Most Likely to Succeed

“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.