Dumplin'

by Julie Murphy

  “I’m glad you’re back.”

  I nod. I’m glad I am, too. This little grease hut feels like a slice of normal. And so does he. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is.

  He pulls the conductor hat off and repositions it on his head. “And I’m sorry you felt the need to leave.”

  “It’s okay.” I stack and restack the same pile of to-go bags before asking, “Are you missing Holy Cross?”

  He smirks. “I actually miss my uniform.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of nice to not have to think about clothes in the morning.” He brushes his thumb along his lower lip. “I guess you could say I’m not a morning person.” Hearing him talk this much after two months of silence is like a downpour after a drought.

  “And then my brother hates it.” He chews the skin around his thumb for a second before adding, “But it’s my fault we had to leave HC.”

  I’m about to ask him why, when Marcus walks back in. “Y’all, those moms are not foolin’ with that candy.”

  Heat spreads to my cheeks, like we’ve been caught making out.

  At the end of the night, we all walk out together, the two of them laughing about Ron’s Zorro costume. Bo still wears the conductor hat, and I can’t even look at him without smiling like a total idiot.

  Outside, Mitch is leaning up against my car.

  It’s horrible of me, but I resent him being here. I’m like one of those people who doesn’t like for their food to touch. I need for Mitch to stay on his side of the plate.

  “Hey,” I say to Marcus and Bo. “I’ll see y’all later.” I turn to Mitch. It might be physically impossible, but I feel Bo’s eyes on my back like a weight. “Um, hi? Nice costume.”

  Mitch is dressed like Indiana Jones in khaki pants and a bomber jacket with a wide brim hat. “It’s Saturday night,” he says. “It’s Halloween.”

  I laugh. “Which basically means I want to go home.”

  He shakes his head. “Nope. Not happening. I’m going to show you why Halloween is awesome. Let’s go. Get in.”

  “I don’t have a costume.”

  He shrugs. “You’re a fast-food employee. Or a candy striper.”

  My feelings for him swing from hot to cold and back. I don’t want him here. I want him here. He’s crowding me. He’s not close enough. I feel a smile flicker on my lips. “Okay. Prove me wrong.”

  FORTY-TWO

  In the car, I text my mom to let her know I’ll be home a little late, but there’s another message waiting for me.

  BO: glad you’re back.

  I bite in on my lips, making them disappear, and drop my phone into the cup holder.

  Mitch drives us to Stonebridge, the richest neighborhood in Clover City. I guess maybe it’s not rich by normal standards, but it was built in the last ten years and it’s gated. The gates are always open, but whatever.

  After parking on a random street, he tosses me a pillowcase.

  “Wait. We can’t go trick-or-treating this late.”

  “It’s not that late.”

  “It’s past midnight.”

  “Well, we are.” Mitch doubles back. “Forgot something.” He runs back to his car and comes back with a brown whip twisted around his fist.

  “Are you shitting me with that thing?”

  “What? It makes the costume more authentic.”

  We walk down the center of the street for a while, looking for a house with the lights still on. The pavement is smooth and pale, nothing like the patch-riddled street I grew up on. Every house is huge and hulking, but crammed together with only slivers of plush, green grass between them.

  When this place was first being built, my mom and Lucy used to drive through here every few weeks with me in the backseat. We watched as all the houses were built and each street added. I remember being in awe of the new street signs, like some virgin territory had been discovered and we were some of the first to visit it. I had no understanding of how small Clover City was, but, to me, this was where all the glamorous people lived. Movie stars, musicians, models. And back then, my mom was still glamorous to me. I thought the three of us would get our fancy house someday.

  The first house we stop at is redbrick, with a huge bay window and a glowing chandelier visible from the street. Mitch rings the doorbell, and I stand half behind him. It’s late and whoever answers isn’t going to be thrilled to have two teenage kids at their doorstep.

  No answer. Mitch rings again.

  I start walking back down the sidewalk. “No one’s answering. Let’s go.”

  “Wait!” says Mitch.

  The door creaks open to reveal a woman in a bathrobe, with water dripping down her neck and her hair wrapped in a towel. She’s too old to be my mom, but not old enough to be my grandma. “Can I help you?”

  Mitch holds his pillowcase out without hesitation. “Trick or treat!”

  The woman looks like she’s woken up in a different time zone. “Oh.” She holds her wrist up to check the time, I guess, but there’s no watch there. “Right.”

  She closes the door almost all the way, and returns moments later with a bowl of candy. Without hesitation, she dumps half the bowl into Mitch’s bag.

  He nudges me forward, and, despite how foolish I feel, I open my pillowcase.

  She pours out the remainder. I guess this lady figures if two high school kids have the balls to go trick-or-treating this late at night in the nicest neighborhood in town, we deserve some candy.

  Bathrobe Lady pats her stomach. “I shouldn’t keep all this in the house anyway.”

  Mitch tips his hat. “Gracias, señorita.”

  As we’re walking down the pathway, he bumps into my shoulder. “See,” he says. “That was fun.”

  Most of the houses we visit have reactions like Bathrobe Lady, don’t answer, or turn their lights off when they see us outside.

  At one house, an old man in boxer shorts answers. His face is perpetually frowning with wrinkles so thick he could be melting. “Get outta here, ya damn hooligans!” he yells.

  “Trick or treat!” says Mitch over the sound of a small dog yelping behind the man.

  “Oh, I’ll trick ya.” The man opens the door fully to reveal a shotgun at his side. “I’mma whip y’all’s asses!”

  Mitch grabs my hand. “Run, run, run!”

  We haul it down the driveway and around the corner as the old man’s heckling laugh echoes behind us.

  When we’re a safe distance away, I stop with my hands braced on my knees. We’re both heaving. “That. Crazy. Bastard.” I take a fresh gulp of air. “Could have killed us,” I say.

  “Nah,” he says. “He wanted to scare us.”

  I stand up straight, letting the muscles in my back stretch. “Mission accomplished.”

  I hold up my bag of candy, much heavier than I ever expected it to be. “I think it’s time to call it quits.”

  Mitch holds a finger up and winces a little. “One more house,” he says. “Please?”

  Beneath the moonlight, he looks different. Almost mysterious. And maybe cute. A small laugh escapes me. “One house,” I say. “Choose wisely.”

  He settles on a huge white house with a long driveway down at the end of the cul-de-sac.

  Mitch rings the doorbell, and after a few minutes, an exhausted woman in a witch hat and a sweat suit answers the door. “Oh, darn,” she says before Mitch even has a chance to say trick or treat. “We ran out a little while ago.”

  “Indiana Jones!” cries a boy in a pirate costume a few feet behind her. It’s a homemade costume. The kind pieced together with great attention to detail. “So cool!”

  Mitch beams.

  “It’s okay,” I say to the lady. “We’re just out foolin’ around. We should head home.”

  She wishes us a good night.

  We’re halfway down the driveway before we hear the kid yell, “Hey! Hey! Wait up!” Pirate Boy is sprinting toward us with a plastic pumpkin dangling from his fingers. He sk
ids to a stop in front of us and holds out a piece of candy for each of us. “I like your costume,” he says to Mitch.

  “Thanks, little man. Your pirate costume is pretty cool.” Mitch doesn’t talk to him like he’s some little kid. Because to Mitch, he’s not. To Mitch, everyone’s somebody.

  The kid runs back inside to where his mom is waiting at the doorway.

  We sit on the curb with our candy at our feet. It’s the first night this year that feels like fall might actually be on its way, and each breeze sinks into my southern bones.

  “I told you Halloween was awesome,” he says.

  I lie back on a patch of rich people grass (real Texas grass is crunchy and brown) between the road and the sidewalk. “It was okay.”

  “When that kid saw me, he saw Indiana Jones. Not some guy who botched play after play in last night’s game. Or some dude who plays video games all day. To him, I was someone else.” He lies down next to me.

  “But doesn’t it kind of feel like you’re hiding from yourself?” I turn to him; the grass tickles my cheek. “I get not wanting to be yourself. But isn’t it almost sadder to pretend otherwise?”

  “I don’t know. I think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you’re trying to become. Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can.” He turns on his side and props himself up with his elbow. “Like, that first time I talked to you, you terrified me. You kind of still do. But the more I act like you don’t, the less you actually do.” He pauses. “Terrify me, I mean.”

  I get what he means, because I think I’ve played pretend my whole life. I don’t know when, but a really long time ago, I decided who I wanted to be. And I’ve been acting like her—whoever she is—since. But I think the act is fading, and I don’t know if I like the person I am beneath it all. I wish there were some kind of magic words that could bridge the gap between the person I am and the one I wish I could be. Because the whole fake it till you make it thing? It’s not working for me.

  “What?” he asks.

  I shake my head and clap my hands over my mouth, smiling against my fingertips. “I terrify you?” The thought of it makes me feel bad, but it’s kind of nice, too. To not feel like the one who’s about to jump out of their skin all the time.

  Mitch pulls my hands down, away from my face. His palms are sweaty, and I’m realizing how close he is. I can see the pores in his nose. “I think the good stuff is always supposed to be a little bit scary,” he says.

  His lips brush mine. I stay very still as he curls his arm around my waist. We don’t kiss with our tongues, just with our mouths open. I can feel the terror and exhilaration in his trembling touch.

  But I am not terrified. Not at all. And it’s then that I know this moment is a lie. I know what I should be feeling and it’s not there.

  FORTY-THREE

  The next day is like someone has dropped an atomic bomb in our house. It starts when my mom gets home from church and decides to try her pageant dress on.

  “Dumplin’?” she calls from her bedroom. “Baby, my zipper’s stuck.”

  I trudge up the stairs. My mother has fit in her old pageant dress every year since she was crowned. Including the year she gave birth to me. From the way Lucy told it, the house was a Jazzercise fun house, and it was a close call, but she did it.

  I’ve seen this dress—a sea-foam-green sequined bodice with a chiffon skirt—so many times that it’s not even pretty anymore.

  Since the house is so old, there’s no actual master bedroom upstairs. Just a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway. It’s weird to think that my mom’s and Lucy’s rooms are the same rooms they grew up in their whole lives. I imagine them as teenagers slamming doors in each other’s faces or sneaking back and forth from room to room. I’ve heard so much about their lives together before me, but sometimes I wonder about what they chose not to tell me and it’s those blanks that I like to fill in.

  I walk down the hallway and reach for the glass knob and open the bedroom door.

  Oh shit.

  From the doorway, I can tell that the zipper isn’t the problem. There’s a good one-inch gap between the fabric across my mom’s back.

  Sweat dampens her forehead as she waves me closer.

  I make a show of pulling on the zipper for a minute or two before saying, “Uh, Mom? I don’t think the zipper is the issue.”

  She whirls around and looks over her shoulder so that she can catch her own reflection. “Godammit,” she spits.

  Okay, so my mom has maybe said the Lord’s name in vain two times in her entire life. And only once that I can really remember.

  “Unzip me.”

  The zipper slides down like a sigh of relief.

  She sits on the edge of the bed, holding the front of the dress to her chest. “Okay, so I’m gonna have to go on a cleanse and add in some cycling and Pilates classes.” She says Pilates like “Pee-lates,” the twang in her voice becoming more and more pronounced with the added anxiety. “I think Marylou’s got a class I can get into tomorrow night.”

  “But I have to go to work,” I say. “I need the car.”

  She looks up at me with her eyebrows raised, like, this is a crisis and I do not understand the gravity of the situation. “Well, sweetheart, we’re going to have to make it work. You keep taking the car to school and I’ll have it in the evenings. Most girls your age don’t even have cars. We get what we get. We don’t fret.”

  I don’t bother fighting her on it.

  I sit in the break room picking on the apple my mom gave me when she dropped me off. I swear, when she pulled into the parking lot, she held her breath, like she might catch some extra calories if she inhaled too deeply near so much trans fat.

  I expected to hear from Mitch yesterday. A follow-up call of some sort to make sure we were cool after Halloween. Or maybe, like, a customer service call to rate my satisfaction. But nothing.

  I woke up yesterday morning and had to convince myself that he’d actually kissed me. It wasn’t a bad kiss. There just wasn’t that heart-stammering feeling I had had with Bo.

  Today, though, he was his usual self. With no mention of The Kiss. I started to think that maybe he really was someone else that night, and it was the magic of Halloween. But the guilt and regret I feel are all too real.

  Then, at the end of the day, when we walked to the parking lot, he took my hand firmly in his. It was hard not to feel like we hadn’t skipped a step somewhere. I wasn’t about to embark on another relationship that was all action and no definition. Before I left he handed me a small hardback book called Magic for the Young and the Young at Heart. “I remember you saying you needed a talent. For the pageant.”

  I shoved the book in my backpack and thanked him.

  “There’s a note inside,” he said. “But read it later.”

  There’s a knock on the break room door, even though it’s open.

  “Hey,” says Bo.

  I smile involuntarily. “Hi.”

  “I wanted to make sure you got home okay the other night.” He fiddles with his fingers, and then shoves his hands in his back pockets. “I felt weird leaving you with that guy, but I recognized him from the dance.” He clears his throat. “You guys must be pretty close, huh?”

  My cheeks burn. “Oh, right. Yeah, that was Mitch.”

  He coughs into his elbow. “Cool.”

  A slight laugh slips from me. “Cool.”

  He turns on his heel and heads back to the kitchen.

  I release a slow breath through my pursed lips. I think that must have been the tamest interaction of all time. And I feel like I’m on fire.

  After we close up, the first thing I notice outside is the lack of my mom’s car. I’m dialing her before the back doors even close.

  “Hello?” Her voice is thick with sleep.

  Dammit. “Mom?”

  “Oh, Dumplin’!” I can hear her grabbing her keys and slamming the sliding glass door. “On my way, baby!”r />
  The line goes dead.

  Marcus and Bo watch me.

  “You guys go on,” I say.

  Marcus nods his head toward where Tiffanie’s waiting for him in her car. “You wanna bum a ride?”

  “Thanks, but she’s on her way.”

  Marcus and Bo share a look. “I’ll wait with you,” says Bo.

  Marcus nods a “thanks” to Bo and leaves.

  “I can wait inside,” I tell him. “Ron’ll be here for a while still.”

  “It’s cool.” He digs his keys out of his pocket. “Let’s wait in my truck.” He must see the pause in my expression. “Just sittin’,” he says. “I’ll even put the armrest down.”

  Once we’ve settled, Bo is indeed true to his word and lowers the armrest between us.

  We sit in silence for a while, listening to the hum of the road at our backs. The scent of him hits me, all artificial cherry and aftershave. I guess I stopped noticing it over the summer, but it’s been a while now since I’ve been in his truck. I don’t quite understand how something can feel so comfortable and foreign at the same time. Like, déjà vu.

  I reach forward and flip through some stations. Bo says nothing about me commandeering his radio.

  “I can’t hear Dolly Parton anymore without thinking of you.”

  My stomach flips as I laugh nervously. “Well, lucky for you she’s not on the radio too much anymore.” My voice comes out more abrasively than I mean for it to. But really, I love that I’ve staked my claim on his memory. Except that I can’t think of Dolly without seeing El or Lucy. And that doesn’t seem very fair.

  “Why Dolly?” he asks. “I don’t really get it. She’s so . . . fake.”

  “Her boobs are, yeah. Obviously.” I trace patterns on the armrest, looking for the right words. “She’s the kind of person who looks like she’s never had a bad day. I guess she’s sort of my guru. Like, her music is good, I guess. But it’s her that makes it good. With her big hair and fake boobs. I’ve never seen anyone who’s living the life they set out to live like she does.”

  He studies me, but doesn’t say anything. “It’s like every day is Halloween for her.” Mitch in his costume flickers in my memory. “But for Dolly, it’s not dress up or make-believe. It’s her life. And it’s exactly how she chose for it to be.” I stop myself before I get too cheesy.