I like winning. I even like winning in a dress. I like winning next to Davey. I like Janie Lee’s fingers pressed against her mouth and then sending me love across the room.
I like it so much it spills into every fiber, every cell. I twirl. Everyone should feel like this. Even Tawny Jacobs. Ten years of losing can’t be easy when this is what winning feels like.
Back in the family bathroom, Davey and I are cutting ourselves free from Belle and Beast. We’re alone with our cardboard check and costume deconstruction. The others are getting food. Again.
Davey is leaning close to the mirror, removing signs of Beast, applying signs of Davey. He traces dark lines around his lids, and I review what I know about him. Dorky. Passionate. Helpful. He likes good music; doesn’t care if it’s popular. School isn’t hard for him. Making friends is. There’s no such thing as casual contact. He loves his complicated dick of a dad. Loves his best friend. Shares some of the same questions about sexuality and faith as me, despite having grown up in a different household.
He’s a bright, bright soul.
“You’re thinking hard over there,” he says to me.
I sigh at being caught. And then my stomach growls—low and rattling like an animal—because we, unlike the crew, haven’t stopped to eat all day. He pokes me in the stomach, and I poke him back, and then we are grappling, laughing, giddy that we have won.
Then, the six inches of height between the top of his head and the top of mine no longer exist. His lips are inches from mine, paused, asking politely, but longing to kiss me.
“I still don’t want to confuse you,” he says.
The slightest pressure of his body against mine is heavy. And warm. We’re both sweating from the costumes and smelling like powder from the makeup. Buzzing, delirious. The day is a Russian doll, unnesting layers I did not know existed.
I say, “Maybe it’ll help,” because I cannot imagine letting this moment pass.
We both turn our heads, and then our lips are on each other, hungry. I kiss him too hard, too aggressively. As if I have something to prove. There is pride in our tongues from a day spent winning what we want. He matches me stride for stride, and I don’t think he minds that I use my teeth. No one else could have kissed me like that. Not even Gerry, who is freer than anyone I know. This isn’t freedom; this is release. I let myself feel everything, the way I haven’t with everyone else because I’ve been too busy thinking to feel.
And at the end of it, I am a dandelion, and Davey is a gale-force wind. He scatters me everywhere. Part of me lands back in Kentucky, caught in Molly the Corn Dolly’s large hand. Another bit of fluff drifts to Missouri and lands atop the arch in Saint Louis. Another crosses the Mississippi River into Illinois.
Our foreheads are still glued together, both of us catching our breath, when Mash says, “Uh, guys, Woods is out front with the Suburban,” and I think, Damn, one of these days I’m going to kiss someone and no one will interrupt it.
“You okay?” he asks when Mash closes the door.
“I’m . . .” What am I? “I’m not sorry.”
“Good.”
“You’re not gay,” I say, because it keeps occurring to me.
He grins. “Nope. But you’ve got a lot going on, and if you’d rather be with her, I won’t make it hard for you.”
The best thing about Davey in this moment: he doesn’t expect me to say anything else. We pack the rest of our stuff and reemerge as if nothing has happened.
We are annoying as hell on the way home. We honk the horn, which sounds like a dying mule. Twice, Woods pulls the Suburban over, and we run laps around it like hooligans. When he reaches town and drives into Molly’s parking lot, he makes us take a picture saluting her. We are idiotic, happy. I’d like to drive too fast or run through a cornfield with my arms in the air. I am alive and weightless.
“We should bottle this,” I scream.
“No,” Woods says. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“We should share it,” we say together.
“You two are fucking annoying,” Fifty says, pushing at Woods’s head and rolling his eyes. “We’re gonna have to do some new project, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, you are. And I know just the one,” I say.
And there we are, back in my garage, everyone pressed around tables, tearing pages from old, destroyed books, like I did for Belle. Mash straddles the chair backward and whispers, “I gotta get a girlfriend so I stop getting drafted for this shit.” I tell him we’d just draft her too, so he should get right on that.
He pops a Dorito into his mouth, smiles like he knows who he has in mind, and starts folding papers according to my example. “You ever think you maybe have an oral fixation?” I ask. He must have the metabolism of a hummingbird.
His lips search for the straw and he whispers, “You ever think you’re fixated on my cousin?”
I deserved that.
I lean in to Mash’s ear. “Did you know he was straight all along?”
Close to us, everyone is folding paper. We could so easily be overheard, but he is careful, angling his mouth where no one will read his lips. “Are you straight, B?”
“I’m complicated,” I answer.
“Yep,” Mash says, his shoulders already falling before they ever got totally into the shrug. “Guess I knew that already.”
“Secrets. Secrets,” Woods calls, not wanting to be left out.
Mash handles that straightaway. “I was asking if she had more chips in the house.”
Here’s a thing about Mash. He’s everyone’s secret keeper. When he does choose a girlfriend, he’ll have her for the rest of his life.
Here’s a thing about Fifty. He always asks the obvious question. “So are there?”
“Are there what?” I ask, dumbly.
“More chips, asshole,” he says, scoffing.
“I’ll go see.”
“I’ll come with you,” Janie Lee says.
This is the first time she is voluntarily placing herself near me in front of my parents. We have to start somewhere. Mom and Dad are watching/not-watching TV in the living room. Janie Lee flips them a strange wave, and I announce that we’re getting chips.
“What are you all up to out there?” Dad inquires, and Janie Lee blushes.
“Hexagon things,” I say.
Dad, who is in a jovial mood, snuggles closer to Mom and says, “Please do not burn the garage down.”
“There are two things for sure in this world. One, I’ll die in these boots, and two, I will never hurt the garage.”
“There’s my girl,” Mom says.
“Your girl,” Dad repeats. “Yep. But she’s my girl tomorrow for KickFall.”
I am her girl when I’m burning things. His girl when I’m winning. At least they’re excited about the game. No amount of excitement keeps him from watching Janie Lee and me too closely, suspiciously.
All we have are those colored veggie-stick things that taste like air. Mash won’t care, but everyone else will. “Popcorn?” Janie Lee asks, and I agree. We wait on the microwave to ding. As the kernels heat and pop, she says, “Was I weird just then?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay.”
“We’re okay?” she asks.
The microwave dings. “I am if you are,” I say. And then, I don’t know why, I say, “I kissed Davey. I’m telling you because I didn’t want to lie about it.”
She backs toward the dishwasher, grips the counter behind her. I am studying her expression, and she says, “Are you saying I lied about something?”
“No. I just want to level. Because we’re us.”
“Oh. Okay.” The oh is painfully spoken; the okay shows some recovery. “Thank you. I’ll be glad to be us again.”
I wonder which us she means.
She takes the veggie sticks, and I snag the popcorn, and we gift the Hexagon with these spoils. Fifty’s napping on one end of the Daily Sit. He snarls only a little, either at waking up or my lack of flavorful provisions. He goes back to sleep and the rest of us fold and tape for hours.
I did the right thing in telling her, but that shocked look plays in a loop. When I walk her to the car, she asks to play her violin to me over the phone when she gets home. That tells me her state of mind: keyed up. The Lindsey Stirling piece she plays is flawless. That tells me the state of her heart: aching.
When she picks the phone back up, and thanks me, she says, “Billie, you looked beautiful this morning as Belle. Thank you for inviting me to the Con.”
I tell her I’ll meet her the next morning at the elementary school, and she says good night. I don’t think either of us sleeps.