Page 33 of Best Woman
“Please never talk about my future sister-in-law’s vagina again. It’s been haunting me all week.” I’d been keeping the group updated with blow-by-blow recaps, including my audition to be Rachel’s new gynecologist. “How’s Atlanta?”
“Same old. The show last night was good. I did a Barbra suite and cleaned up in tips, although someone spilled poppers on them. I got high trying to count earlier.”
“Does someone mean you?”
“I refuse to dignify that with a response. Unrelatedly, when we’re both back in New York let’s swing by the Leather Man so I can pick up a new bottle.”
“Why are their poppers so fucking good?”
“They’re probably organic. Farm-to-table alkyl nitrites.” Daytona moves on to the next leg. “Or maybe there’s a little meth in them. How’re things going with your big lesbo crush?”
“Oh god, I’m like inlovewith her. It’s worse than when I wasfourteen and obsessed with our rabbi. I got really into Judaism for the summer so I could come to his house and ask questions about the Torah, but I just ended up hooking up with his daughter and never going to temple again because it was so awkward.” I pause, trying to figure out which side of my shiny Chloé top is the front. “Oh god, what if Esther is at the wedding?”
“Esther is kind of a sickening name. So it’s going well?”
“As well as can be expected, I guess. But who knows, it could all go ass over tits tonight. I mean, I’m preparing to spend an evening with a bunch of cis women who are probably going to go completely silent when I join them in the bathroom to touch up my makeup and check under the stall door to see if I still piss standing up.”
“At least you were fuckinginvited,girl. At least your family wants you around. At least they aren’t chasing you into the town square with pitchforks like you’re fucking Frankenstein.” There’s a current of anger and resentment in her voice, and I remember that not all of us have families we can go home to.
“You’re right,” I murmur, feeling awkward and uncomfortable in my bra and my stupid leather pants, complaining about my family drama to someone whose only real family is…well, Kyle, River, and me. My heart clenches in my chest again, and I miss Daytona fiercely, wishing I could bury my face in her long mane of hair and breathe in its summery strawberry scent. I always ask what shampoo she uses to get it to smell like that and every time she smirks and shakes her head. “Women need their secrets, honey.” Daytona is a woman built of secrets, fashioned out of pain and fury and an unbridled hunger for life on her own terms.
“It’s OK,” she tells me, unusually tender. “Everything’s gonna be OK, honey.”
“I love you,” I tell her, because I do, and you should tell the people you love that you love them as often as you can.
“I know,” she says, smiling. “Take off the bra, it’s doingnothingfor you.”
Mom comes home from work right after I hang up with Daytona, and we have a quiet dinner with Randy and Brody—Brian is at an oboe lesson. I didn’t even know he played.
“Interesting outfit,” Mom says as I’m checking my lipstick in the mirror by the front door. The guard gate had just called—Kim would be here any minute to pick me up, which she offered after Rachel extended the last-minute invitation. Obviously, I said yes.
“Thanks.” My bangs aren’t doing what I want them to, and I try running my fingers through them a few times before sighing in defeat.
“Let me,” Mom says, turning me toward her and licking her hand, bringing it to my cowlick.
“Mom, gross.” But in reality, I’m preening under her attention. I let her fuss with my hair for a moment before drawing back to admire her handiwork.
“Perfect.” Her eyes move down to my chest. Her lips purse, but she’s learned her lesson.
A car honks from outside.
“Have fun. Bring me home a vase for the collection.” Mom has a display case dedicated to her children’s artistic endeavors, which includes some of Brody and Brian’s most terrifyingly bloody early work—we went through red crayons quickly when they were little—and a teapot I painted to look like Mrs. Potts fromBeauty and the Beastwho could make it to the final four onDrag Race.
A few minutes later, I’m buckled into the front seat of Kim’s rental, admiring the way her legs look wrapped in perfectly faded vintage Levi’s and imagining how much better they’d look wrapped aroundme. Her hand rests between us and it would be so easy to lace my fingers through hers, but I won’t, despite the look she gave me when she saw my leather pants, which I’ll generously callsmoldering. I didn’t know people could smolder outside of Gothic literature and the Xena/Gabrielle fan fiction I wrote in middle school, but Kim Cameron somehow manages it.
“Do you know a lot of the other bridesmaids?” I ask over the Portishead playing from Kim’s phone—hotandgreat taste in music.
“A few, from college. But Rachel and I were never really part of the same group of friends, just friends with each other. They’re all nice, but…intense.”
“Rachel does seem to have a type when it comes to friends,” I acknowledge, “and it’s…more Rachels.”
She shoots me a look. “Are you callingmea Rachel?”
“You’re about as far from a Rachel as it’s possible to be. You’re”—I wave my hands, hoping the perfect descriptor will magically appear—“a Kim Cameron.”
A laugh. “I’ll take it.”
That makes two of us.
