THREE

February 28, Thirty-One Days to Deadline

Dawn shut the medicine cabinet and met her reflection in the mirror on the opposite side. She leaned into the mirror to get the lipstick just right. It looked good on her the way it did in the store. The thick red of it let her be exactly who she wanted to be, who she was on her way to becoming. A fearless beauty. Her dust-brown hair settled in a soft pool around her naked collarbones.

As she moved to her bedroom, she let her mind wander to outfits. She’d picked something out two nights ago but worried the spontaneity she wanted to project would be ruined by the premeditation. She let the thought go and grabbed the top she’d placed at the front of the closet. She yanked it from its place on the hanger and let the shimmery silver material curve around her flat chest and settle on her form.

She always thought of her body as something to get along with, a well-meaning coworker at a job she wasn’t allowed to quit. She borrowed Edie and Georgia’s clothes every now and then but was too tall for anything to fit her correctly. As she leaned into the closet, a clear divide revealed itself between her old clothes piled into a small mountain on the left and her new wardrobe. She looked at herself in the top again and shut the door.

She saw her room as dreamy and elegant despite the messiness of it. She liked its smallness, the single window, how there was nothing for her to do except read and think and then read again. She shimmied on some jeans and stuffed a bag with a jacket, some pajamas, her wallet, and keys then stepped out into the hallway.

There were only three rooms in her home besides the kitchen so anything that happened in the house happened everywhere.

She treaded into the living room and moved her hand to the doorknob. Dawn looked around the space. The cool blue of a single fluorescent lamp played against the empty living room like a shadow box. One sofa, one chair, two bookshelves bookless and longing. The emptiness of it felt like a second body in the room.

“I’m leaving, Papa.”

She stood and listened and noticed her breath. One inhale. Two. Three. No reply came from the echoing walls of her little house. The low glow of night bathed her brown skin slowly as she shut the door behind her.

---

The top of the parking garage was warm and light with wind. People crowded around each other, dancing and gossiping about all that had happened between the last party and this one. The neon lights coming from people’s phones, the tacky outfits, the crooked teeth; they played frantically in her wide eyes and she tried to adjust to all the stimulation. Dirty cigarette butts burned out beneath her feet and the familiarity of it all warmed her to the evening.

As she stood looking for familiar faces, namely Georgia and Edie, the parking garage became crowded and hot with the presence of wandering bodies. Small iron railings along the edge of the garage created lines in the scene of the city spread out below. People Dawn recognized and didn’t recognize let themselves fall in and out of her view.

Dawn turned her head towards the sound of her name and saw Georgia motioning for her to come over, a simple white fringe dress tinkling frantically against her body as she moved her hand back and forth. Edie trailed behind with Ben. They were wearing a bright pink sash that said “Birthday Girl,” the “Girl” crossed out in Sharpie and replaced with a poorly scribbled “Person” on top of their typical uniform of a tie-dye shirt and jeans cut short above their knees.

Dawn hadn’t seen Edie and Georgia since that afternoon and thought they looked so good. Edie wore an apple-red crop top that dipped just above her belly button where a flowing white skirt draped downward to her feet, and Georgia’s dress and matching earrings gave her a fairy-like look. Much better than the sweat-pants-as-daywear monsters second semester of senior year had turned them all into. The night was open, and she felt its potential energy buzzing deep beneath her skin.

She exchanged hugs with everyone and told Ben happy birthday. She couldn’t afford a present for them but noticed the lack of gifts around and felt grateful. Georgia and Dawn made faces as Edie and Ben got lost in each other’s kisses and moved towards the makeshift dance floor.

“I’ve missed you,” Georgia said as she gathered both of Dawn’s hands into her palms.

Dawn saw Georgia and Edie as guiding lights in the dank sewer drain of Alsbury High School. She’d met Edie wandering the halls of Alsbury a few days after she’d transferred there sophomore year. Georgia was her warmup partner the very first volleyball practice she’d ever attended the next semester. They were both so bad. They’d spend entire practices shoving volleyballs under their shirts, pretending they were rich pregnant housewives of River Oaks. Ben was nice too; they’d met when Edie brought them as a plus-one to watch Paris Is Burning together for the third time at Georgia’s house. The most important people in Dawn’s life seemed to appear during her first moments in new spaces. She thought it was exciting and romantic that she could be just a car ride away from some new, unknowable love.

“Are you okay? Do you want to dance?” Georgia’s voice was scratchy and strained against the music so that Dawn only caught the words want and dance.

Dawn wanted nothing more. She needed to dance and feel her body as worthy of movement, as capable of something good beyond her own understanding, excused from its innumerable failures with boys, with mirrors, with itself. She saw Edie and Ben enveloped into each other across the floor and grabbed Georgia’s hand so they could move towards the mass of dancing bodies.

After what felt like hours of music flowing from the top of her head and into the rest of her limbs, Dawn caught another sight of Edie and Ben dancing sweetly across the dance floor and began to feel her body and feet aching as she grew tired of thrashing around to the fast-paced, angry beat of the latest song. She wandered towards the edge of the garage quietly. Dawn looked up and saw a single constellation through the city’s clouds, maybe Orion’s Belt. Looking around again, she saw Georgia and Jill Moger talking on the lawn chairs set up in the corner. Dawn had seen them flirting at parties for months but Georgia still hadn’t said anything to her or Edie about it yet. Georgia didn’t usually mention girls until she was sure about them, so Dawn and Edie had a running bet on when she would bring Jill up. Dawn watched as Jill let her butt-length licorice hair swing out to drape over Georgia’s lap as she whispered something in her ear.

Dawn swung her legs out over the edge of the building and reached her hand out towards the bumbling lights of the city. Here is the skin, she thought. Here is the hand. Here is the thumb and the forefinger. Here is the moon. Here is the body swimming over the night. Here is the sound of every weed creeping up through the hot, Houston cement.

“Soda?” A gentle hand came into her view and then a golden boy.

“With alcohol?” Dawn smiled up towards him.

“Nope. Ben thought it’d be a bad idea to mix drinks with several people hundreds of feet above the ground.”

She quickly looked him up and down as he bent down to her level. The warm lights of the parking garage shined against his eyes and illuminated their green and brown flecks, his smile edging gently at sharp cheekbones. Against the noise of the party, his voice cut her up and melted her down again. She let her eyes wander over his just-unfolded clothing and sandy brown hair as he ushered one of the plastic red cups to her hands.

She brought the drink to her lips and downed it all in one gulp. In an attempt to place the cup on the ledge, it wobbled from its place and slipped to the shadows below. She watched it all the way until it hit the ground and got swept into the street.

“Ben is a very smart kid.”

“You’re Dawn, right?” He looked at her and settled comfortably into a spot beside her on the ledge. Their thighs touched and she held in a ridiculous scream at the warm feeling of their skin being together.

She nodded.

He seemed to be humming all around her with the electricity of the night inside of him. His prettiness made her tired, she felt so extremely aware of how she looked to him, so alert, but she liked the feeling of fatigue.

She watched his fingers press into the other cup, the fingernails like waning crescent moons. She couldn’t keep herself from imaging his hand on her wrist, thigh, waist, pressing into her, crushing. She liked the feeling of worms turning over the dirt of her stomach as he spoke.

“I’m Knox. Ben told me you were making a movie or something?”

“Yeah,” she offered dully.

Every day she spent hours writing out ideas for the film in her notebook or editing clips she’d already recorded. She wanted so badly to share her friends’ stories.

“What’s it about?”

“Queer love.”

This was true and untrue. It was so much more. It was a documentary about something she wanted but couldn’t have. She found herself desperate to document queer love and all its caveats and inconveniences. She wanted to identify it, hold it, know that it could be hers one day. Among all the love in the world, did some of it not rest in the hands of a few lucky queer people?

The idea of her documentary felt powerful and correct in her mind. She wanted to tell a story she thought couldn’t be told by anyone else. Or, if it could, she hadn’t seen it yet. She didn’t care if it wasn’t perfect, she just needed it to exist. Love was like a Christmas list of gifts she knew were too expensive but that she couldn’t stop stupidly asking for year after year anyway.

For the past four months, she’d been filming her friends responding to questions about love and queerness. She wanted to know everything. Breakups, hookups, how to ask someone out, how queer love looks, why people were afraid of her and her body and her beauty. She needed to know everything.

Dawn wanted love to surround her like flurried pollen in April. If she couldn’t have it, at least she could witness it. She could hold it right in front of her in digital intervals of light, sound, and color.

“Like Scorsese or Kubrick?” he asked.

“More like Chytilová and Jennie Livingston become best friends and make a documentary,” Dawn laughed, regretting dropping her cup, her hands feeling empty now.

“Who?” His head tilted slightly to the right like a child’s.

“Yikes.” The party seemed to get louder around them as they talked. Dawn tried hard to focus on his words but kept getting distracted by the music and the little dent in his cheek that appeared whenever he smiled at her.

“What’s it called?”

“What?”

“The documentary.” He asked, his smile curving its way up again to the dent and sending Dawn’s mind into a haze.

“Um, The Queer Girl Is Going to Be Okay. I mean, it’s not all about queer girls—”

“Oh, cool.”

“Like, I interview nonbinary people and gay cis people and lesbians, pretty much anybody I’m friends with. It’s just, when I started making it, I did these really shitty videos of my two best friends who are girls and myself on my phone camera, and the idea kind of just went from there so the title stuck.” Dawn could hear herself talking too much but sensed that he was really listening, taking in each and every word with a small nod. It was a new and unfamiliar feeling and she loved it immediately.

“Hmm, well since you’re letting just any gay in, how can I, a queer who loves, be in it?”

“We aren’t friends yet,” Dawn said. And yet she couldn’t stop herself from liking everything about him immediately. She liked to think he was born on the elevator up to this party and had emerged on the other side of the doors fresh and untouched by all the ugliness she knew could store itself inside the hearts of real-world teenage boys.

“But we could be.”

“I’ll think about it,” she laughed, trying to play it cool.

“Well, while you’re thinking about it, do you want to maybe get out of here?” he said, his now empty cup spinning between his busy fingers.

Dawn looked around for the right answer. There was Edie, Georgia, Ben, the party. She couldn’t leave them for some boy she’d just met. She’d promised herself to stop doing that. She lifted her head from the soaking bucket of hazy thoughts and squeezed out all the excess into the chilly night.

“I can’t,” she said. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought.

“Too bad. What about Saturday? I live next to Gremler Market. We could hang out there.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” Her heart knocked against her chest hard and fast. She didn’t like it but couldn’t help but place her hand over her rib cage to try to remember the intensity of the feeling for later when she thought of this moment. Knox stood, his hand brushing her leg as he moved from the ledge.

“I’ll see you around?” He walked backwards towards the still-moving crowd of hot, dancing bodies. He smiled again, waiting for her response.

“Yeah,” Dawn breathed out. She watched him disappear into the mass of people and Dawn felt her chest expanding unreasonably beneath her shirt.

Midnight came and went and stragglers began to plan a mass exodus to Whataburger for late-night burgers and fries.

Ben, Edie, and Georgia came to sit with Dawn in a grouping of pink lawn chairs she’d laid claim to as people emptied from the garage.

“Congrats, D. Edie told me about the film festival.” Ben smiled at her and toyed with the rings on Edie’s fingers as they held hands over the arms of the plastic chairs.

“Oh, thanks. I’m starting to realize how stressed I actually am. Like, I need to win.” Dawn closed her eyes tight and tried to quiet the thoughts those words brought up in her.

Ben lit up. “Wait, didn’t you win that short film fest last year for your video about the gym teacher’s art car with the clowns all over it?”

“Oh yeah, that was incredible. You got this. Easy,” added Edie.

“Yeah, but that didn’t have a full ride to film school as the prize,” Dawn replied with a deep breath.

Ben pursed their lips into a small circle and let a whistle out. “Jesus, wow.”

“Exactly. I could even get somebody to take care of my dad.”

The group quieted. Dawn never talked about her dad or really anything that happened after the girls dropped her off at her front door in the afternoons after school, or in the evenings after jumping out of some guy’s window. Not even on those late nights when the moon is high and nineties songs are blaring from the radio of somebody’s Toyota Corolla and everybody’s worst secrets and fears come out in whispers over the hum of the engine.

They didn’t mind this. Dawn always seemed to have everything under control, so they didn’t push her for information.

“What, like you’d use your savings?” asked Georgia.

“I mean, I have a couple thousand dollars from when I worked at the bookstore and babysitting for that rich family in West University.” Dawn tried to do some quick math in her head but ended up with a jumble of numbers floating in the blank space.

“I thought that was for college,” said Edie, always the reasonable voice.

“My dad needs a caretaker,” Dawn uttered out. “Either I find a way to pay for one and college, or I have to stay home.”

“As in, not go to school?” Georgia asked, her voice approaching a screech. “Dawn, no. You’ve been talking about film school since the literal day we met. I remember thinking, this girl talks a lot about movies.”

“I know, I know. I applied to a bunch of schools, but even if I get in somewhere, I don’t know if they’re going to give me any money.”

Dawn looked around and noticed that the four of them were the only ones left at the party.

“So, what’s the deal with your friend Knox?” She tried to sound casual and not completely obsessed.

“What do you mean?” Ben questioned, folding their legs over and squeaking in the lawn chair.

“Like, what’s he about? What’s his deal?” Dawn asked again.

“Oh,” Ben exclaimed, recognition flowing over their face. “He’s nice. Not straight, I think. Listens to a lot of Kim Petras. We met at a soccer camp thing when I was younger. He’s a really good baker. Like, he would bring all these pastries for everyone to eat after practice and they were so good, so we asked where he got them one day, turns out he’d been making them. That was wild. I mean really, there was an eclair that I still think about to this d—”

“Babe, focus. We need crush info, not his whole life story.” Edie placed a light hand on Ben’s now fidgeting hands.

“Oh. No, yeah. He’s nice, I guess. Sorry, I don’t really know him super well,” they said, pulling their phone from their pocket with their free hand.

“A nice baker who listens to my favorite German pop princess. Good to know.” Dawn tried not to get too ahead of herself as Ben held their phone up to the circle with the time flashing on the center of the glowing screen.

“Time to go for me.” Dawn bent her knees to stand from the chair.

“I’m taking you home, right?” Georgia asked, standing up from her seat with a small groan.

Dawn nodded and looked towards Edie and Ben.

“Are y’all good?”

“Yeah. We’re just going to go to my place,” Ben answered.

“Happy birthday, my star. Love you, E.” Dawn bent down to give Ben a hug and then Edie. “See you Monday, Ben?”

“Second period Physics. My favorite waste of time.” Ben laughed and grabbed Edie’s hand again.

Georgia and Dawn made sure they had their phones and disappeared from the parking garage.