“Song!” we all called out.
Mallory nodded, counted on her fingers, then held up nine of them.
“Nine words!”
She drew a squiggly shape in the air.
“Question mark!”
“A question!”
“A song in the form of a question!”
Mallory clapped enthusiastically and indicated that she was going to act out the second word, which would be one syllable that sounded like… she held up two fingers.
“Two.”
“Sounds like two.”
“Boo, coo, do, e-oo, foo.”
“You.”
While Mallory jumped with joy that I had gotten the second word right, I didn’t even look up from filing my fingernails. It’s not that hard to figure out when it’s totally obvious that e-oo and foo are in no way shape or form words.
Oh, ho-hum-hummedy-hum-hum-hum. Here it was Tuesday night in B’ville, and I could have been doing an Ugly Betty marathon out at Hawkleigh with Teddy Mac and Lacey Wilkes, but noooooooooo. Instead I, along with all my Magnolia sisters, was being held hostage in the home of Mizz Upton and her lovely daughter Caroline and being forced to play charades at gunpoint.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration, we weren’t being held at gunpoint. But have you ever seen a good Southern home? We’re big believers in the old right to bear arms, just in case the Yankees ever get it in their minds to invade again. So a lot of us keep weapons around the house: ancient swords and Revolutionary War–era muskets as decoration on the walls, rifles for hunting and pistols “just in case.” That was the situation at the Upton house. So we girls could have been held at gunpoint, if Mizz Upton had gotten it into her head that she wanted to do so. Let’s just say we were held in the “spirit of gunpoint.”
On Monday, after our great success with the fund-raiser, Mizz Upton admitted that we had done well but that we had a serious problem on our hands. She was horrified at all the talk running around town about how we didn’t have a queen yet. It was a major issue. Big humiliation. So even though, yes, she was proud of us for raising so much money and getting on local and national news, we needed to shape up and fast. “Maids, we’re having an intervention here,” she said. “In my fifteen years of being involved with the Magnolia Maid Organization, it has never been in such a disastrous state mere days in advance of the Boysenthorp debut. You must elect yourselves a queen. You must—and I mean this—learn to work as a team.”
I raised my hand. “Mizz Upton, with all due respect, we worked really well as a team on Saturday.” Little did she know that it was more than just the fund-raiser. That we had also rallied around Ashley after Jimmy humiliated her with that oh-so-public dumping, that we had gotten her the hell out of Lancer’s party as fast as we could, that our designated driver, Brandi Lyn, had driven straight to Ashley’s house and we had poured her into bed before she really knew what hit her.
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Mallory. In fact, there were nods around the room. Ashley was catatonic, which was only to be expected, but the rest of us were in agreement at least.
“Well, that is good news, but we do still have a deadlock. Personally, I would prefer that Mr. Hill and I go ahead and take care of selecting the queen ourselves,” said Mizz Upton. “But he insists that we follow the bylaws and give you until the day of the debut. So listen to what I’ve got planned.”
A slumber party. She had planned a freaking slumber party. Instead of having our final dress fitting with Miss Dinah Mae at the chamber of commerce where we usually met for rehearsals, we were to report at five o’clock on Wednesday to Mizz Upton’s house for a rollicking evening of dress-fitting, fun and games, and female bonding. She put Caroline in charge of coming up with games to play and bonding activities. If we didn’t come out of the situation a happier, tighter group who could sort out the queen situation for ourselves, then she would break the tie for us on Saturday, which would be a dreadful first. “This is your last chance, girls, and I do mean last. Be responsible and make a choice.”
So we’d had our potluck dinner party for which Mizz Upton required each of us to contribute a homemade dish (Ashley’s famous crab casserole, Caroline’s cheesy chicken rice casserole, Zara’s grandmother’s corn and okra casserole, Brandi Lyn’s ham hock and green bean casserole, Mallory’s broccoli casserole, and my sausage and collard greens casserole). We’d listened to two guest speakers—former queens, a couple of enthusiastic Old Bienvillites named Mary Megan and Haleigh—tell us how magical and mind-blowing our year of Magnolia Maid-ing was going to be. How you should never eat in your dress because last year Julie Danville had to get a whole new bodice after a run-in with the prize-winning chili sauce at the Memphis Barbecue Festival. And how you should never wear your hoopskirt in the car because it might pop open and limit your vision and cause you to crash like what happened with Amber Davis about five years ago.
But nobody, I mean not one of us, was in the mood. I take that back. Mallory was chipper as ever, but the rest of us were in our own little worlds: Ashley was still reeling from the breakup with Jimmy. Zara was more reserved than ever, and she kept glancing over at me and lifting her eyebrows to the top of her head in a show of “Can you believe this crap?” Caroline, tasked with the job of leading us through our little bonding activities, mustered up as much pep as she could, but she snuck off to read Pirate Romance of the High Seas or some such every chance she got. Even Brandi Lyn’s sparkly self seemed to have taken the night off. She kept looking off into the distance and sighing. When I asked her if she was okay, she slapped on a smile, and said, “Oh yes, of course. I’ve just been putting in a lot of hours at Karl’s recently and am so tired, that’s all.” As for me, I was mourning the death of Luke. Well, the death of any potential relationship/friendship with Luke. Which was pretty obvious after his aggressive make-out session at the party. That guy wanted nothing to do with me.
So we were stuck in Mizz Upton’s basement rec room with the blues, and only thirteen hours left to go.
The third word of Mallory’s question of a song rhymed with something that vaguely looked like a fish, or at least that was the expression that she put on her face.
With a bored sigh, Ashley rattled through the alphabet, combining letters with “ish.” “Bish, cish, dish, eish, fish, gish, hish…”
“Wish.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Mallory jumped up and down.
“It’s that Pussycat Dolls song, ‘Don’t Cha W—’” Ashley guessed.
“That’s it, that’s it!” Delighted, Mallory broke into the song and a well-choreographed series of “drop it like it’s hot” and gyrations. “Come on, Ash, remember?”
“That is so fourth grade, Mal. Give it a rest.”
“Well, it’s still hot. I don’t care what you say.” She was deflated, though, and plopped down onto her sleeping bag. “We could at least try to make this fun, y’all.”
“I’m afraid I’m never going to have fun again.” Ashley sulked over to the corner.
The doorbell rang. Miss Dinah Mae had arrived.
We trudged up to the living room a bunch of sad sacks, and to my immense surprise, it took all of thirty-seven seconds for that vibe to change. The dresses were here! The dresses! Giant pastel-colored antebellum dresses with flounces and ruffles and bodices and corsets. I was a little freaked out by the whole thing, but they were a sight to behold, so much heavy fabric in giant cloth bags the color of our dresses that it took three of Miss Dinah Mae’s grandsons to lug it all in. Ashley dropped her catatonic state in a millisecond as she and Mallory grabbed their bags and started yanking out yard after yard of taffeta ruffles. “Careful, Maids!” called Mizz Upton. “Wait till I explain how to put it all on!”
“Oh, don’t worry, we know!” Ashley replied, and she and Mallory commenced shimmying into everything that came out of their bags. Mizz Upton teared up with joy at the sight.
Meanwhile, I was pulling enough fabric from my pink bag to make a dozen prom dresses. “What is all this stuff?” I exclaimed.
Mizz Upton stifled a glare and launched into a lecture on the proper order of Magnolia Maid enrobing: hoopskirt, slip, full skirt, apron, cummerbund. In layman’s terms:
| 1. | Put on a corset. Like the kind that Keira Knightley wears in Pirates of the Caribbean (the first and most awesome one) when she faints and plummets into the sea while wearing the gold medallion that raises the Black Pearl and the zombie pirates. Put one on and then stand still while someone else pulls the laces so tight that the stays suck your ribs in and take your breath away. |
| 2. | Cover said torture device—I mean corset—with a beautiful frilly bodice and wait for someone else to button all twenty of the mother-of-pearl buttons up the back. |
| 3. | Take a hula hoop. You know, one of those unbendable plastic circles that you gyrate around your waist like some reject from a sixties beach blanket show? The kind with Sally Field in it. She’s the mom on Brothers and Sisters? Well, she used to play a surfer girl named Gidget. Seriously. Gidget. Look it up. |
So take a hula hoop. Attach it to a slightly smaller hula hoop with some white muslin. Attach that slightly smaller hula hoop to a slightly smaller than that hula hoop with some muslin, and so on and so on, until one thin hoop rests about six inches beyond your thighs and one spreads out about five feet in diameter around your feet. Lay this contraption on the floor, then step into the center and draw it up to your waist—“The natural waist!” Mizz Upton barked, but she was excited, very excited. “These are not hip-huggers, Maids! I insist that they sit on your natural waistline.”
| 4. | Put on the slip: it’s partially a slip, with white organza from waist to knee, but the bottom layer is the colorful lower ruffle of the dress. |
| 5. | Shimmy into the full skirt: this consists of the middle layers of ruffles, anywhere from two layers to, I don’t know, ten? Ashley and Mallory went with more the merrier on the ruffle front, which meant they now resembled giant wedding cakes. Me, I just had two. |
| 6. | Place your apron over the skirt—no, not an apron for cooking, but the top layer of skirt. It covers the midsection, from waist to upper thigh. |
| 7. | Circle your waist with the cummerbund: this is the three-inch-wide sateen belt that hides all four of the waistbands of the various skirts (and the pantaloons, but we didn’t even have those yet). Fluff out the giant bow on the back of the cummerbund. |
| 8. | Adorn yourself with all the accessories: the parasols that match the dresses, the frilly bonnets that tie in a wide bow under the chin, the dainty lace gauntlets that slip over the hands to protect them from exposure. |
| 9. | Then pretend like you can still breathe with all those layers forcing your stomach in. And don’t even bother trying to walk! |
While Ashley and Mallory were twirling and curtsying as if they had been doing this every day of their lives, I could barely move an inch.
I raised my hand. “Mizz Upton, I’m stuck! This thing weighs a ton!”
“No, Jane, your dress has only two ruffles, so it weighs only about thirty-five pounds.”
Mallory agreed. “Ours are closer to fifty!”
“Lucky you,” I said, and turned back to Mizz Upton. “And they’re hot! If I have a heatstroke, who do I get to sue?”
Mizz Upton shook her head. “Fortunately, you’ve signed all sorts of waivers and so has your grandmother.”
Mallory glided by. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. And my cousin Lucinda says the bruises go away. Eventually.”
“Bruises? What bruises?”
Zara dragged me over to a giant mirror on the wall so that we could check ourselves out. We totally looked like we had stepped out of the 1850s into Tara. It was scary. Zara whispered to me. “Am I a traitor to my race for putting this on?”
“Probably,” I answered. “But I won’t tell anybody.”
Meanwhile, Brandi Lyn had pulled on the hoopskirt she made herself and was giggling up a storm. “Oh my, I feel so Scarlett!”
“Scarlett’s dead, Brandi,” I called out to her.
“Not in spirit!” she chirped. “Well, hello, Rhett, you devil, you.”
“Rhett’s dead, too, Brandi Lyn.” Brandi Lyn reclined into a seat, and she would have looked quite elegant, too, if the hoopskirt had not popped right out in front of her, revealing everything she had on underneath. Great. You can’t even sit down in these things.
“That is NOT how you do it.” Mizz Upton loomed over Brandi Lyn, scowling down at her. “And where is the rest of your dress?”
“Oh, um, I, I’m almost done. It’s looking beautiful! I mean, not as good as what Miss Dinah Mae does, but I’m proud of it!”
“Bring your dress to the next rehearsal. They have to be Magnolia-approved before the debut next week.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Brandi Lyn nodded vigorously, and Mizz Upton moved on.
Miss Dinah Mae clapped her hands. “All right, you girls hush and line up and let me check you. I’m tired and I want these dresses done so I can go home and watch Dancing with the Stars.”
We were all so busy with this final inspection that I don’t think anyone noticed at first what happened when Mizz Upton finally walked over to Caroline. All I know is that when I looked up, Mizz Upton had pulled the hoopskirt out of the bag and thrown it on the floor and said, “See what you can do with this.” Caroline was eying the thing as if it were a viper on the verge of biting her. Now, y’all, I have to say, I am not good at spatial relationships (just ask any one of the math teachers who has tried to get me to answer a geometry question right) but even I could tell that the circumference of the natural waistline did not match the circumference of the waist it was intended to fit.
Mizz Upton pursed her lips. Tension hovered in the air. It was official: the mood-killer was in the house. “What are you waiting for, honey?” Now, to most Americans and other speakers of the English language, are is a one-syllable word. In that moment, however, Martha Ellen Upton drew it out into about sixteen syllables, in a way that only the older class of Bienville Prepster Supreme can. So it sounded like this: “ahhhhhhhhh-er.” “What ahhhhhhhhh-er you waiting for, honey?” Had you seen the words on the page, you probably would have thought that she was encouraging her daughter to get a move on. “What are you waiting for?” would have just meant “Hurry up, honey, we need to get busy.”
But Mizz Upton had laced so much ugly through that sentence that it permeated every molecule of air in the room. Mallory halted mid-twirl. Brandi Lyn stopped her sitting practice. Ashley quit admiring herself in the mirror. Zara paused mid–inner conflict, and I ceased bitching about the bruises I’d just learned we’d all get from carrying the weight of the skirts on our hips.
“Try it on, Caroline,” commanded Mizz Upton.
Poor Caroline, she now had a full audience. She stepped one foot into the circle. Then the other. Then she bent over and started drawing the hoopskirt up her body, interminably slowly.
Until it got stuck at her hips. And she couldn’t button it.
Ashley stifled a giggle. Mallory looked away politely. Zara and Brandi Lyn and I traded “WTF?” glances. Miss Dinah Mae clucked her tongue, and Mizz Upton narrowed her eyes. She brought herself up to her full height and said, “Disgraceful.”
Caroline, stupid hoopskirt stuck around her waist, shambled out of the room as fast as she could.
“Caroline, it’s not your fault your mother’s a complete and total bitch!” I yelled through the door separating the rec room from the laundry room. After her mother’s horribly humiliating comments, Caroline had run downstairs and locked herself inside. Zara and I ran after her, or at least tried to, but we got hung up at the door with our multilayered hoopskirted dresses. Seriously, we couldn’t wedge ourselves through the door in those things! “You have to bank up,” Mallory called out, instructing us on how to pull the various hoops up and collapse the fabric so that we could walk through the door, but Zara and I were in such a clumsy hurry, we ended up pulling them to our shoulders on one side and scurrying through.
Caroline sobbed through the transom. “Yes it is. She’s always telling me, watch my weight, don’t eat this, don’t eat that.”
Zara sighed. “That was just plain mean what she did to you back there.”
“I deserved it.” Caroline wailed even louder. “I’ve gained too much weight since Miss Dinah Mae took my measurements!”
“Caroline, I told you to go on a diet, didn’t I?” Ashley glided into the room, properly banking her skirts before she did so. She kicked up the bottom ring of her hoopskirt with her left foot, grabbed it with her left hand, pulled the bottom layers up to her waist, then reached down and did the same thing on the right side. She pulled the hoops in toward her body, which made it look like she was wearing a sky blue kayak around her waist, and sailed gracefully through the door.
Zara and I exchanged glances. “Well, at least somebody knows how to work this thing.” I hit Ashley on the arm. “But seriously, Ashley, stop being mean.”
Zara glared at her. “If you aren’t going to help, just mind your own business.”
“I’m not trying to be mean. It’s a cold, hard fact. If you eat too much, you can’t fit into your skirt.”
Then Ashley rooted through her purse, whipped a flask out, and downed a sip. No lie!
Zara and I gaped. “What the hell are you doing?” I screeched.
“Taking the edge off. It got tense up there.”
“Well, give it here.” I ripped the flask out of her hands.
I took a swig. Vodka and cranberry juice. Nice.
“Jane!”
“So rude, not offering it to anybody else. Zara?” I handed the flask to her and she got in on the action.
Brandi Lyn arrived at that moment, still wearing her hoopskirt, making an attempt to bank it properly. “What’s that smell? Ohh! Are y’all drinking?”
Ashley offered her the flask. “Want some?”
To my immense surprise, Brandi Lyn did. She had a big swig and sputtered up a storm. Then she called to Caroline over the transom. “Caroline, I can fix your waistline! It’s not hard. I can put in a small panel. Or I can extend the loops for the buttons with elastic. It’ll work!”
“Really?” Caroline’s weak voice came fluttering back.
“Really.”
“Come on out, Caroline. Let us help. We can fix this.”
“I don’t know.”
At that moment, Mallory glided in, but she wasn’t the sweet, fun-loving puppy dog we all knew and loved. She was raging. “All right. I have had it. This is supposed to be the greatest day of our lives.”
Brandi Lyn looked confused. “Isn’t that supposed to be our wedding day?”
Mallory ignored Brandi Lyn. She was on a roll. “I have waited twelve years to wear this dress! Twelve years to serve our fine city as a Magnolia Maid! And, so help me God, I am not going to let all y’all ruin it with your bad moods and your bad attitudes! Give me that.” She grabbed Ashley’s flask and chugged from it. She handed it back. “It’s almost empty. Now, listen up. Caroline, you come out of that laundry room right now. Everybody else, go sit your butts down and let’s figure out what we have to do to make this work. Everybody hear me?”
You should have seen the glances flying between me, Zara, Brandi Lyn, and Ashley. “Go, Mallory.”
“I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Who would have guessed?”
“Look who’s got her bloomers in a bunch.”
Suddenly self-conscious, Mallory giggled. “Well, I’m fired up, and when I’m fired up, I speak up.”
“Nice job.”
“Come on, Caroline,” Mallory called over the transom. “Will you please come out?”
“I just want to know… y’all won’t laugh at me?”
“We’re here, aren’t we?” I said. “Of course we’re not going to laugh at you.”
“Ashley?”
All eyes turned to Ashley. She sighed. “Caroline, I like to pride myself on always telling the truth, but I guess sometimes the truth hurts and I could be more respectful of other people’s feelings.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Are we actually calling that an apology?”
“Trying!” Ashley groaned. “I’m sorry, Caroline. I really am!”
The door unlocked and a tear-covered Caroline appeared in the doorway. Ashley offered her the flask. She drained it of the last drop. “Thank you. Why are y’all being so nice to me?”
We stood there for a moment, contemplating. And there it was, happening. The very bonding that Mizz Upton had been exhorting us to create for three weeks straight. All the board games and charades in the world could not have achieved what witnessing the Armageddon of Ashley’s love and Caroline’s humiliation had. Nothing brings people together like tragedy. I mean nothing.
“Because we’re Magnolia Maid sisters,” Ashley stated. “We’re a team.”
It turns out Team Magnolia Maid, without even talking about it, was definitely on the same page regarding something else—getting a party started. Back in the rec room, I dove into my duffel bag and pulled out a bottle of tequila that Teddy Mac had donated to the cause, courtesy of his mother’s well-stocked bar. “You’re going to need this,” he’d said. Ashley yanked out a liter of vodka, Mallory pulled out Grand Marnier, Zara brought out a bottle of champagne, and even Caroline revealed a bottle of Boone’s Farm. Brandi Lyn accompanied Caroline to the kitchen for ice, limes, cranberry juice, and every supply necessary for good cosmopolitans, and within fifteen minutes we had set up a bar as fine as any tailgating party the South has ever known.
Then we sat down to talk. Or tried to. Nobody had bothered to change out of their dresses, so we were all hoopskirted up. It was a disaster. Balancing our drinks, Zara and I carefully sat down on the couch, only to have our skirts fly right over our heads, just like Brandi Lyn had done earlier. We howled with laughter. And did it again just for fun.
“Are you kidding me?” I yelled. “Are we not even going to be able to sit down in these things?”
“No, you can,” replied Mallory. “I’ll show you. Move.” I jumped out of the way. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There’s no jumping when you’re wearing thirty-five pounds’ worth of skirts. One side at a time, Mallory kicked up the lower rung of her skirt and grabbed it. Then she shimmied her butt up to the couch, lifted the back of the skirt, plopped it over the back of the couch, and sat. “See, the skirts fly over your head if you sit on the hoop. If you move the hoop out of the way, and don’t sit on it, you’ll be fine.”
“That’s like a ten-step process to sit down. And you look ridiculous backing your butt up to the couch like that, by the way.”
Zara asked, “How do you know all this, Mallory?”
“Told you. Twelve years I’ve been waiting. In the meantime I’ve been practicing in my cousin Lucinda’s hoops.”
“There is an easier way to sit,” added Ashley.
“Oh yeah, show them, Ash!”
“You just cross your ankles and kind of flutter to the ground.” Ashley demonstrated, ending up in a flurry of flounces and ruffles as her skirts and hoops collapsed all around her.
That did look easy. “Aha! That’s what I’m doing.”
So we moved the furniture out of the way and we all “fluttered” to the ground in a circle, ending up looking like a bowl of pastel sherbets.
Finally, the talking began. Ashley started. “I thought Jimmy and I would be together forever,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Ashley,” Caroline said. “I thought y’all were the perfect match, what with your fathers being in the same law firm and everything.”
A tear came to Ashley’s eye. “I did, too. I thought everything was set. We’d finish high school, go to college, get engaged senior year. Get married the next summer. I wanted to have my first baby by the time I was twenty-four.”
Wow. “Isn’t that young?” I asked.
“Not around here,” said Brandi Lyn. “Anyway, it’s good to have a life plan.”
“I had it all planned,” continued Ashley. “We even got a room reserved at the Riverview for next Saturday after our Boysenthorp debut for, well, you know…”
Mallory gasped. “What?! You didn’t tell me that!”
“He said he couldn’t wait to get a certain dress up over my head.”
I grinned. “I will say this, that’s more original than doing it after prom.”
“I guess he just couldn’t wait for me.” More tears came to Ashley’s eyes. Poor thing.
I had to ask something, though. “Out of curiosity, Ashley, how did Jimmy feel about your whole life plan?”
“Well, he didn’t know about all of it. I mean, we’d talk about where we’d live if we ever got married, but mostly it was something our mothers talked about. That I talked about with them. They just loved the idea of us as a couple.”
“Hmmph,” I said, sounding like Grandmother. “It sounds more to me like y’all didn’t have much choice.”
“Yeah, like it was something that your parents expected you to do,” said Zara.
“But you loved him, right, Ashley?” asked Caroline.
“Yes, of course I did! I mean…” Ashley trailed off.
As Ashley sank into her own head, Mallory turned to Zara. “So what’s your problem?”
Zara sighed. “Ugh. My controlling, freak-show father is ruining my life!”
“Sounds familiar,” said I.
“He went through my phone.”
“Oh no.”
“This can’t be good.”
“I hate it when my parents do that.”
“What did he find?”
“Texts. Lots of them. Between me and this boy.”
Mallory leaned closer. “Who?”
Zara went conspicuously silent. Totally buttoned up.
“I know!” I said. “It’s that guy from the pictures!” I turned to the other girls. “Y’all, I have seen this specimen and he is indeed hottie pa-tottie! Tell, Z, tell!”
“Well,” Zara demurred. “It is kind of scandalous, you guys.”
“We love scandal!” Mallory cried.
“That’s why my father is about to kill me.”
“Now I’m interested,” Ashley said. We all leaned forward toward the front edge of our dresses.
Zara suppressed a grin. “Well… he was a teacher at my school.” We all shrieked. A teacher? How taboo-licious! “Well, he isn’t really a teacher, he’s a teaching assistant and he’s only three years older than me, so it’s not that terrible, but still. Daddy is livid.” She explained that the specimen’s name was Charlie, and he was a student at Georgetown University and he had been the darkroom monitor for her photography class. They had hit it off during the long hours Zara spent developing film and printing pictures, which had turned into having coffee, which had turned into hanging out at his dorm room on a Friday night, which had turned into them dating until her parents had viciously moved her here to Bienville.
“It must be so hard for you!”
“Do you miss him?”
“Every single day. What can I say? He’s my muse.”
“Awwwww.”
“You have a muse?”
“I’ve never known anyone who had a muse before.”
“The thing is, I was supposed to go to DC in a couple of weeks, to see my friends, so Charlie and I started texting, and…” Deep breath in. “He invited me to stay with him.”
“To stay with him!”
“Here comes the scandal!”
“… and my dad read all those texts and now he’s making me cancel the trip.”
“That’s so sad!”
“You poor thing!”
“He was threatening to call my old school and get him fired, but Momma talked him down off that ladder.”
“Ugh, this is terrible.”
Zara grimaced. “And I have no idea when I’ll see him again. If ever.”
Mallory turned to Ashley. “We can make that happen, right, Ash?”
Ashley came out of her funk. “Of course, when we go to DC.”
“We’ll sneak you out!” Cool, more sneaking around! I raised my glass in the air.
“To sneaking Zara out to see a cute boy!”
“To cute boys!”
“Of which Jimmy is no longer one!”
“Hear, hear!”
We toasted, clinked glasses amidst Mallory screaming, “Don’t spill! No spilling on the dress!”
“We need more drinks!”
Mallory jumped up. “I’ll get them!” And she bustled back to our bar and fired up her cocktail shaker to make another round of cosmopolitans.
Zara leveled a look at me. “You know what else we need? We need to know what’s going on between Jane and Luscious Luke Churchville!”
“Yes we do!” Mallory sang from the bar.
“No we don’t!” I sang back to her.
Zara was not giving up. “Come on. Everybody on our team at the fund-raiser noticed that something was going on. I have never seen so much eye ping-pong in my life. Glance here. Glance there. Glance everywhere.”
“Ha-ha. I never knew you were so funny, Z.”
Ashley jumped on Zara’s bandwagon. “And I saw y’all out there on the porch at Lancer’s the other night. It looked like some awfully personal words were being exchanged.”
“I saw that, too!” Caroline giggled.
“Tell us.”
“It won’t kill you!”
Oh yes it will, I thought. I had never told anyone the story. Ever. My heart was beating so fast as every eye in the room pounced on me, demanding I tear down the brick wall, pull out the box with Luke’s name on it, and open it for all to see. It felt like I was in front of a firing squad, a pastel-colored, cosmo-tipsy, sweetly concerned firing squad. I tried to put them off. “Oh, it’s such a long story.”
“We have time.”
“We have about ten more hours between now and breakfast.”
“Please, Jane,” said Caroline. “We really want to know.”
Something burst inside me. My heart? The dam holding back the waters? Whatever it was, I found myself spouting out everything about everything, from Disney World to Daddy and back again. I told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Every blow, every moment, every detail from five years ago to just last Saturday night. When I was done, the room was totally silent.
“Jane?” Caroline spoke tentatively after a few moments. “I… Was that your first kiss?”
I nodded, then in a fit of “Oh my God, I just revealed way too much!” I awkwardly wriggled my way to standing and rushed over to the bar to make myself another cosmo.
As I returned, I couldn’t help but notice that Ashley was staring at me, mouth open as if she wanted to speak. “What, do you want to make fun of me now?” I snapped.
“No. Not at all.” She shook her head. “I’m just really sorry for you, Jane.”
“You’re sorry?”
“Yeah, your family life, I can’t imagine how hard it is not to have a mother. Or your father around. To live with your elderly grandmother. It’s just not normal.”
“Okay. That sounds kind of terrible the way you said that, but I think you actually mean well.”
“I do!”
“You’ve had such a hard life, Jane,” Mallory said.
“Harder than anyone else’s here, I bet,” said Brandi Lyn of all people.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think everyone has a hard life, one way or another.”
Everyone nodded at that one. We sat quietly for a moment.
Finally, Zara broke the silence. “What are you going to do about Luke?”
“What is there to do? It’s a done deal. He hates me.”
“Do you still like him?”
I thought about it a minute. “How can I? I don’t know him. He’s a memory. I have no idea who he is now. And he obviously hates me.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“I don’t believe that.”
I grimaced. “And he’s with Mosey or Posey or whatever her name is.”
Mallory and Ashley exchanged glances. “I don’t think so,” said Mallory.
“They may have hooked up at a party or something,” Ashley added.
“But if they were really dating, we’d know.”
“Yeah, this is Bienville. We’d totally know.”
Meanwhile, Caroline was mulling the whole thing over and coming up with a different take. “Jane, I bet he still likes you.”
Huh?! “I doubt it.”
“No, seriously. I bet he was really hurt by what happened back then and now that you’re back in town, he really wants to see you. That’s the kind of thing that happens in romance novels ALL the time. There’s a misunderstanding, feelings get hurt.”
“But because he’s a boy”—Ashley switched into total shrink mode—“and boys are notorious for being emotional morons, he lashed out.”
“But secretly underneath it all he still loves you.”
I nearly snorted my cosmo up my nose. If I had learned one thing it was that my life was definitely not a romance novel. “Yeah, right. Nice fantasy.”
Mallory grabbed my hand. “We could talk to him if you want.”
“NO!” I barked like a rabid dog. “Absolutely not, no way, no how!”
“Okay, okay. Calm down.”
“I’m serious, Mallory, Ashley. I just want to put the whole thing behind me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! Leave it alone. Please. Let me forget about him.” Clearly, it was time to change the subject. “Anyway, Brandi Lyn,” I said, “what’s going on with you? I thought you didn’t drink anything stronger than Diet Coke? And you’ve had like, what? Three cosmos already.”
She giggled. “Oh, I’m just real tired, that’s all. I’ve just been working hard at the Shack to make extra money and then at night on the dress.”
But out of the blue, her entire face transformed. Her easy smile slid away and her lower lip started trembling. She burst into sobs. “I’m sorry, y’all, it’s just, I’m so, feeling so emotional. These stories are so sad! Ashley, what Jimmy did to you… I would just die if JoeJoe ever acted that way toward me! Zara, the fact that you can’t be with the boy you love… And Jane, you poor thing! I just feel for you so much!”
It was as contagious as a yawn, her weeping.
Caroline burst into tears.
Then Mallory burst into tears.
Ashley was the next to go. At first she was calm, thanking Brandi Lyn for her sympathy, but once she got going it wasn’t long before she was hiccuping and hyperventilating. “He was my whole life! I don’t know how to carry on!” she exclaimed over and over again, as if she were straight out of some Shania Twain song (not that I’m dissing Shania Twain here because I’m not).
Mary, Mother of Meltdowns! What a big, blubbering pastel mess. The scene on the Bienville Civic Center stage four and a half weeks ago was nothing compared to this. This was a sixty-tissues-per-girl-meltdown mess.
Zara and I looked at each other, at first in this “Oh, Lord, can you believe the drama kind of way,” but then I couldn’t help it, I felt a tear quiver in my eye, and I saw Zara’s lips start trembling.
Under such conditions, it should come as no surprise that the histrionics level rose faster than a flood during a category five hurricane. One Maid threw out an idea and then another one picked up on it and we spiraled ourselves into a frenzy.
First it was:
“Boys are dumb!”
“Boys ARE dumb!”
“Boys are SO dumb!”
Then it shifted to:
“Jimmy is such a jerk for breaking up with Ashley in front of everybody!”
“We should have let JoeJoe beat him up!”
“Do you think he still will?”
“Oh yes, he and my brothers would totally do it! You want me to call them?”
“Kind of!”
“No, y’all are talking crazy talk!”
Then it spiraled in this direction:
“Jane, you need to straighten things out with Luke! Tell him the truth!”
“I told y’all, he doesn’t care! Although we did save a bird together.”
“You saved a bird together!”
“Together!”
“That has to mean something, right?”
“Oh, it definitely means something!”
“He still likes you.”
“Soooo obvious!”
I shook my head. “No, y’all, it’s not.” But then I got to thinking. And trust me on this, nothing good comes from thinking after downing three cocktails and interacting with a sixty-Kleenex meltdown. “But you know what is obvious? Luke owes me an apology. How dare he make out with some girl right in front of me?”
“Yeah!”
“You are soooo right!”
I turned to Ashley. “And furthermore, how dare Jimmy dump you so publicly? Doesn’t he have any manners? Doesn’t anyone have any manners anymore?”
“Yeah, Jimmy owes you an apology, Ashley!”
“Luke owes Jane an apology!”
And that’s when I got the idea that changed everything. “We should go find them right now and get this taken care of.”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You said it!”
“I wish we knew where they were.”
“Shoot. Too bad we don’t.”
“I know where they are.” All eyes flew to Caroline.
“My cousin Jules told me. They’re playing pool at his house tonight. Jimmy, Luke, Lancer, all of them.”
It took about sixty seconds for that to sink in. Then there was a mad scramble of hoops and ruffles and flounces as we all, as one, waddled to our feet.
Off we went, six sweet little Magnolia Maids, into the night to seek vigilante boy justice, secure in our beautiful newfound friendship.
If only it had lasted.