“Don’t ruin today with your doubts,” she tells me.
They aren’t doubts. They’re questions. Why the sudden shift in town opinion? How did someone who has been called dykish so often she practically answers to it make it onto the ballot? The Corn Dolly is not a beauty contest, but raw beauty is always a consideration. Gerry called me beautiful. I am trying to think who I would call beautiful. My mom. Jeanelle. Mrs. Carrington. They are polished and pearled and feminine.
Janie Lee. Those long legs covered by skinny jeans that get lost in her UGGs. That black sweatshirt of mine she grabbed from the garage, the front hoodie pocket slight torn. It matches her hair. Matches the heavy mascara highlighting her eyes. Yes, she’s beautiful. Maybe even striking.
But I am the girl-who-isn’t-a-guy who lives perpetually on the guys’ side. A brother, a dude, a . . .
I climb onto the concrete barrier as though it is the chest freezer in my garage and swing my legs. Janie Lee follows. It is now almost too dark to see anything more than the shadowy outlines of the other side of the lake. We’ve lost complete sight of the barge. But we let ourselves be absorbed by nature around us. Chirping crickets and scrambling squirrels. They are harmonizing in a nearby stand of trees. A barred owl sings the song of a whinnying horse. Somewhere below us, a fisherman revs a boat engine and heads home to clean his catch.
“Can you believe it?” I ask.
“I can. You’ve done a lot of things to put yourself in that position, friend.” She reels off a list that is basically one item: helping old people.
“It doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Don’t be silly. Just enjoy it. Your mom is happy. Your dad is positively enraptured. I swear, B, it’s like he just got to baptize the whole town. Accept the fact that people see the real you.”
The real me is a cloudy, fuzzy thing these days.
“Are you excited? Even a little?” she asks.
“I’m . . . overwhelmed.”
“And delighted?”
“It still feels like a fluke, you know? Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”
She swings sideways. Puts her feet up on my thighs and shoves her hands in the hoodie pocket. “You know what we should talk about?” A pause. “Woods.”
“O-kay.” I keep swinging my legs, pounding my heels against the concrete.
“I was wrong,” she says. “The night of the fire.”
“Oh.”
“Tuesday night, after practice, he kissed me. Or I kissed him. Either way, we kissed. We had finished singing. I was packing away my violin, and he was shoving sheet music into his backpack and he just came out with it. ‘We should kiss. Billie said we should kiss. And I’d like to so I can stop thinking about it.’ Can you believe that? Well, I guess you can if you told him to do it, or maybe he’s already told you this story.”
“He hasn’t.”
“And so we had an awkward moment where we worked out if it was okay with me. Which of course it was. You know I’d been thinking about it too. Except we were both worried that if it stank, our musical partnership might change. It’s funny the things you think about when you should just be feeling, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I desperately want her to get to the heart of it. Tuesday night was five days ago. Five full days of seeing them nearly all day, and I picked up on nothing. Nada. They hadn’t even sat near each other tonight.
“So, the kiss, yeah, nope.”
“Huh,” I say. So, the kiss, yeah, nope: exactly how I felt. “Did you talk about it?”
“Yeah. I said, ‘That was sort of like dropping a book on the lower register of a piano.’ And he said, ‘Whelp, that’s that,’ and dusted his hands. Billie, he dusted his hands. That’s how bad it was.”
“Did he bite your lip or something?” I ask.
“No. He’s decent enough at kissing. It was because”—the palm of her hand lays flat on my stomach, above my belly button—“I don’t love Woods from here, from my gut. I love him from my head, from our history. I just got confused.”
I knew the feeling well. “It’s easy to get confused when you’ve got great people in your life.”
“Right? Don’t tell him I said this, but honestly, I had more going in the guts region when I kissed Mash.”
I whip around. “You’ve kissed Mash?”
She scrunches and takes her hand off my stomach. “You haven’t?”
“I kissed Fifty once.”
Her turn to scrunch and push me. “You kissed Fifty? When? Why do we even have that silly code if everyone has kissed everyone?”
“Everyone has not kissed everyone,” I say, locking eyes on a dock across the lake whose decorative pink lights have started flashing.
“Nearly everyone.” She moves closer, and returns to the posture she assumed when we first arrived. Feet hanging over the side, body slouched, hands back in the hoodie pocket. “You should kiss Davey. He’s into you.”
“I probably will if he’s not into Thomas,” I say, because maybe I’d like that. He has very nice lips, and he’s easy to talk to.
Should I tell her I also kissed Woods? I could, but it doesn’t matter now.
“To be honest,” she tells me, “I’m a little bit relieved. About Woods, I mean. It takes a lot of energy to like someone. And since Tuesday . . . I’ve felt better, lighter. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Not only is he going to die in the 42045 zip code, someone will probably construct a forty-foot statue of Woods Carrington right next to Molly.”
“I’m glad you feel easier about things.”
“Me too.”
“Just friends is easier,” she says.
“Just friends is easier,” I repeat.
She leans her head against my shoulder, and we wait to pedal home until there are uncountable stars.
16
Billie, stop rocking on two legs. You’ll break the chair.” Mom beckons my brain back to the dinner table and looks past me to the television.
The New Madrid Fault Line rang like a rotary phone for four or five seconds yesterday—only a 3.5—and the newscasters are acting like we’ve never had an earthquake before. It happened during church and was over so fast no one even thought to get under the pews. It also happened while the church was recognizing—by standing ovation—that the preacher’s daughter had been nominated for the Corn Dolly.
“You don’t think the two things are connected?” a lady asked another in a way that suggested she most certainly thought they were.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” one gentleman replied.
I wish Dad hadn’t overheard that.
He hasn’t brought it up, because he’s focused on a more earth-shaking conversation he had with Davey’s mom at the BI-LO, which is not technically BI-LO anymore, but we can’t be bothered to call it Greg’s Market.