“At the end of rehearsal, you will each be assigned a Texas landmark to plan your opening number outfit around. Everyone is asked to wear a denim skirt, plaid shirt, and cowboy boots. Beyond that, you are welcome to create whatever you like in homage to your landmark. For example, if you were given our state flower, the blue bonnet, you could wear a headpiece made to look like blue bonnets. This is an opportunity for the judges to get a taste of your personality and see how well you do with an assigned task. Take advantage, ladies.”
Ellen sits in the front row with Callie, who is of course competing in the pageant. They wear matching workout gear with Sweet 16 stamped on their hips. We haven’t spoken in two entire weeks. The last time I went two weeks without talking to Ellen was when her parents rented an RV and took her up along the West Coast. I wrote her a letter every day she was gone and left them in her mailbox. I went mad without her, and when she got back, both of our moms let her spend the night for two nights in a row.
This is so much worse. Because she’s right there. She’s at the other end of the room, and if I call out to her, she won’t answer. I’ve almost apologized so many times, but I’ve waited too long now. And a part of me still thinks—no, knows—I’m right.
We all stand up to learn the routine. Millie leans over, standing on her tiptoes, and says, “You should talk to her.”
“What are you talking about?”
She pushes up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “Ellen.”
“Grapevines!” says my mom over the twangy music. “Five counts left. Five counts right. Bekah!” she calls. “Come up here, so the girls can see your technique.”
Bekah blushes, but obeys my mother. Just looking at her annoys me, and really I’ve got no good reason. She’s good at everything. She’s pretty, too. And she’s humble.
I spend the next hour tripping over my feet, trying to keep up with the endless grapevines and turns as we all weave in and out of one another. I catch my mom watching me in the mirror as I trip over Amanda’s platform shoe and have my ass handed to me by a hardwood floor. In the end, my mom was right to call Bekah forward, because she knows what the hell she’s doing.
At the end of rehearsal, I am sweating in places that I didn’t know could sweat.
Millie’s got this crazed look on her face and a huge sweat ring around her neck. “That was so cool,” she says. “What landmark did you get?”
I hold up the slip I drew from the bowl. “Cadillac Ranch.” A place I’ve only ever seen in pictures. Something you gotta understand about Texas is that it’s freaking huge. I know tons of people who have never even left the state. I remember hearing that, depending on where you start, you could drive for a day and still be in Texas. “What about you?”
She grins. “The Stockyards. Up in Fort Worth.” Only Millie could turn a livestock market into a pageant-worthy headpiece. If her optimism were contagious, I’d be betting on myself to win this whole thing.
THIRTY-FIVE
I’ve heard that at bigger schools, dances aren’t really a thing anymore. There are too many students, I guess. But, unfortunately for me, dances are very much alive and well at Clover City High. And, outside of prom, the hottest shit in town is the Sadie Hawkins Dance. Because a sister can’t just ask a guy out like it’s some normal thing, girls have gone to great lengths to make sure that their Sadie Hawkins proposition is the most elaborate.
Then three years ago Macy Palmer reinvented the wheel when she asked her boyfriend Simon to the dance by employing the Twelve Days of Christmas. I am not kidding. Every morning this kid came to school and was greeted by anything from three hens to twelve drummers drumming. And the guy was already her boyfriend! It’s not like he suspected she’d ask someone else. (Let the record show that they both graduated. She was four months pregnant while he had one foot out the door thanks to a golf scholarship.)
After that, it was no longer acceptable to ask a guy to Sadie Hawkins by baking him a plate of cookies or by wearing a T-shirt with his football number on the back. Now, not only do you have to muster the courage to ask a guy out in the first place, but you’ve got to do it with style.