Dumplin' (12 page)

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HarperCollins Publishers

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I waste the days of my suspension on the couch. After school, Ellen comes over with my homework before my mom gets home. We watch television in silence and although I want to ask her about school and if she's heard anyone talking about me, I don't. Tim drops her off and picks her up, but he never comes in. I like Tim, but I like him even better for not inviting himself in and for letting me have El for these few hours.

At first, my mom and I operate on our own schedules and in the evenings it's like someone's come in and divided the house with red tape. When I leave my room, she stays clear and when she leaves her room, I stay in mine. But slowly, our paths wind closer and closer until Saturday morning when she says, “I've got an all-day pageant planning meeting today. We're gearing up for open registration. There's tuna salad in the fridge.”

It's not a truce, but it breaks the silence.

Mitch texts me a few times, telling me he's sorry for the scene he caused and that Patrick has a big mouth. I tell him I'd rather not talk about it, but I know it's me who should
be doing the apologizing.

El works all day Saturday and is going to a party afterward, so I am left alone. I have been stuck in this house for so long that I think the wallpaper is moving.

I hate that there's never anything good on TV on Saturday afternoons. It's like even the networks are trying to get you off your ass and have a life. I guess whoever does the channel scheduling has never been grounded on a Saturday.

Maybe it's the boredom, but Lucy's room calls me like a siren.

Her bed is perfectly made with Gram's homemade moss-and-cream-colored quilt folded up at the foot of the bed with my mom's steamer in the corner.

In Lucy's nightstand, I find more newspaper clippings, but these are mostly of Mom. Mom's in the
Clover City Tribune
all the time. I think she even dated the editor for a while, but he ended up marrying the girl who did his dry cleaning.

The stack of clippings is thick with grainy photos of Mom in her crown and dress. The same dress every year, posing with a different Miss Teen Blue Bonnet. I dig deeper in the drawer, coming up with a weathered gallon-sized bag of documents. Contracts, pamphlets, bills. Until I stumble upon a totally blank pageant registration form. Dated 1994, three years before Mom won in '97. Mom would have been too young to enter. But this can't be right. Lucy thought the pageant was a joke. Or I thought she did.

My aunt wasn't a timid woman, but even at her slimmest,
I can't see her ever entering this pageant. The blank form feels like empty promises of what could have been. I look over the application and imagine her handwriting there. The form asks for the usual: name, DOB, and address. But it asks for things that make me cringe like height, weight, hair color, eye color, career ambition, and talent.

I try to mentally piece together this puzzle, but it's useless. There is no answer.

The only thing left in this particular drawer is a red velvet box with a Christmas ornament inside. A white iridescent globe with puckered red lips wrapping around its circumference alongside Dolly's signature in gold. A souvenir from Dollywood—a place Lucy had always wanted to visit. El's mom had won a set of airline tickets at work, and she immediately offered the second ticket to Lucy. They would go to Dollywood, like they'd always dreamed.

They made plans. They looked at hotels and rental cars. They drove the three hours to the closest airport only to find that Lucy would have to purchase an extra seat on the plane because she wouldn't fit in one. The airline was kind, she'd said, but firm. In the end she was too mortified, and decided to go home rather than take up two seats on the plane. Mrs. Dryver brought home the ornament for Lucy. You knew it was expensive because instead of a metal hook, it hung by a red velvet ribbon.

I shuffle back to my room with the old pageant registration form and the ornament. I spend the rest of the afternoon studying the form and am surprised to find that the only real requirements are that the contestant be
between the ages of fifteen and eighteen and that their parents give consent. For all the requirements I've made up in my head, I can't wrap my mind around how simple it is to compete in the pageant and how many girls are actually eligible.

An obscene thought crosses my mind, and before it becomes anything more, I stuff the registration form away in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

My mom's voice fills the house as she comes in through the back door. “I don't think she's in the right state of mind to be an active member of this committee. I'm sorry, but this town is not ready for an opening number set to Beyoncé.” I can't help it. I laugh when my mom says “Bayyonsay.” “Even if it is one of her tamer songs—or so she says—I am not taking the flak for that.”

I plop down on my bed. Riot trots in from downstairs and spreads himself out in front of me until I scratch his chin.

“Well, ready or not, registration opens this week,” Mom says.

I grab my Magic 8 Ball from my nightstand and give it one good shake.

Signs point to yes.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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On Sunday morning, I've got this major emotional hangover. Last night I made a decision—a really stupid decision. I tell myself that I don't have to hold myself to anything because no one else even knows about it except me. If I chicken out, I will be my own sole witness.

It's kind of like when you see someone drop their lunch tray at school, but no one else notices. Nobody will know if you don't help them. But you'll know.

I flip-flop back and forth all day, not even really paying attention to the fact that my mom and I have been sort of civil today.

After dinner, I lock myself in my room to catch up on some required reading. But instead I find myself looking over the registration form again. I can't imagine it's changed much since 1994. The idea of me in a poufy gown, gliding across a stage like I own it is ludicrous.

There are so many things that Lucy never did. Not because she couldn't, but because she told herself she couldn't and no one made her believe otherwise. I won't lie to myself and say that Lucy was the picture of health in
the last few years, but that's such a horrible reason for her to have deprived herself of the things she wanted most. It's not even that I think she wanted to compete in the pageant so badly. But it's that, even if she wanted to, she wouldn't have.

I pick up my phone and hit the call button.

“Hey! Your sentence is almost up,” says El.

“I need to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

I could chicken out now and tell her never mind. Or I could tell her about Bo and how some parts of me can't let him go. Even now when my head is full of so many other things. But instead, I say, “I'm entering Clover City's Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant.”

The line is silent for a second, a second almost long enough for me to say, “Just kidding!”

“Oh. Hell. Yes.”

“You don't think I'm crazy?”

“Well, you're totally nuts, but this is going to be awesome.”

“I don't know about that.”

“Have you told your mom?”

I rub my forehead. “Christ. No. I haven't really figured out the logistics. I just know that I want to enter the pageant. Not like I can hide it from her.”

“She's going to freak.”

“Yeah, well, she's always been embarrassed by me. Why not give her a good reason?”

Ellen doesn't say I'm wrong even if she thinks so. “We
need to game plan. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Working, but I don't think Alejandro will care if you come and hang out.”

“Okay. Me. You. Tomorrow night.”

I hang up and put the old form away. Now that I've told El, she won't let me back down.

I try to sleep, but not even Dolly does my nerves any good.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Ellen and Tim pick me up in the morning so that I won't have to face the carport because I am officially Patrick Thomas's public enemy number one.

But except for a few whispers, school is relatively calm. Everyone seems to have suppressed the memory of or sort of gotten over last week's incident.

At least that's what I think until lunch. People crowd in groups all passing around phones. Most laugh. Some shake their head in disgust. In the lunch line, I peer over a girl's shoulder. She turns to me, her voice bubbling with laughter, and says, “Have you seen this?” Her arm's outstretched, holding the screen within inches of my face.

Hannah Perez. Her school photo on the screen sits alongside a photo of a horse, with his gummy mouth of giant teeth on full display. Just like Hannah. Except hers are even more crooked. The caption for the picture says:
HaaaaaaAAAAAaaannah
. I hear it in my head in Patrick Shit-for-Brains Thomas's voice.

“That's not funny,” I spit.

The girl whips her phone around, holding it to her
chest, with her face twisted in confusion. “Um. Okay.”

I know very little about Hannah except that she is quiet and stubborn. In third grade, during art, we all sat coloring hand turkeys for Thanksgiving. I hadn't heard Hannah speak all year, but then I took the marker that sat in front of her—one she didn't even appear to be using—and she slapped it out of my hand, yelling that I should've asked for permission first. The only other memory I have of her is from fifth grade when she snapped at a teacher who kept calling her Afri
can
Ameri
can
. Which actually made sense because she's Dominican.

As I'm walking to my next class, I hear things like, “So horrible,” or “I'm sorry, but she's hideous,” or “Why doesn't she get braces?”

That last one is the sentiment that stays with me all day because Hannah shouldn't have to get braces. Maybe she can't afford them or maybe she's scared to get them. Either way, she shouldn't have to fill her mouth with metal so that some shitheads will leave her alone.

In fifth period, Bo sits with his arms crossed tight over his chest. His cheek is bruised and a scabbing cut clusters at the corner of his lip. I want to know what happened. Who he got in a fight with.

But it's not your business
, I remind myself.

When he sees me, his brow furrows, and his lips fall into a deep-set frown, breaking his scab. He pulls the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his hand and pats it to his mouth.

After school, I meet Ellen in the parking lot. “Did you see all that stuff about Hannah?”

I nod. “She must have lost it when she found out. Does anyone know who did it?”

“Tim says some guys on the golf team, but that they can't get in trouble because no one can prove anything and it didn't happen at school.”

“That's such bullshit.”

Tim and El drive me home and wait for me to change into my Chili Bowl uniform shirt. They drop me off at work and Ellen promises to come back for me later with her mom's car.

I brace myself for Alejandro. He's got to be pissed that I missed so much work, but when I walk in, he asks, “You're not still grounded, are you?”

I shake my head.

“Good. 'Cause I don't cross moms. Anyone's mom. So if you're lying, you can go home.”

“Not lying,” I say. “Totally free.”

Around seven, Ellen walks in. “Sorry, my mom would only let me take the car if I ate dinner with them.”

“It's cool.”

She hoists herself up on the other end of the counter and whispers, “This place smells like onions and BO. I still don't get why you quit Harpy's for this shitter.”

“Better pay,” I lie as I lean forward, practically laying my upper body on the counter. “How much do you think I can get a formal for? This pageant isn't going to
be cheap.”

She shrugs. “Maybe a couple hundred bucks. You could try Goodwill, too.”

The cowbell above the door rings. I stand up, totally caught off guard by the prospect of a customer. Ellen doesn't budge.

Millie Michalchuk waves at the two of us as she walks in. She smiles at me and an immediate guilt for any less-than-nice thing I've ever thought about her weighs me down like an anchor.

“Hey, Millie.” Ellen gives a short wave.

“So what can I get you today?” I ask.

She drops her keys down on the counter, and there are at least twenty-six key chains on her key ring with all of two keys. “A pint of house chili.” She pauses. “And some crackers.”

“You got it.”

After she pays, Millie picks up some plasticware from the condiment bar while I spoon her chili out from the pot.

“So,” Ellen says, “the registration fee can't be more than two hundred bucks, right?”

“I guess. I have five hundred and sixty-eight dollars in savings, so if the whole thing costs more than that, I'm going to have to get a second job.” I press the lid down on Millie's to-go cup. “Here ya go!”

Her eyes skip back and forth between El and me before taking her chili and walking out the door.

El watches as Millie pulls out of the parking lot. “That was weird-ish.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, she's kind of weird all on her own.”

We hang out all night and when Alejandro comes out from his office, Ellen slides off the counter and pretends to be a customer. He runs the nightly report on my register and as he's walking back to his office, he calls over his shoulder, “Tell your friend we're hiring!”