Reagan came home with us after a quick stop at her house to pick up a toothbrush and medicine and pajamas. The sleepover wasn’t something Reagan and I planned. Apparently Janna and Reagan’s dad quietly came to Dad and Taleesa and suggested it so they could spend some time alone.
“I don’t understand Christianity,” I said, as we waited in the car for Reagan to collect her things. “I mean, church people are always talking about waiting until marriage and all that, but when grownups want to spend the night together, they just go ahead and do it.”
Dad shrugged.
“I’m not inclined to judge,” he said. “They’re not hurting anybody really. Let ‘em have a little happiness. What is it Reagan says? I am large, I contain multitudes?”
“I want to join a religion where nobody talks about this icky stuff at all,” Martinez said.
Reagan returned to the car, pill bottle in hand, arms wrapped around a little purple girly duffel bag stuffed with clothes and toiletries. She plopped down in the seat next to me, looking completely unlike Reagan. She was sad, vulnerable, a little girl.
“Well, this is awkward,” she growled.
“Atty, give your bear to Martinez,” Dad said. “Now that you’re sitting in the middle, you’re blocking the rear view.”
“Ugh,” said Martinez. “I don’t want your yucky love bear.”
“Everybody knows what’s happening here, don’t they?” Reagan said. “How is this happening? I’m the hottest person around, and I’m the only person who’s not getting any action tonight.”
Dad turned to look through the back window as he backed out of the Royalls’ driveway.
“I think you’re exaggerating, Reagan,” he said. “I don’t think everybody’s having romance tonight.”
Taleesa looked back at me, cautiously, clearly ready to change the subject.
“That elephant,” she said. “How can they do that? Isn’t there a law or something?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “I’ve read all of Title 3 of the Code of Alabama, and I can’t recall a thing about elephants in it.”
“Well,” Dad said. “As we know, Title 3 isn’t the only part about animals. There’s the Fish and Game Section as well. And there’s the Administrative Code.”
All of Alabama law is in a set of books called the Code of Alabama 1975, which—on our bookshelves at least—takes up about six feet of shelf space. Well, six feet with a gap of about three inches, because I always carry “Title 3—Animals” with me. There’s a whole other set of books, called the Administrative Code, that explains the stuff in the Code to mayors and cops and other people who actually have to do all the work. All of this is online, and I’ve gotten pretty good at looking things up on my phone.
“Here it is,” I said. “Section 220-2-26. Let’s see . . . any species of mongoose, San Juan rabbits, it shall be unlawful to release any tame turkey, walking catfish . . . no, that’s not it. Here it is: ‘permits for wildlife for public exhibition.’ Is an elephant an ungulate? Oh, yes it is, it’s listed here. There it is: you have to have a permit to exhibit an ungulate, which includes rhinos, hippos, elephants and something called a cape buffalo.”
“Super Cow,” Martinez said. “A buffalo with a cape.”
“If there’s a permit required to display an elephant, then there’s probably some sort of inspection that has to take place,” Dad said. “Somebody from the state ought to be able to inspect the elephant’s living conditions and approve or disapprove.”
“No wait,” I said. “There’s a list of who’s exempt from getting a permit. Zoos or wildlife exhibits, private traveling zoos, circuses, pet shops. Jeez, basically anybody who would own an elephant is exempt from the elephant permit.”
“Well,” Taleesa said, “there’s got to be something we can do. First thing in the morning, let’s get into the books again.”
At first, Reagan was a little crabby as we settled in to sleep. She’s always like that on sleepovers. And now there’s the problem of Easy. He won’t let anyone on the bed but me, so that messes up our old arrangement of me on the floor, Reagan in the bed. If I’m in the bed and Reagan’s on the floor, he sits there and glares at Reagan like she’s going to attack me. So in the end, both of us were on the floor with Easy between us.
“What’s it like to have a stepmom?” Reagan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, really. I always talk about Taleesa as a stepmom because of the color thing. It’s the quickest way to make people understand. But she’s my MOM, for real. I’ve never known anything but having them around, Taleesa and Martinez. I remember being mad when they told me I was a big girl and Martinez gets to ride in the shopping cart instead of me. But I don’t remember ever riding in the shopping cart myself. My other mom is, I don’t know, a ghost. A lady that I was cloned off of, who left notes in the margins of all of our books. It’s just not the same.”
Reagan was quiet.
“There’s a lot about my mom that I guess I don’t remember,” she said. “Stuff that I don’t remember clearly, anyway. It’s weird. All the times when things were really bad, all my memories of those times, I’m not seeing them from inside my own head. They’re all like movies. Like I’m watching them from outside of me.”
“Toni, my therapist, keeps asking me about this,” I said. “Dissociation. That’s when you see yourself from outside like that. It’s supposed to be a thing that happens when you have post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Reagan was quiet again for a moment.
“Is this good or bad?” she said. “I mean, I think I kind of like it. I like thinking of myself from the outside. I’d really rather be Outside Reagan right now, looking at this cool kid who’s giving everybody a hard time, instead of being Inside Reagan, moping around and thinking about what it’s like to have a stepmom.”
“So that’s how all this works?” I said. “Tough Reagan. Smart-alecky Reagan. Reagan who will always take a dare or eat a bug or whatever. It’s all just to avoid dealing with what’s inside.”
“Don’t knock it,” Reagan said. Her voice was starting to get that edge again, sounding like she normally sounds instead of like a hurt little kid. “Maybe there’s nothing inside. Nothing worth dealing with. Ever talk to Toni about that? What if inside is just a bunch of broken furniture and it will never be fixed and there’s no point in trying?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Today I feel like there is something inside. Something warm and comfy.”
Reagan poked me in the side with a finger. Easy snapped at her, with one click of the jaws.
“Warm and comfy because you’re in luuuv,” she said. “You got you a maaaan. Gettin’ some action.”
I smiled in the dark, but I turned away a little.
“Maybe I’ve got me a man,” I said. “I don’t think I want to talk about it just yet. I don’t want to talk it all away.”
“I’ve really got to know about this boy who wants to win a bear for a girl who wears an Elmer Fudd hat,” Reagan said. “What’s he like? What’s his name?”
“Emory,” I said
“Emory what?” Reagan said.
“We didn’t get that far,” I said.
“But he won you a whole bear,” Reagan said. “That takes a long time. And you didn’t get his whole name.”
“It didn’t take that long,” I said. “He’s skillful. He has rough hands, like someone who works. He’s rough, like the fair, in a good way. He smelled like hay.”
“So he doesn’t mind a girl who smells like dogs all the time,” Reagan said.
“Do I smell like dogs?” I asked. Of course I did. I was sleeping with a dog right next to me. I have dog hair all over everything I own.
“But you didn’t kiss him, even though the world’s smallest lady said you would,” Reagan said. “Did he try to kiss you?”
“ Yes, and the bear kind of got in the way,” I said. “Look, I don’t think I want to talk about it. It was nice. I want to keep it for myself. Anyway, what about you? Did you hunt yourself up a man, Miss Outside-My-Own-Body?”
“You’re afraid,” Reagan said, poking me again. “You’re afraid of magic. You don’t want the World’s Smallest Woman to be right.”
“I’m not afraid of magic,” I said. “Right now, just now, I really like magic. Maybe I am afraid of other things. I mean, like, I’ve never thought about it until now, but there are people who are good at kissing and people who are bad at kissing, right? What if it turns out I’m not good at it?”
Reagan was quiet again.
“This is where you’re supposed to tell me not to worry about it,” I said. “This is where you’re supposed to tell me that guys don’t care whether you’re good or not.”
“Well,” Reagan said. “I’m not gonna do that. Maybe it does matter. Maybe there’s a skill and we’re both bad at it and we’ll be lonely freaks our whole lives because we’re not good at it. I’ll live alone in a big gothic house, and men will pine over me, and they’ll never know my dark secret, which is that I never learned how to kiss.”
I chuckled. “Well, I mean, how are you supposed to learn anyway?” I said. “I see things in books about people practicing on pillows and stuff. That seems stupid.”
“I don’t know,” Reagan said. “You would have to practice with somebody, and you can’t because if you do then it’s not practice anymore. I always figured those girly-girl types—Peyton Vebelstadt and her friends—practiced on each other or something.”
She meant to make me giggle, but something else happened to me. Thinking of Emory, the almost-kiss, and Peyton Vebelstadt all together in one strange moment, I suddenly couldn’t catch my breath. In a good way. I let out a big, deep, pleasant sigh.
“I would kiss Peyton Vebelstadt,” I said. I couldn’t believe I said that, but it was true.
Reagan was quiet again, for a long time. I lay there with my back turned to Reagan, feeling a thousand emotions at once. I realized, all of a sudden, that I really was in love with Emory. True love, like in the movies. The once-in-a-lifetime kind, the kind you can’t mess up. Only I realized it just as I had cheated on him—cheated by imagining myself kissing someone else. I wanted to rush out the door and run down the road to the fair and find Emory and—and what then? Apologize? Kiss him? I didn’t know. I just felt wild. And I was expecting Reagan to give me heck, to tease me mercilessly about cheating on the boy I hadn’t even kissed.
I waited and listened. And finally I realized she was asleep. The little snore I was hearing, it wasn’t Easy. It was Reagan, dozing off.
The next morning, everyone woke to the sound of me screaming.
“WHERE IS IT?” I shouted to Reagan, who was still sleeping. I grabbed the big stuffed bear and shook him. “WHERE DID I PUT IT?”
Here’s what happened. When I woke up, I had one thing on my mind: send a text to Emory. That’s what he’d told me to do. He gave me his number, and asked me to text my number to him.
So I hopped up and went over to where my pants were lying on the floor. Nothing in the pockets. Shirt pocket: nothing. I even checked the folds in my hat. Nothing there either. I checked my purse, even though I hadn’t even brought my purse to the fair. And only then did I realize that being calm and checking all the normal places wasn’t going to help.
My chance for a love life was on a little slip of paper. That piece of paper was somewhere between the fairground and here. My future life played out before me in an instant: I could have grown up to be a fairly normal person, with two children and a wedding ring, if only I had hung on to this little love-receipt. Instead, that slip of paper was out in the parking field behind the fairground, stuck to a piece of dried hay and flopping randomly in the wind. If I go back to get it, surely by the time I arrive the wind will pick back up and carry the paper away. Some other girl will marry Emory, and one day in fifty years he’ll wonder why the girl with the funny hat never called him back, and he’ll shrug.
“Let’s just be calm,” Taleesa said. “Here are my keys. Go look in the car. I’m making coffee.”
There was no paper in the car, though Martinez was delighted to discover that I found an old Iron Man toy, in pristine condition, between the back seat cushions. He’d lost it literally the first day he bought it, two years ago.
At breakfast, I could do nothing but stare into my bowl of Froot Loops and almond milk. No one seemed as crushed by the death of my future family as I was. At least Dad had an excuse for being so casual. He still didn’t know anything about Emory.
“I had a dream about the elephant,” Dad said. “It was weird. In my dream, they told me Elizabeth the Elephant wasn’t Elizabeth at all. He was a he, his name was Saramago and he was an eighty-nine-year-old Portuguese elephant, which they said is smaller and drier than an African or Indian elephant. That’s what they said. It’s a very dry and long-lived elephant.”
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a Portuguese elephant,” Taleesa said.
“No, I don’t think so either,” Dad said. “But it has got me thinking. Elephants do live a long time. And they’re not from Alabama. There must be quite a story behind Elizabeth. And I don’t even know where to start with that. I mean, we’re pretty good at researching and investigating things, all of us. But with this, where do we start?”
“Surely there’s got to be some kind of elephant registry or something,” Taleesa said. “Some kind of paperwork.”
“We’ve got to go back to the fair,” I said, still staring into my cereal. “Yes, that’s it. We’ve got to go back to the fair and look into this. That’s the way to pick up where we left off.”
And so it was agreed. Some of us, at least, were headed back to the fair. Me, of course. Taleesa said she wanted to go, and naturally Martinez wasn’t going to pass up a chance to try and Fall To His Death again. Reagan opted out, saying she wanted to get her house back from Janna.
“And of course I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the love birds,” Reagan said later, in my room, as she was packing up her things. “I know the real reason you want to go back to the fair.”
I felt a twinge of guilt. And something else. Does it really do any good to name emotions? Sometimes there are so many of them, all at once. I sighed again.
“I’m not going to see him,” I said. “He won’t be there. I’ve lost his number. I’ve ruined my love life.”
Reagan shrugged. “Well, there’s always Peyton Vebelstadt,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know,” Reagan said. “You’re gay. You’ve been crushing on Peyton ever since I’ve known you. I really just figured it out last night, when you said that thing about her.”
“I don’t think I’m gay,” I said. “I’m in love with Emory. He is, in fact, a boy. Oh, God. I am in love. With a boy I’ll never see again.”
“You’re in denial,” she said. “You like girls and boys. That makes you gay.”
I shrugged.
“Well, I mean, yes,” I said. “I like girls and boys. I don’t think I’m in denial about anything, though.”
“So, you’re bi,” Reagan said. “You’re bisexual. No need to be ashamed. You need to come out. To let the world know who you are.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it works that way,” I said. “I don’t feel any particular need to declare anything.”
“That is how it works, though,” she said. “First you realize you’re gay, then you come out to friends, then you tell your parents and so on.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said. “I don’t think you understand my family. Nobody ever assumed I was straight. From the beginning, Dad and Taleesa were always like, ‘when you grow up and marry some boy or some girl.’ They were always cool with it. Everybody’s free to love whoever they want. There’s no need to make some kind of declaration.”
“So if you just came home with a chick and said, hey, this is my girlfriend, your parents would be cool with it?” Reagan asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Honestly, I think Dad would probably be more comfortable with that than with, you know, Emory.”
“Who we still haven’t really told him about,” Reagan said. “See, you’re even in the closet with the straight stuff.”
“I don’t think it’s a closet,” I said. “I think there are just a lot of things we don’t talk about.”
Reagan shook her head.
“You’re in the closet,” she said.