Dumplin'

by Julie Murphy

  “Huh.” He crosses his arms and sinks down further into his seat. “I’ve always thought of her as some kind of cartoon character. But maybe not.”

  The Harpy’s light above us cuts out and we let the radio do the talking.

  “No car?” he asks after a while. “What’s the story there?”

  I lean my head against the headrest. “It wouldn’t start. About two months ago maybe.” Is that all? It feels like it’s been forever since everything happened and I entered the pageant. And since I lost Ellen. “It’s been in the shop ever since. Can’t afford to get it fixed.”

  “I feel ya,” he says. “Money’s supposed to make things easier, but it’s always doing the opposite. I sort of wish we worked on a barter system.”

  His words grate on me. Bo’s gone to private school for the last few years, and that’s anything but free.

  “What?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “No. Come on. Out with it.”

  After a long moment, I say, “Well, I mean, you went to Holy Cross. I get that you’re trying to be nice, but I don’t think it’s fair to say you actually know what it feels like to be broke.”

  “Wow,” he says. “That’s a pretty broad assumption.”

  Headlights flood the cab of the truck from behind us. “Whatever,” I say. “You asked. Good night. Tell Bekah I said hi.”

  I slide out of his truck and slam the door behind me.

  He rolls down the window. “Just so you know,” he calls to me. “Not everyone who goes to private school is rich. Especially not the poor kids who can play basketball.”

  The window rolls back up, dividing him from me, before I have a chance to add anything else.

  My cheeks burn with embarrassment. But more than anything, I’m confused. Why wouldn’t he tell me about being on scholarship?

  My mom gets out of her car and runs up to Bo’s window. I watch from the other side of the truck as she uses one knuckle to knock on the glass. She talks in the high-pitched voice she only uses when communicating with “menfolk.” Bo says something and her whole face lights up. She touches his forearm and holds her other hand to her chest. “Bless your heart, Bo!” I hear her say.

  She walks to the car and I follow. “Uh? Mom?”

  We get in the car and she says, “I’m so sorry, Will. That Pee-lates kicked my behind and I was out like a light the second I got home.”

  “It’s fine,” I grumble as she’s turning out onto the street. “But what was that about?”

  “Your sweet coworker. Bo, he said his name was?” She laughs, and out of the corner of her mouth says, “That boy’s jawline could cut glass.”

  “Mom.”

  “I said we were shuffling around, sharing a car, and I appreciated him waitin’ on me.” She turns, but not hard enough for her blinker to stop ticking. “But then he said y’all work the same schedule and he could drive you home every night.”

  “Mom! You said no, right?” Panic rips through me. Click. Click. Click. The blinkers are still going.

  “Well, why would I do that? He was so kind to offer. Don’t let me stand in the way of a good deed.”

  I sigh. A huge dramatic sigh.

  “Willowdean,” she says. “Enough with that sighin’. Count your blessings.” She pulls into our driveway. “Especially the good-looking ones.”

  “I hate you,” I say as I climb out of the car.

  “Well, aren’t you a wretched thing,” she calls after me. “And maybe do your hair before your next shift! A well-styled head of hair is a head above the rest.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  The bell for World History rings and I barely make it through the door before Miss Rubio shuts it behind me.

  I stop. Right there, in Amanda’s usual seat next to mine, is Bo. I think my brain is dribbling out my ears. From the back of the room, she shrugs and mouths, Peachbutt wouldn’t move. I wave my hand at the air to tell her it’s fine. But really it’s not, because what the hell is even happening?

  Seating for World History isn’t assigned, but no one has budged since the first day, so it goes without being said. Knowing Amanda, there was a confrontation when she saw him in her seat, but someone had to lose. And it wasn’t Bo.

  He sort of half smiles when I sit down, and says, “Willowdean.” And that’s it. That is the only word he says for the whole damn period.

  When the bell rings, I scramble out the door as fast as I can.

  I meet Mitch in the parking lot and his face brightens because he thinks this stupid grin on my face is for him. No, I want to tell him. Don’t give me that sweet smile. I don’t deserve it.

  The next day, Bo’s there again in Amanda’s seat. I watch from the corner of my vision as he brushes his knuckles across his chin. I want to touch him. It seems inevitable. He’s a negative and I’m a positive and all that stands between us is a matter of time.

  Like yesterday, he says my name at the beginning of class, but this time adds, “I’ll see you tonight.”

  There is a chorus of bees in my stomach as I listen to Bo whistling in the kitchen. Bo always whistles when he thinks no one is listening. But normally it’s no song in particular, just a hodgepodge of tunes. But tonight his lips press together and whistle “Jolene” by Dolly Parton. Which turns my knees to mush.

  Ron comes out from his office and hums along as he restocks the receipt paper. With a few minutes to go before closing time, Marcus barks, “Don’t you know any other songs?”

  The whistling stops for a moment as Bo flips a burger. The burger lands, sizzling against the griddle, and he begins to whistle again.

  Marcus watches us curiously when, at the end of the night, we both walk toward Bo’s truck.

  I get into his truck just as his phone rings. He picks it up, and I watch as he listens for a moment. The vein in his neck bulges, his head shaking. Through his clenched teeth, he says something and hangs up before sliding in behind the wheel.

  “Who was that?”

  He chews on the inside of his bottom lip for a moment. “My brother.”

  “Oh.”

  “He just needs me to pick him up after I drop you off.” He stares straight out into the field behind Harpy’s. “We don’t really get along.”

  I don’t have any siblings, but I know what it feels like to butt heads with someone you see every morning and every night.

  “I envy him sometimes,” he says. “It wasn’t the same for him when our mom died. I don’t know how true it is, but sometimes I think I absorbed more of the blow than he did.”

  I nod. I knew Lucy in a way my mom never did, and it’s hard not to feel like I carry the heavier burden because of that. “I’m sorry,” I say as we’re buckling our seat belts. It’s like a hot potato that I’ve been holding on to for days. “For what I said about you going to private school.”

  He grips the steering wheel and cranes his neck back while he reverses out. “It’s fine.”

  We sit at the stoplight in silence until it turns green. “What happened then? You were on a scholarship, I guess?”

  “Yeah.” I love the way he drives with one hand anchored to the bottom of the wheel as he uses his palm to spin it when he turns, like he’s driving an eighteen-wheeler or something.

  “Left on Rowlett,” I say.

  “I was in eighth grade when one of the Holy Cross dads saw me playing. I don’t want to say I was really good, but I guess I was. I just didn’t know it because no one gives two shits about basketball in this town.”

  “Except at Holy Cross,” I say. Holy Cross is too small for a football team, but their basketball team always wins district and sometimes state.

  “Yeah, so I guess a bunch of the dads got together and talked to my dad about me going there. But we couldn’t afford it. Not with everything that had happened with my mom. You can’t give high school kids sports scholarships. At least not according to the athletic association they compete in. They put together this academic scholarship for me. And for my brother,
too. My dad said I couldn’t go unless he went.”

  “But you said it was your fault that y’all had to leave, right?” I point to my driveway a few houses down. “This is me up here on the left.”

  “I blew my knee out at the end of the season last year. We didn’t have insurance then, so I’m not really sure how everything got paid for. More of those rich dads, probably. But I wasn’t going to be playing anytime soon.”

  The car idles in front of my house. I wish the drive home were three times as long. “But you were on an academic scholarship? They wouldn’t take that away from you.”

  He crosses his arms. “After my injury I got in a fight with a guy on my team. Collin, that kid who swung by Harpy’s over the summer.”

  “Over what?”

  He shakes his head. “What every guy gets in a fight over. A girl.”

  The air in his truck is dense, and I can feel it all the way down to my bones. “The girl who was with him?”

  “Amber. We dated for two years. But I was a shitty boyfriend to her anyway.”

  I want to ask him how, but I don’t know if I want to know the answer yet.

  “I broke Collin’s collarbone. He broke my nose. When we went to enroll for the next year, they said funds had dried up. The donor had to pull their donation. And now my little brother hates me.”

  “He misses it?”

  He smirks. “Yeah, that kid was a king there. He’d been dating the same girl since seventh grade. Who does that?” He shakes his head, still smiling. I can see what he doesn’t say: that he loves his little brother more than is healthy and would probably play on a busted-up knee to make him happy. “He’s a freshman now. He took the whole thing worse than I did. And then because he’s fifteen and everything’s shit when you’re fifteen, his girlfriend broke up with him. Said she couldn’t do long distance.”

  “Long distance?”

  “Yeah, the place is about a ten-minute walk from our house.”

  “Wow.” My hand hovers over the door handle.

  “Let me walk you to the front door,” he says.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  He persists. “Really.”

  “We actually use the back door.”

  “Why?”

  “The front door’s jammed. It’s been like that for a long time.”

  “So why don’t you fix it?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Just one of those things we never got around to. And now we’re so used to it that it doesn’t matter.”

  His lips twitch like he’s got something to say, but he stays quiet.

  I let myself out of the truck and hold the door open a second as a thought forms in my mind. “Why have you been sitting next to me these last two days? In class. You can talk to me at work.”

  He does that thing again where he brushes his knuckles across his chin. “I guess I would rather talk to you everywhere.”

  Behind the fence, in my backyard, I smile.

  I dump the contents of my backpack on my bed, hoping to at least do some homework before I fall asleep. Splayed out between my textbooks, with a bent cover, is the how-to magic book that Mitch gave me. I pull it to my chest and slump down to the floor. I’d completely forgotten about my talent—or even the pageant—for a few days. Bo coming back into my world, if only in the tiniest of ways, turns my brain into a vacuum, where nothing else can exist, because I’m so consumed.

  But I don’t want that. I can’t want that.

  Thumbing through the pages, I find several different tricks, but none of them grab me. A note slips from the pages, and I unfold it.

  Will, when I was a kid, I went through a magician phase where I wore capes and top hats everywhere. I thought maybe you could use some magic of your own.—Mitch

  I slide the note back between the pages and sigh. It’s ridiculous. Me, performing silly magic tricks. But what else is there for me to do? I don’t have a self-defining talent like Bekah or even something I stuck with long enough to fall back on.

  I lean back against my bed with the book in my lap, and begin to practice the motions of hidden coin illusion. This feels like settling. A missed opportunity. But I don’t think that makes it wrong.

  I try to channel that spark of energy that made me enter the pageant in the first place. But that little bit of magic is nowhere to be found.

  FORTY-FIVE

  When I pick my mom up from work the next day, she’s got a dress bag draped over her arm. She holds her hand up as she gets into the car. “Before you say anything, hear me out.”

  “Okay?” But I can’t hide the apprehension in my voice.

  “Debbie and I hit up a few thrift stores on our lunch break, and I knew you hadn’t gotten a dress yet. And well, you have to get the dress approved in a few weeks, so you don’t have much time. You may not realize it, but you can’t just buy a dress off the rack. That’s not how it works.”

  I know I need a dress, and I know I’m dragging here. But there is no recipe for disaster so guaranteed as my mother clothes shopping for me. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We still have the bruises.

  “It’s a little on the simple side, but that means we can add our own touches. Like it was custom made.”

  I promise myself that I’ll at least try it on. I will give her the benefit of the doubt.

  Mom lets me get dressed in her room so I can use the big mirror. The door clicks shut behind her, and I realize how odd it is that she doesn’t stay. She roams the house all the time in various states of undress, searching for a stray sock or ironing her scrubs. It’s not as if she ever instilled modesty in me. But there came a point, maybe around the time I was eleven or twelve, when my mom stopped sitting in fitting rooms with me or brushing her teeth while I was in the shower. I guess it could be that she was trying to be intuitive to whatever privacy needs she figured I might have. But the thought tickling in the back of my mind says that she’s not interested in being reminded of this body I wear.

  Whether or not it’s true, it still hurts.

  I have to give it to her: the dress isn’t horrible. It’s red—the perfect shade of red that’s reserved for sexy nail polish and fast cars—with a sweeping neckline and straps that hang off my shoulders on purpose. My shoulders don’t create the sharp lines I’ve seen on actresses and models. Instead they slope at the edges, but still I like the dress.

  Until I zip it.

  It zips.

  But that doesn’t mean it fits.

  Christ. The fact that I’m able to get the zipper over my hips is a lesson in inertia or just willpower. The fabric pulls against the seams, threatening to tear if I even look at a chair the wrong way. And the top is pretty huge. I can actually tuck my arms in. (In case I get cold or something.)

  “All right,” I call to my mom. “Come on in!”

  My mom stands behind me, and I can see both our reflections there in the mirror. I watch as her gaze travels over me, and her lips dip down at the corners when she sees the way the fabric stresses against my hips.

  Our eyes meet, and she catches herself. Her mouth presses into a smile. “Surely we can let it out a few inches,” she says. “And tuck it in up top.” Her voice is too high and her smile too big, but I don’t care. I can ignore those things. Because she’s making an effort to meet me where I am. “What do you think?” She pulls the top of the dress back, bunching the spare fabric in her fists.

  I can almost imagine what it might look and . . . I like what I see. “It’s good. I’m only going to wear it for twenty minutes, right? We can make it work.”

  I sit in the third row of the school auditorium. Millie sits beside me, reading a paperback romance, and beside her sits Amanda, her feet bouncing as she drums her fingers on her thigh.

  Today is the day we all have to have our talents approved for the pageant. All I’ve got is the one magic trick I learned from the book Mitch gave me. The rules state that a contestant should prepare a sample, so I’m hoping this is enough.

  Hannah squeezes down
our aisle past Amanda and Millie. “I’m out of here as soon as they give me the okay.”

  “Don’t you think it would be polite to stay for everyone else’s talents?” asks Millie.

  Hannah plops down in the seat beside me, but doesn’t bother to answer.

  Millie’s patience for Hannah is slowly slipping, and I get this sick joy from that. I would love to see cheerful little Millie lose it on Hannah’s grumpy ass.

  Once the crowd settles, my mom gives her spiel and says that costumes for the talent portion will need to be approved at the same time as the rest of our wardrobe. “The surprises,” my mother says, “are for the audience.”

  First up is Bekah Cotter who—ta-da!—twirls a baton like a freaking superhuman. This time, however, Bo’s name is not stamped to her butt cheeks. It’s really not fair how much I can’t stand her. She’s maybe said twenty words to me, but the thought of Bo, in a tux, escorting her at the pageant turns me into this version of myself that makes my eyes burn.

  Then there are five girls in a row who sing songs from either Les Miz or Chicago. Karen Alvarez’s Chicago performance is deemed too sexy and she is given one week to come up with another song. She slinks off the stage, holding her songbook to her chest. I can tell she’s mortified, but it smells of pageant scandal and I kind of love it.

  “Amanda Lumbard?” calls Mallory Buckley.

  Millie pats Amanda on the back as she reaches down under her seat for a duffel bag. Once she’s onstage, I notice that she’s not wearing her Frankenstein orthopedic shoes. I mean, these still have a thicker heel on one side, but they’re more athletic-looking.

  “I guess this isn’t very traditional, but it’s what I’m good at.” Her voice shakes a little. She squats down and opens her gym bag to retrieve a soccer ball. Without any further introduction, she begins dribbling the ball back and forth between her knees. It’s kind of amazing. She head butts the ball a few times and even kicks it over her head, but the ball never hits the ground.