A man from Cambridge, of learned intelligence, published something called Littlewood’s Law before I was born. The professor claimed mathematical proof that miracles occur once a month. Per person. Give or take. I don’t know if this is science’s doing or God’s, but I am positive Billie McCaffrey on the Corn Dolly ballot is nothing short of miraculous. Last I checked, in the court of public opinion, I’d burned down a church.
With the unexpected news, my house has been downright festive. Mom fixes ribs, which is a banner that screams Special Occasion. Dad drinks a glass of champagne—an actual glass of alcohol—and invites the Hexagon and Grandy over to picnic. He’s so stinking proud he’ll have to pray for forgiveness all the way through the Harvest Festival.
I’m too stunned to be proud. Too concerned I might screw this up to enjoy anything more than their company.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? R.I.P.: Corn Dolly Nominee.
By four thirty, paper plates are loaded with ribs and carbs. Napkins dance away from the picnic table at the wind’s insistence. Mom plugs in festive white lights over the pergola even though the sun still hangs high above the tree line. When everyone sits, Dad lifts his glass. Aluminum beverages rise to shoulder height all around me. I duck my head and stare at my fork tines.
“To Billie,” Dad says.
“To Billie,” everyone repeats.
I am not the sort to cry, but I am nearly persuaded. Janie Lee, who is sitting directly across the table from me, puts an UGG on my boot, taps. Tears plop from her chin to her tank top and a quiet little “I’m proud of you” passes across the table like a scoop of mashed potatoes. At the other end, Woods winks and licks his lips. Possibly over the spicy rib seasonings. Possibly because he’s spinning ideas into gold. How do I turn a nomination into an award? he’s thinking.
Davey occupies the seat to my right; Mom, the one to my left. They have both wordlessly side-squeezed me. My dad seems taller than Molly the Corn Dolly. He stays tall through the whole meal, lavishing praise on everyone.
“You’ve all worked so hard,” and “People were bound to notice,” and “I’m proud of you.” He doesn’t hand these things to me alone; he speaks them to the whole Hexagon, and that makes me even happier.
When Mom says, “You’re the first teenager ever to be nominated,” I know she is trying to remind me that it might be a group accomplishment, but I need to own some of the excitement for myself.
I don’t care if I win a Corn Dolly, but this, this full feeling in my soul, I’d like to keep it. Otters Holt is my home, and these people are my family.
One by one, they all tromp off to Saturday night plans. Grandy first: beauty sleep. Woods next: he’s playing the piano for services tomorrow and hasn’t practiced. Mash and Fifty follow, citing some Fantasy Football thing. Davey sticks around, making sure the trash is out, the lights are unplugged, and the propane tank is reattached to the grill.
“You working at the elementary school after church tomorrow?” he asks.
“If I don’t die of shock in my sleep.”
He leans in close. The stubble on his cheek grazes against my face. “You deserve this,” he whispers, and then he is off and away; the Camaro has left the drive.
“You’re very red,” Janie Lee comments.
I’ve been red-faced since I saw the newspaper.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she says.
We tumbleweed to our bikes and pedal furiously down the drive without so much as an explanation to Mom and Dad. River Run Road is short and pockmarked. We weave back and forth, avoiding as many potholes as we can. Sometimes our hands are on the bars, sometimes high in the air; we take back road to back road, which eventually spits us out near Molly the Corn Dolly and the dam overlook. I am windblown and spectacularly happy. The light bends golden and glowing over the horizon and trees. Perhaps I’ve been alive seventeen years. Perhaps three hundred. On a day like today, age is irrelevant: existence is infinite.
The leaves aren’t afire yet, but the orange and red and yellow of autumn are on preorder. One more rain and Otters Holt will start to explode with colors. Molly the Corn Dolly greets us. A family, using a tripod, snaps a quick photo before piling back into a Suburban.
Janie Lee points toward the overlook. “The dam?”
I pedal in that direction, and once we arrive I toss my bike in the grass, walking directly up to the concrete barrier. I bend over to see the water. The deep blue and frothing lake is a mirror for the sky, but it is not transparent. Visibility stops within inches of the surface. Beautiful things are often muddy.
Janie Lee is beside me. “There,” she says of a barge carrying coal or maybe limestone.
I nod, hoping the light will hold long enough for us to watch it go through the lock.
A towboat chugs forward, pushes the barge to the left, nearly to the shore. Even from this height, the cacophony of water and machinery keeps us from speaking. When the barge is in place, the towboat backs downriver and the massive lock doors inch closed. Turbines grind and water slips out of tiny holes, starting the laborious process of changing the water level inside the lock. All because someone effing brilliant imagined a seventy-five-foot elevator for boats.
Concrete and steel.
Water sucking, snorting, draining, or filling.
Magical engineering at its very best.
I feel a strange kinship with this incredible but very normal feat. Isn’t it as unlikely as I am? Isn’t it magic the same way me being nominated is magic? I say as much to Janie Lee.
“Billie,” Janie Lee protests.
“Shhhhh.” The water levels are almost flush with the other side of the Tennessee, the enchantment almost at an end.
“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.