Is Tyler moving back in? Will they get an apartment? But most of all I wonder what all this means for me. I should feel free, shouldn’t I? Hattie has made her choice.
Part of me feels a little sad. Replaced, even. I imagine what life would look like if I stayed here in this trailer with Dad. I can’t think of him alone. I’m scared that somehow he might wilt away without Hattie or me here. But if I stay, I might just wilt away, too.
APRIL
FORTY
Coach Pru makes a schedule for me. After spring break, we start meeting after school before I go to work. I’ve made it totally clear that I have no immediate plans for college or anything like that, but I like pushing my body further when I’m in the pool, and she likes having someone to push. So I guess we’re sort of both fulfilling a need for each other.
She likes that I ride my bike for the paper route, but she wants me to start running and lifting, too. Since the thing that I like most about swimming is, well, swimming, I compromise and run twice a week after my route and lift with her at the Y every Tuesday and Thursday after I swim. She has me concentrating on my turns between laps and my dives. She says that’s where most swimmers lose the most time. She drills me on technique and has me doing all kinds of things like counting strokes and swimming with tennis balls in my fists. It’s hard, grueling work, but nothing has ever made me feel so in control of my own life.
Tyler and Hattie start attending parenting classes, and even though he’s still technically living back home with his mom, he crashes at our place at least four nights a week. He’s still an idiot, but he’s trying. Like, the other day he voluntarily did the dishes. For no reason. I thought I was having an out-of-body experience.
Seeing Freddie is less and less horrible. We don’t really talk, but there’s none of that awkward eye contact anymore. Instead, we wave and move on.
I ran into him outside the school library the other day. Like, literally, he was reading something on his phone, my head was somewhere else, and our bodies collided.
“Hi,” I blurted. It wasn’t like I could get away without saying something after a head-on collision like that.
He paused for a beat, his forehead creasing. “Hey.”
I felt words piling up in my chest and in my throat, like I was about to vomit all my feelings everywhere. Homesickness racked my bones, and all I wanted was to be able to joke around like we used to, and maybe kiss him, too. Mostly, I missed being his friend. But I couldn’t make myself regret a single minute of our relationship, because I didn’t. Not even a little bit. “How are you doing?” I finally asked.
He slid his phone into his backpack and shoved his fists into his pockets and nodded. “Good. Good. I signed up for freshman weekend at LSU. Swim team tryouts are this summer. I haven’t decided if I’m going to give it another go. I’m pretty out of shape.”
“You should do it,” I told him. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
He smiled, but it was nothing like the toothy gap smile I love. “I gotta go to class.”
“Right. Better keep those grades up, so they don’t take away that acceptance letter.” What a dumb thing to say.
He nodded again. “It was good to see you.”
“You too,” I whispered. But he was already halfway down the hall. I wondered what would happen if I caught up to him and just forced him to be with me. As his friend or his girlfriend. Or however he would have me. But I hurt him. When I was hurting the most, I turned around and cut off the person who’d been there for me more than anyone.
One night at the end of our shift, Ruth and I pile into the booth nearest the kitchen to refill all the salt and pepper shakers, hot sauce, and ketchup.
“Hey,” says Ruthie. “Do you need all your graduation tickets?”
I shrug. “Probably not. How many do we get?”
“Something like ten.”
“Uh, yeah.” I laugh. “I just need two. Maybe three.”
She glances up at me. “You need three,” she tells me. “Have you even seen your mom since Hattie’s shower?”
I shake my head. “She’s called a few times and texted us both, but I don’t know. I mean, I’m not even mad at her, really. She’ll always be this way. I think I’ve come to terms with that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be selective about how often and when I see her.”
Ruthie sticks a funnel into a hot sauce bottle and carefully begins to pour. “I wish I could choose when I have to see my family.” She sighs heavily. “My mom won’t shut up about prom. Saul didn’t go to his, and it’s like I’m somehow depriving her if I don’t give her this. She keeps saying it’s a young woman’s rite of passage. I don’t even think she cares if I actually go. She just wants the picture to put on her mantelpiece.”
“Oh God. I haven’t even thought about prom. I’ve never been to a dance.”
“I haven’t been to one since freshman year,” she says.
And something about this makes me wonder if we’ll someday regret not going. “So you don’t want to go to prom?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I think I’d want to if she wasn’t breathing down my neck. Like, I guess it is a sort of big deal, ya know?”
Saul slides into the booth beside me and lays a big, fat, wet kiss on my cheek. “What’s a big deal?”
“Prom,” says Ruthie. “Mom won’t back off about it and you’re not around to distract her.”
He lays his server apron down on the table and begins to count out his tips. “Think of this as the final gauntlet.” Looking up for a moment, he adds, “And maybe you should go, Ruthie. You might even have fun.”
She scoffs.
I can’t help but think that maybe we should go. There have been so many things over the last few years that Ruthie and I never did. Things that felt totally hetero and outside of what two gay girls in a small town should get to do, and school dances are definitely number one on that list. We always joke about Vermont, but maybe we don’t have to wait until we’re old ladies with fifty cats, making maple syrup.
I lean across the table. “Ruthie, go with me. Be my date to prom.”
She shakes her head even as I’m still talking. “No way.”
I grab her hand, forcing her to look at me. “What? We’re already rejects, right? Why not give these people a real thrill?”
Saul holds a fluttering hand to his chest. “Nothing would excite me more.”
Ruthie turns to her brother, and he reaches for her other hand, so that she’s stretched across the table holding both of our hands. “Ruthie, you’ll have fun and give Mom what she wants on pure technicality, which is basically the exact opposite of what she wants. It’s perfect.”
I feel myself smiling, because with Saul’s insistence, she can only say yes. Using my pointer fingers, I draw a heart in the air around my face. “Ruth, will you be my super-platonic gay date to prom?”
She shakes her head again, but her lips say, “Fine. Yes, I’ll go with you, but only because two small-town lesbos at prom completely undermines the hetero bullshit that is our high school’s prom.”
I grin.
“Or just a yes would have been good.”
FORTY-ONE
Hattie informs me that because I did the asking, it’s my responsibility to buy our tickets to prom. So by the time I’ve made that dent in my cash supply, I can’t bring myself to buy anything more than a thrift-store dress. I’m not the only girl in Eulogy to have this idea, though, so by the time I make my selection a few days before prom, my options are a mauve mother-of-the-bride dress and a short bright-yellow dress with huge velvet sleeves and black velvet polka dots to match.
Yellow it is.
Carefully, Hattie and I detach the sleeves, which actually have tulle inside of them to keep them pouffy, and we are left with a not-so-horrible yellow polka-dot strapless dress with a very pointy sweetheart neckline. The skirt falls into layers of ruffles, none of which we can spare, because I need every bit of length I can get.
“You really should have let me touch up your roots,” Hattie says as she curls my hair.
She had me pull a chair into the bathroom from the kitchen and face it so that my back would be to the mirror. For the big reveal, she said.
“I don’t like that I can’t see what you’re doing.” I fiddle with the evil-eye charm hanging from my wrist. I’m even wearing the black plastic spider ring from Thanksgiving.
“This is what they’d do if you went to a salon anyway. Trust me, okay? Have I ever led your hair astray in the past?”
It’s true. Without Hattie I might have a mullet, and I love the way the freshly warm hair feels against my back every time she releases it from the curling iron. “What are we even supposed to do at prom?”
“Whatever you want,” she says. “Dance. Eat. Make fun of people.”
My phone buzzes then, but it’s not a text or a call. Instead it’s an alert from the National Weather Service issuing a severe thunderstorm warning. “Great.” I hold up the screen for her to see. “I don’t think it will matter much what you do to my hair at this point.”
“Text Saul and tell him to put the top on the Jeep.”
Since I don’t have a license and Ruth doesn’t have a car, Saul has volunteered himself as our ride. I shoot off a quick message as Hattie puts the finishing touches on my hair.
“Okay,” she finally says, and rests the curling iron on the side of the sink. “Close your eyes and stand up.” She kicks the chair into the hallway. “You can look.”
When I turn around and open my eyes, it’s not that I see some kind of transformation. No, I look very much like myself. I have to duck a little to get the full picture since our mirror is so short, but my watery blue hair has been meticulously curled into loose waves that make me look like the kind of mermaid that might sing you to your untimely end. The yellow-and-black polka-dot dress doesn’t hurt my eyes as badly as it did at the thrift store, but maybe that’s just the crappy lighting in our bathroom. It almost looks like something you might find in the mall. Still, it’s not quite cool enough to be vintage.
I nod. “I love it. You’re sure the shoes are okay?”
We both glance down at the pointy red flats Mom got me two years ago for Christmas. Having size-twelve feet has always resulted in limited footwear options.
“I mean, I wouldn’t say they match,” says Hattie. “But that makes it more Ramona.”
“Don’t you ever wonder what we might look like if we’d grown up with money?” I ask. “Or if I weren’t tall?” I shake my head with my hands on my hips. “I don’t know. It makes me think.”
Rain begins to splatter against the bathroom window.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess. But then aren’t those all the things that make us who we are?” She sits down on the chair in the hallway and holds her belly. “Sorry. Just can’t stand up like that for too long. It’s not like you wouldn’t be Ramona if you weren’t poor or tall, ya know? But I feel like dealing with the consequences of those things have been what makes you, well, you.”
I nod. And I guess she’s right there. Maybe it’s not all the little labels that make us who we are. Maybe it’s about how all those labels interact with the world around us. It’s not that I’m gay. It’s that I’m gay in Eulogy, Mississippi. It’s not that I’m tall. It’s that I’m too tall for the trailer I live in. It’s not that I’m poor. It’s that I’m too poor to do and have everything I want. Life is a series of conflicts, and maybe the only resolution is accepting that not all problems are meant to be solved.
When Saul pulls up, I run outside with my army jacket draped over my head. Ruth sits in the back in an icy-blue floor-length halter dress with her hair half pulled up and curled into ringlets.
“You look great,” I tell her. “Superhot.”
“Yeah, she does,” says Saul.
“Thanks,” Ruth says. “Mom and I actually agreed on the dress.” She leans forward. “That’s before I told her you were my super platonic gay date.”
“She’ll live,” says Saul as he reaches over my lap and into his glove box to retrieve two corsages, which happen to match each of our dresses. “I knew neither of y’all lesbians would think to buy these.”
“You asshole,” Ruth says as he slips hers over her wrist, “why’d you have to go and make tonight special?”
“My two babies are off to prom,” he says. “It’s already special. And hey, I didn’t even go to my prom. You’re making my gay dreams come true right now.”
“Well, I’m glad someone’s dreams are coming true tonight,” says Ruth.
“Hey now!” I slide the elastic band over my wrist. “FYI, I am a very dreamy date.”
The rain softens just barely as we pull up to the Eulogy Civic Center. I hold my jacket out so that Ruth can duck underneath as we both run inside.
“Y’all, get into some good trouble for me,” calls Saul.
Inside, Ruthie and I pose for pictures, and when I feel people staring—including her boyfriend from freshman year—I take her hand to give them something worth remembering.
The halls of the civic center are strewn with white streamers and paper lanterns. With the lights dimmed, I can actually forget that we’re in the same place where town elections and the annual craft show are held.
We first stop at the punch bowl, where we run into Adam, who is with a shorter Latino girl whose black curly hair is twisted into an intricate updo. Adam wears a fitted black suit with a black shirt and a skinny red tie to match his date’s A-line-cut tea-length dress.
“Well, well, well,” says Ruth, “Adam’s got a date.”
The girl, who I’ve never seen, blushes even though she doesn’t look the least bit amused by her date, who is chugging punch.
Adam glances around before saying, “Ruth, Ramona, this is my”—he coughs into his shoulder—“cousin, Sophia.”
I try not to laugh at how obviously he’s embarrassed by this. The good news is no one has to know this is his cousin, and the even better news is that Sophia is pretty hot. “It’s great to meet you, Sophia. I haven’t seen you at school before. Do you live around here?”
“Hell no,” she says. “I live outside Hattiesburg. My mom made me come down here for this.”
Adam groans into his fist. “Can you at least pretend to be cool with me for one night?”
Ruth and I laugh, and after a minute Sophia does, too.
“Well, I guess we’re gonna check things out,” I tell them.
“Cool,” says Adam. “Just leave me here with her then.”
I grab Ruth’s hand, but before we leave, I ask, “Do you know if Freddie—”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Adam tells me. “He’s been all weird and brooding lately. Like an angsty vampire.”
What if he shows up? Or what if he doesn’t? Or even worse: What if he brings a date? I don’t know if I could handle seeing him with someone else right now.
I nod and pull Ruth behind me to the dance floor. “Hey, Sophia,” she calls over her shoulder. “Save me a dance?”
Rather than shy away, Sophia says, “If you think you can handle thi
s.”
I squeeze Ruth’s hand as we slip into the crowd. “Oh my God! Who are you? I bow down, Queen Sexpot!”
“I know! I know!” Her voice is giddy. “But it might be cool to know someone in Hattiesburg.”
“Ruth!” I pull her to me in a huge hug. “You didn’t tell me you got into Southern Miss!”
Her eyes water, which is as close as I’ve ever seen her come to crying. “It’s all happening so fast. Everything’s going to change.”
I hold her hands in mine. “Yeah, it is,” I admit. “But we can still be the same.”
She nods, and then a slow grin spreads across her face. “She was really hot.”
“Yeah, she was. Come on!” I yell at her over the music. “Let’s dance.” I’ve never really been the kind of person who dances, but the music reminds me of dancing with Freddie in Jackson Square and how our bodies melted into each other and how perfect that moment was.
I suddenly miss him so much. I miss parking my bike in his driveway every morning and swimming with him and eating all his different breakfast concoctions and making out in car washes and broom closets.
We don’t dance in the same way Freddie and I did, with our skin pressed together, but the sight of us is still enough to make a few heads turn. I watch intently as a couple of faculty members whisper back and forth and point at us. I dance so that Ruth’s back is facing them, and I wonder if they’re going to tell us we can’t be here or that we can’t dance together. It’s the first time I’ve felt in danger of being told I don’t belong simply because I’m being myself. It’s a feeling I want to forget, but one I know I will always remember. But then the librarian, Mrs. Treviño, steps into the conversation, and the other teachers quickly disperse. I heave a sigh of relief.
After a few songs, we sort of slip into the background like everyone else and we’re no one’s spectacle. I can’t stop myself from glancing around every once in a while, searching for Freddie. But I can’t imagine he’d have a date or that he’d come here by himself. Yet this is just the type of thing Agnes would force him to attend.