Then Teddy hauls his big belly out of the water and lumbers toward the trees. He drops his shorts just before the shadows swallow him, flashing his bare ass in the moonlight. The boys start whistling and catcalling.
Teddy calls back to them. “If Sabrina is willing to go through a near-death experience for our entertainment, the least I can do is show my ass!”
Laughter ripples through the crowd as a few more boys trail after him.
“Are you girls scared?” Teddy says.
“Just of seeing your white ass again,” Hannah calls back.
Someone’s rigged a length of rope to a big cypress that leans out over the water. Out of the shadowy part of The Hollow they swing, Tarzan-style, only they squeeze their legs shut, or turn their bodies away, before they escape into the cover of water. Billy’s wiry frame flies last. He twists while airborne to face the girls, but he’s covering his junk.
“Don’t judge the shrinkage!” he shouts, just barely getting out the words before being swallowed in water. It has all the girls laughing.
When he resurfaces, he swims straight for Sabrina, who’s hugging her knees at the water’s edge, vying for attention in a whole new way.
“What a bunch of idiots,” I say. “Do they actually think that’ll convince us to take our clothes off?”
But Hannah is watching Billy, not me.
“Then again…” I say, and Hannah and Olivia both turn toward me. “Itwastradition.”
“No way,” Olivia says, tugging her T-shirt down and scrunching up her knees.
I stand up. I hear my mom’s voice in my head, telling me to sit pretty, smile sweet. Screw that. “Never hide, right?” I say to Hannah, and I walk back toward the trees, tugging down my leggings as I go.
Behind me, I hear Hannah stand. She meets me in the shadow of branches, and slips out of her pants too, following my lead.
“Are we seriously doing this?” Olivia says, trying to catch up, unbuttoning her jeans as she jogs toward us.
We all lift our shirts, toss them to the ground, so we stand in our bikini tops and bottoms. Then we slip out of those. I take my girls’ hands, and we walk out into the moonlight. To the edge of our limestone stage.
The boys below us are dead silent, like I imagine Adam was the first time he laid eyes on Eve.
Yes, pageants build poise and confidence. And whatever the hell else you need to tell yourself to feel better about objectifying the female form.
But let’s be honest. Pageant girls?
We’re fucking hot.
Together, we leap.
CHAPTER FORTYINGRID
After Travis dropped me off, I came into the house quietly, easing the door shut and slipping my shoes off. Dad was asleep in the recliner with the television still on. I’d found him like this every night, and I wondered if he’d been sleeping in the living room ever since Mom was admitted to the hospital, avoiding the empty bed upstairs. It’s been forty-five years since he’s slept alone. I turned off the TV and covered him with a blanket.
Now I’m sitting on my old bed, flipping through the stack of photos I brought down from the attic. In one, Izzy and I are helping Dad paint the garden shed, both of us with our hair tied up in messy buns, wearing paint-splattered Preston High T-shirts. I squint at the picture, trying to figure out which one is me.No one will know it’s you, I’d told Izzy when I had tried to convince her to do my gymnastics routine. Because even Ben, who had known us both a lifetime, with his face close enough that I could feel his breath hot on my ear, hadn’t been able to tell us apart.
The truth is, the last time I saw my sister, I was angry at her. For emailing that college guy, for stringing Ben along. Every time Ben kissed her, every time he reached for her hand in that easy, familiar way, it boiled me up. It wasn’t fair to him. She’d always had him, and so she didn’t appreciate him. And what was she going to do? Wait until the day we left for college to pull the rug out from under him? Let him play out this charade all summer?
Don’t even go to dinner, I told her. I knew exactly how that would play out: Ben would kiss her as soon as she arrived, and she’d lose her nerve. She’d end up staying over with him, telling Mom and Dad in the morning that she’d fallen asleep on the Shermans’ sofa, or she’d sneak back home late in the night. Either way, she’d tell me that she hadn’t gone through with it. That she’d break up with him next time. We’d been playing this game for months.Just go straight to his house now. Rip the Band-Aid off. Tell him it’s over. You owe that to him, Izzy.
I don’t know, she’d said, flustered. She was packing her date-night purse, a little black clutch that barely fit her wallet and ChapStick, fiddling with the zipper to avoid eye contact with me.I have to go to the library first and study.
There were only a handful of people at the library that day. Sheriff Ryan interviewed them all, and no one had seen Izzy. I always thought that meant she’d taken my advice. That instead of waiting to meet Ben up at the square, instead of breaking up with him in a crowded restaurant in the middle of town, she had gone straight to the Sherman house. That I was the reason she had been alone with him that day in the middle of the woods.
That I had practically marched my sister to her death.
What if that wasn’t true? What if, when she pulled away from the house that day, she hadn’t gone to the library or to the Sherman house?