On Monday the school elected Sawyer and me homecoming king and queen. Since cheerleading practice was on the football field with the band, DeMarcus held his phone and read the announcements Ms. Chen had e-mailed to him. As soon as he made this pronouncement, all the cheerleaders mobbed me, squealing and hugging, along with all the majorettes (except Angelica), and Tia, who’d abandoned her snare drum halfway across the field—despite Ms. Nakamoto calling through her megaphone, “Ms. Cruz? Let’s keep it together until the end of practice, shall we?”
Sawyer had heard the announcement too, in football practice. A couple of guys who came to help with the homecoming float build after school told me the entire football team had ribbed Sawyer about what he and I were going to do to each other on homecoming night, which was kind of touching and kind of gross.
He called me from work. “What does this vote even mean?” he asked me. “We just sit on the float together?”
“And get crowned during halftime, yeah.”
“Do we get a special prize at the dance?”
“Like my parents have a change of heart and let me go out with you? I seriously doubt it.” I hated the way this sounded. I’d treasured every moment I’d stolen talking with him at school that day, but all I’d done while I was with him was complain bitterly about not being with him. If I kept this up, he wouldn’t even want to date me for long, and my mother would have won.
“I’m wearing the costume, you know,” he said. “Not at the dance, but of course at the game, and also on the float. The pelican has to make an appearance of some kind in the homecoming parade. Little kids might actually cry if he doesn’t.”
I planned to cheer during the game too. I wouldn’t miss that to stand and grin at the crowd in a tiara for five minutes. During the parade, though, the cheerleaders just waved from the back of Grace’s dad’s farm truck. I might as well play queen in formal wear.
And I didn’t need my mother to help me with that. I had last year’s prom gown. So I didn’t even tell my parents about my achievement, which they wouldn’t see as an achievement anyway. I just kept going to the homecoming float builds after school as if we weren’t building it for me.
On Thursday night, Sawyer showed up at eight o’clock at the school’s shop class, where we’d constructed the float. He said he’d gotten off work an hour early so he could help with last-minute preparations. By that time, though, the float was finished. Will’s design of a blue crepe-paper wave rising behind the homecoming court had worked beautifully. I was one of the few students left in the shop, cleaning up stray scraps of paper on the floor. There was nothing for Sawyer to do.
“So let’s go get a vegan dinner,” he said, “on me. It has to be in downtown Tampa, though, where the vegans are.”
I did a quick calculation in my head. The student council had spent some late nights on the float. My parents wouldn’t expect me home until ten. I had time for sneaky vegan. “We need to go in separate cars, so they don’t see mine abandoned here or catch me getting out of your truck.”
“Okay.”
“And I never want you to pay for mine. I get an allowance. You need your money.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He grinned. “That night your family came to the Crab Lab, your dad tipped me a hundred bucks.”
“You deserved every penny,” I grumbled.
The restaurant he picked out had an Indian feel but an international menu. “I’m surprised at all the choices,” I admitted. “I wanted to come with you, but I’d pictured eating carrots dipped in ketchup.”
“I’m surprised too,” he said, turning the page. “I’m glad we came. I never even thought about eating half this stuff.”
“It would be great if you could shift your attention to what you can eat,” I said. “Until now, it seems like you’ve been totally focused on what you can’t have.”
He reached across the table for my hand. “Yeah, I have been.”
I tilted my head and frowned at him. “Is this worth it if it makes us both miserable?”
He didn’t answer. He slowly rubbed each of my fingers with his, then circled his fingertips in my palm, shooting delicious fiery sensations up my arm.
That was my answer. As long as he made me feel so good, this was worth it.
And I remembered what Tia had told me at the movie Saturday night, which had made it sound like Sawyer had a deep vested interest in me. “Tia said you left your dad’s house because of something he said about me.”
Sawyer’s eyes widened. He let go of my hand and put his own in his lap. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Sawyer,” I scolded him. “You think you’re being chivalrous, but my mother doesn’t like you, either. She dislikes you for a totally different reason, but still. And I’m not moving out.”
Sawyer took a deep breath and sighed. “I could almost forgive him for what he said. Prison’s supposed to rehabilitate people. Of course it only turns them into monsters if they weren’t already. And the races don’t mix there.”
“I know that.”
“It’s not what he said. It’s that he was stone-cold sober, and he insulted the one person he’d found out I care about. A couple of weeks ago when you came to the Crab Lab with Aidan, my brother saw that I was upset and figured out you were why. He told my dad about it. My dad went out of his way to make a comment, not to insult you, but to hurt me. People who love each other don’t do that.”
“So you’re not going to live with someone who doesn’t love you,” I said slowly. “Maybe that’s too much to expect. Maybe you move back in with him until May because you need a place to live and he’s your father. As for the rest . . . maybe that comes with age.”
He looked out the window onto the busy street, considering. Candlelight flickered across his face, glinting in the blond stubble on his chin. I wondered how old we would both grow before we got along with our parents and won the chance to date like everybody else.
“You need a roof over your head,” I said, “and you need to eat. You can’t do well at school or at work while you’re worried about those basics. If you’re determined to make a success of yourself, you need to start taking care of yourself first.”
“That’s exactly what Ms. Malone told me.” He surprised me by standing, leaning across the table, and capturing my lips with his. As he sat back down, he promised me, “I’ll think about it.”
14
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, JUST AS I was sitting my royal ass down on my crepe-paper throne in preparation for the parade, Sawyer came around the corner of the school dressed as the pelican. When he saw me, he jumped about two feet and threw up his wings in exaggerated surprise, then slapped his glove to his chest like he was having a heart attack.
I knew why. I’d changed my hair again.
The homecoming parade was a big deal in this town—because we didn’t have that many big deals. So many people were in it that I was always surprised there was anyone left to watch it. And the school, which forced us to make up hurricane days, didn’t mind letting half the student body out of last period to line up for marching band, suit up for dance troupes, and gussie up for waving at the crowd from elaborate constructions of wood and chicken wire.
That’s why Chelsea, after she’d donned her majorette leotard and pushed her tiara into place, had time to help me pick out my hair. I was going full Afro.
“And the final touch.” She slid my official homecoming queen tiara into my round hair, making a dent. She squinted at me in the mirror. “Wow, I didn’t know it would be so . . . big.”
“Me neither,” I admitted. In fact, I was having second thoughts about appearing in public like this, but there was no time for a redo. “What am I saying with this?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re giving Aidan a big ‘up yours’ for making a comment about your hair a few weeks ago.” She shot the mirror the bird.
“True.” I hadn’t said anything to Aidan about calling the cops on Sawyer. I had no proof, for one thing. An
d hardly anyone in the school seemed to have heard about the incident. I wanted to keep it that way. No need to provoke him.
But if he hadn’t liked my big hair before, huge hair certainly let him know how much I cared about his opinion.
“You’re also telling the school how you feel about having to struggle so hard just to hold a homecoming dance.”
“I like it,” I proclaimed, even though I didn’t.
And so, a few minutes later when Sawyer fell on the ground and played dead in the sunshine, I knew why. I called, “Is it that bad?”
He leaped onto the float and took his head off—something he almost never did once he was in costume. Crepe paper crackled as he slid into place on the throne next to me. “I love it,” he said, taking off a glove to slide his fingers into the back of my hair.
Of course he would love it. I felt myself glowing inside.
“It’s fragile,” I warned him, my voice trembling as he touched me. “It’ll only stay this way for a short time.”
“Like seaborgium,” he suggested.
I laughed in an unregal way at this periodic table joke from nowhere. “It does look like a hairstyle that would have a radioactive half-life,” I agreed. “It’s for special occasions.”
“This hair is a special occasion,” he said. “It is its own holiday.”
“With its own zip code,” I agreed. “I’ll disassemble it before tonight. It would never survive a back handspring.”
“That’s a shame.” He moved toward me, his eyelids lowered sexily.
“Wait, lipstick, mmmm . . . ,” I said as he kissed me.
I heard the familiar click of Harper’s camera, and I broke the kiss in alarm.
“Sorry!” Harper called from the front of the float. She was wearing the cute clothes that had become her work uniform lately, cargo pants and a tight tank top, with the addition of her retro glasses. “I know I keep doing this to y’all, but I can’t stand to miss a great shot. And your hair!”
“You won’t put that in the yearbook, will you?” I pleaded. “You have to delete it. My mother can’t see me kissing Sawyer.”
“I’m not going to delete it!” she exclaimed, outraged. “But I’ll put it in my ‘Kaye’s mom can’t see this’ file. Which is growing.” Already spying another great shot, she wandered off without saying good-bye.
“Have you ever been felt up by a pelican?” Sawyer growled in my ear.
“I thought you said that’s illegal in Florida.”
“Hm,” he said, leaning in to kiss me again. Technically this was grounds for suspension. School hours weren’t officially over yet, and we were on campus. But the float had been dragged out of the shop building and parked behind the gym, at the very end of the floats and bands and horses and antique cars lined up for the parade. We were the pièce de résistance. Nobody was watching us steal this moment together.
Until Grace, who’d been elected homecoming senior maid, climbed up onto her own throne and called, “Principal Chen! Sawyer and Kaye are having sex on the homecoming float.”
“My God, can’t we get any privacy in this parking lot?” Sawyer complained. He put his foam head back on but wrapped his wing around me, sitting back casually and propping one big bird foot up on the opposite knee like he was sitting around a bonfire at the beach with his girl.
Just after school let out, the parade began to crawl through town—out of the school parking lot, down the avenue shaded with live oaks—to make a very difficult ninety-degree turn-on-a-dime into the historic downtown. The entire route was lined four people deep. I gave them a Queen Elizabeth wave. Some of them pointed at my hair. Everyone smiled.
Everyone, that is, except my mother. I still hadn’t told her or my father that I’d been elected homecoming queen. It was too much to ask that she wouldn’t find out. She stood on a corner in front of headquarters for her bank, surrounded by her best employees, wearing shades so I couldn’t see her eyes. I imagined her calculating how much money I was wasting if time was money and I could have been spending mine on Stephen Crane.
I kept having to remind myself to enjoy the moment. I’d been elected homecoming queen, for God’s sake. People might have voted for me for a variety of reasons, but one of them wasn’t to get revenge on me because they didn’t like me. I was popular, either because I got along with almost everybody or because I’d done a bang-up job on student council. Homecoming queen was an accomplishment few people could ever claim. Each time I came to this realization, I seized the moment like one of Harper’s snapshots. Not many other students at my school would ever glimpse the beach from quite this angle, through the trees and six feet off the road, or look up and be able to touch the traffic lights framed with palm fronds overhead.
And the hour that the parade crept through town gave me time with Sawyer. Granted, we weren’t really touching. We definitely weren’t talking. He frequently jumped down from the float to high-five little kids, then pretended he was scrambling to catch up to us again with an exaggerated run. But there were also long interludes when he sat next to me on our throne, his feathery knees invading my personal space, his arm around me.
Even after I located my mother in the crowd, I wasn’t self-conscious about touching Sawyer. I could say later that it was all part of his act. In truth, he gave me the warm fuzzies I’d always gotten when he treated me like his girlfriend while he was in costume. Sawyer and I might argue or break up or even come to hate each other because my mother was tearing us apart, but the pelican would always love me.
When the parade was over, I drove home. Carefully I took off my prom gown and hung it up, then flopped onto my bed in my underwear, exhausted. I couldn’t rest now, though. I needed to get up and start the long process of reconstructing my hair.
But as soon as I lay down, my mind raced. The student council’s responsibilities in the parade had gone off without a hitch. Boxes checked: tick, tick, tick. Everything was set up for the dance tonight to go smoothly, too. Since I would be cheering during the game, I’d delegated all the last-minute preparations to parents and teachers. Tick, tick, tick. I was about to suffer the indignity of being kept away from my boyfriend at the dance I’d personally constructed, but at least I would get to see him.
My heart raced along with my mind. I took long, deep breaths through my nose, trying very hard to slow everything down. I was amazed at how fast my heart beat anyway, like it knew something I didn’t.
I was really looking forward to consulting with Ms. Malone on Monday.
My mother breezed into my room. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who was there. She was the parent who didn’t knock. She paused at the foot of my bed. “Get your cheerleader uniform on,” she sang like nothing was wrong. “You’re not going to wear your hair like that to the game and the dance, are you? You’ve already squashed it. Let me help you.”
Grudgingly I slipped on my top and skirt. I sat down in my bathroom while she worked my hair into twists, then pulled them out into curls of varying diameter, recreating how my hair had looked before. The feel of her hands in my hair was familiar, the motion of her arms in the mirror identical to a thousand repeats from my childhood. The difference was, we didn’t speak.
A knock sounded on my bedroom door. “Come in,” my mother called before I could. Dad peered at us, taking in the familiar act of sectioning and twisting hair, and our uneasy silence. Without a word, he left again.
* * *
Our football team had gotten so good that the games might have been boring with their guaranteed wins, except that we always seemed to get in trouble and come from behind at the last minute. And Brody always managed to get hurt. This time, in the second quarter, the opposing team’s defense pushed through Noah and the other guard. Brody got sacked so hard that he flew several feet through the air before landing on his back with a two-hundred-pounder on top of him.
He did get up, very slowly. I glanced down the sideline and felt terrible for Harper with her camera around her neck and her hands sl
apped to her mouth in horror.
I had my own scare a few minutes later. I’d never paid much attention to the local cops who patrolled the sidelines, keeping spectators off the field, but Sawyer had noticed they were Sterns and Sorrow. He followed them around for a few minutes. He imitated Sorrow’s walk. He tapped Sterns’s shoulder and jumped to the other side when Sterns turned around. I was afraid the whole stadium was about to find out how the police frisked a pelican.
He was saved by halftime. He loped over to wait with me and the rest of the homecoming court for our cue. Finally the announcer called our names one by one, the crowd cheered, and we walked slowly onto the field while the band endlessly played the alma mater.
Sawyer never missed an opportunity to incorporate a staid institution into his act. I’d thought the weirdest thing that would happen during my reign as homecoming queen would be that I was escorted onto the field by a six-foot-tall bird. I was wrong. Sawyer stole my glittery sash that said KAYE GORDON HOMECOMING QUEEN and put it on over his own head, upside down. He stole my roses and stored them in his beak. They didn’t quite fit. The stems hung out. He tried to steal my tiara. I slapped him. The tiara fell off anyway when he dipped me and pretended to kiss me.
The crowd roared louder than it had when Brody threw a touchdown. This town loved Sawyer.
And, I was realizing, so did I.
* * *
Along with the other cheerleaders, I showered in the girls’ locker room, changed into my cute outfit, and hurried across the parking lot to the dance. The night was clear and perfect, with real stars behind the imitation ones blinking in the palm trees. The air was nippy for the first time since March.
It had gotten around school that my mother wouldn’t let me date Sawyer. Several girls in the locker room had told me what a shame it was that Sawyer and I had been elected homecoming king and queen together but couldn’t be each other’s date for homecoming. Ellen told me she thought it was romantic. I supposed it was, in a Romeo and Juliet sort of way, if you liked your romantic nights to suck.