The Saturday morning the Corn Dolly ballot is due for release, Woods and I are on his bed, heads touching, watching the book television. A much-needed break. At his prompting, we pulled double duty this week. Community service projects and the painstaking process of clearing unwanted things from the elementary school lot. Save the Harvest Festival is alive and well, and so far it’s making me want to wallow in a vat of Icy Hot and sleep for a year.
All week we met at 6:45 and worked for a solid hour before school. “Chop. Chop. Get her done,” chirped Woods, the happy overlord. Post-school, we went to our assigned senior citizens. I’ve reroofed a shed, I’ve painted a bathroom the color of lilacs, I’ve made approximately four million trips to Goodwill and three to the dump. Yay for dirty, sweaty redemption. I am behind on homework, have eaten a dozen homemade cookies, and have ignored the mysteries of kissing altogether. Yay for dirty, sweaty distractions.
I was too bone-tired to stand over the Daily Sit and glue another damn anything to anything. So when Woods texted, and didn’t want nothing other than company, I biked over. I noted that he was very clear about “not wanting nothing other than company.”
His mom vacuums in the hallway. I wish she’d suck up our impatience. The newspaper should be out already. Woods has already trekked to the Fork and Spoon and claims there is nothing to report.
“What did they make you sing?” I ask.
He groans. “Elvis.”
“Glad I didn’t get up for that.”
“Whatever. You get up with the sun.”
Fable. The sun is not involved. If I go to bed at one, I’ll wake up at six. Thus far, five hours is my limit. Before anyone else in my house woke, I spent three hours on the Daily Sit. To no avail. “Do you know how many layers of newspaper it takes to make something the depth of a couch?” I complain.
“I’m sure you’re counting.”
I was. But Davey added some layers when I was in the shower, and accuracy went out the window.
“That reminds me.” Woods retrieves his keys from his pocket, drops them on my stomach. “Grandy sent you her newspapers. And some aluminum cans. They’re all in my trunk.”
I drop the keys on his crotch. “On my bike, genius. You’ll have to drop them off later.”
We watch the book television some more. Woods changes the channel three times, lands on a cartoon. Mrs. Carrington finally stops vacuuming and starts clanking in the kitchen. I’m massaging my own shoulders thinking I’ll never finish anything. Woods has two vertical worry lines stretching from his eyebrows to his hairline. These occur every time he focuses on stuff he can’t control.
Is he thinking about me? Is he thinking about how terrible our kissing attempt was?
In an alt-universe, where Janie Lee said nothing the night of the fire, we would continue through graduation in normalcy. A single sentence set us on a course of redefinition, of pairs, of benefits. Benefits were always my lowest frequency setting. Now I think about them, well . . . frequently. And I think about them with everyone. Even Fifty. I want to Dial-soap my brain.
Woods has no upper lip to speak of. Why do I know that? Because I’m staring at his mouth.
His mouth is forming sentences about the Harvest Festival, KickFall, and the Corn Dolly nominations.
“Who do you think will make the ballot?” he asks.
I draw a large, ironic heart shape in the air with my fingers. “Tawny, of course.”
“Obviously. But who else?”
“There’s not a woman in Otters Holt who wouldn’t be happy to win the Corn Dolly. Especially if it’s the last one.”
“Oh, it ain’t over. Not by a long shot.”
There’s such a fine line between things Woods plans to do and things Woods has done that he assumes we’ve already saved the festival, even if no one comes out for KickFall.
Woods props himself up on an elbow, pulls at a loose thread on his comforter. “What about you? You want a Corn Dolly?”
“No,” I say quickly. I love the Corn Dolly and what it represents in Otters Holt, but I would never pursue one.
I was seven, maybe eight. I’d seen an old movie—The NeverEnding Story—and as I was prone to do at the time, I obsessed over the main character. Who went on adventures. Who flew on luck dragons. Who faced shit down like a pro. Following Wednesday-night church, I marched myself into the bathroom with scissors and gave myself a haircut that resembled the main character’s. Nearly a foot of dark hair was on the tile floor.
Dad found me. He must have said something like, Elizabeth, what have you done? And I must have said, Daddy, I’m Atreyu. Those words are hazy, but I do remember the words that followed: “Elizabeth, Atreyu is a boy. You are a girl.”
And I didn’t understand what he meant, only that it sounded like girls couldn’t go on adventures. He dragged me kicking and screaming from the bathroom to my mother. And while I sat, calming myself on her lap, a lady, maybe Tawny or someone else, said, “Well, that one will never win a Corn Dolly.”
I’ve known this all my life. Internalized it. And everyone else has too.
“Oh, come on.” He digs his chin into my chest until I cough.
I palm his head to stop him. “I’m serious. But I’d love to see my mom or Janie Lee on the ballot someday. I think they are both that invisible sort of good, ya know? Plus, with all the pressure, I think a McCaffrey on the ballot would help my dad.”
His jaw dances with surprise. “You really think Janie Lee is an invisible sort of good?”
“Maybe she’s not invisible . . . maybe we’re just really loud?”
Woods gnaws on the collar of his shirt. He assesses. “No,” he says. “Neither is true. And you really don’t want to win a Corn Dolly?”
“And have every eye in town assessing me more than they already do? Have them voting if I am woman enough for the honor? Woods, even you put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon. I hardly think having attention on my femininity, or lack thereof, will help my dad keep his job. Plus, I would hate being paraded around town for scrutiny. Can you imagine what they would say?” I draw a banner with my right hand. “This candidate blew up a church. Vote for her.”
He is quiet, respectful of my feelings. His shoulders are flat against the bed, his voice crawls upward like a vine on a trellis. “I hadn’t thought of that.” But in true Woods fashion, he fires another equally hard question. “How are things with your dad?”
Another round of silence.
“Don’t be a badass with me, Elizabeth.”
“I’m not.”
He pins my shoulders, laughing. I squirm. He doesn’t budge. “I’m your best friend, McCaffrey.” Well, there’s a solid boundary, I think. “If you believe us messing around on the roof excuses you from being real, you need a CAT scan. I’ve heard the rumors. I know there are people who want him gone, and I know what that means for you. Talk to me.”
I execute a fairly sudden wrestling move that pins him under me. We’re eyeball-to-eyeball—body-to-body. Intimate. “You’re breaking the rules,” I say.
“To call your shit your shit?”
I don’t say anything.
“I’ve called your shit before,” he reminds me. “And I plan to always do it. Every time I watch that gleam disappear from your eyes.”
He has. Only once.
Puberty was reason number one Dad and I stopped being Dad and I. Reason number two was the Spandex Junkwagon Moms, a group of moms from church who push strollers and wear Lululemon when they aren’t working out. One afternoon—I was thirteen, maybe fourteen—Woods was playing the piano in the sanctuary, and I was lying on a pew, listening, and tossing a football up to myself, when they appeared without warning. They took the football as a desecration of holy space and me as the son of Lucifer. They staged a coup, and after all the back-and-forthing, a small issue became a large issue in which I was at the center. Five families—five wealthy families—left our church, citing the reason as the unwillingness of Scott McCaffrey to discipline his sexually confused daughter. Principles, they claimed. Hypocrisy, they gossiped.
If I had a daughter like that I’d demand she wear girls’ clothes.
If I had a daughter like that I’d send her to one of those camps.
If I had a daughter like that . . . they said.
My father had a daughter like that, and it became apparent to him, and later to me, that I wasn’t the daughter he wished he had. Or maybe, I was the daughter he initially wanted—after all, he’d purchased the football and Nike gear—but in a battle of me versus the church, the church was the heavyweight champion of the world. His job, our house, the family reputation: all meant I needed to stop playing football and start playing on Jesus’s terms. (My father and Jesus being synonymous entities.)
Which was the exact wrong thing to explain to Billie McCaffrey.
I decided that church members would never tell me what to do again. (Jesus could have his say—I was a person of faith; I just wasn’t a person of legalistic bullshit.) Those women threw stones over a football and a girl who girled differently from them. That’s the real problem—not people leaving the church, not Christians acting like Pharisees, not making up rules that don’t exist.
Publicly, Dad held his ground about me. His daughter could wear what she wanted. His daughter wasn’t disrespecting the sanctuary. His daughter was his daughter. Privately, my dad sided with them, and Mom sided with me.
I know. Because that’s the moment he started trying to change me into someone else.
Mom’s take on the situation was that those five families—she actually called the women “rich bitches”—didn’t deserve to be part of our congregation, and they could mosey along. Dad’s take was that Mom should dutifully bake and take a casserole to Margaret Lesley’s house when she found out she had breast cancer. Mom made the casserole because of the cancer, but she made Dad deliver it to that Spandex Junkwagon because of me.
The one person who realized how much Dad’s betrayal burrowed into my heart was Woods. I’d had a dad who I loved and respected. After that, I had a holy man who slept in a room down the hall.
Woods and I never made an arrangement about hiding these weaknesses. But we fell into a pattern. He’s strong. I’m stronger. We’re strongest. We act as if there are no failures, and we focus on the horizon. But I’d allowed him one true conversation about football and judgmental assholes, and he was now jonesing for another over my nongleaming brown eyes.
What would I say? There’s no gleam because I’m scared we’ll have to move or that even if we don’t, I feel so close to misstepping, to losing everyone. Even him, my oldest and easiest friend. Please don’t kiss me again. Please tell me what to do. Write me a plan on Einstein. Predetermine the course of my life.
Instead, I release my wrestling hold on Woods and say, “You keep interrupting the best show on television, and I need you to stop.”
We return to our side-by-side, temple-to-temple position. Woods isn’t done. “You’d tell me if it was all too much, right? Because I swear to God, McCaffrey, if you’re being a stoic bitch about this, and I find out later you’re suicidal or using your saw to cut something other than two-by-fours, I’m gonna give you a real tombstone. You hear me?”
I nearly cave. I nearly open a vein and tell him everything. That I’m scared that if we fail at rescuing the Harvest Festival my dad will be ousted by the deacons and we’ll have to move. And even if we don’t have to move, I’ll ruin this perfect thing—this Hexagon of people—because I don’t understand what I want and need. I wish we could hook our brains together with an HDMI cable so he could just know, and I wouldn’t have to say.
Janie Lee raises his window and crawls into the room and saves me.
“What’s on the TV?” she calls.
Woods and I separate quickly, patting the space between us. Janie Lee vaults over Woods and lies down. She folds her hands over her stomach and there we are. Three peas in a pod, watching a television made of books.
“There’s a variety show on,” I suggest. “A cappella group.”
They take the cue. The three of us are singing a mash-up of Adele and David Guetta when Woods’s mom opens the door. “Morning, Billie. Janie Lee.”
“Morning, Mrs. Carrington,” Janie Lee and I say together.
She never seems surprised or fazed at two girls lying in the bed with her son, but today she’s wearing an untraceable expression. Euphoria? No. Anticipation? Maybe. Hesitation? Yes.
From behind her back, she produces a newspaper. After popping her son in the forehead, she says, “I believe this is what you’ve been waiting for.”
We sit up. I polish a little smudge on my boots—try to play this moment of anticipation cool. I hope to see Mrs. Clare McCaffrey in Times New Roman letters. Woods snatches the newspaper and reads the headline aloud: “Corn Dolly Results Announced.”
He follows with three names:
Mrs. Tawny Jacobs
Mrs. Caroline Cheatham
Miss Elizabeth McCaffrey
If Janie Lee’s mouth could catch a thousand flies, mine could catch a million.
Woods tugs his hat toward the bridge of his nose. “Hot damn, Elizabeth McCaffrey, you’re on the ballot.”