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wouldn’t she? She got the boy with the hands, warm with matching calluses where his palms had folded over the handlebars of his green Schwinn Sting-Ray, his grip strong and tight. I got the boy who, though fully formed on the page, would never be born.
    The introduction of Dill and Wade into our letters marked the beginning of doubt. Before this, Kelly and I had experienced fear. Of the dark. Of being alone. Of monsters (imaginary and real). Doubt, however, scared us in an entirely different way. Kelly and I saw a future (otherwise known as the sixth grade) in which we would remain invisible and unchanged while around us other girls suddenly bloomed. In Kelly’s version, the girls burst, blousy peonies after the first hot summer night. In mine, after seven days and seven nights of rain, these girls became dandelions while we remained green clumps of crabgrass. Kelly and I knew what we needed. Lips that looked pink, wet, and just licked. Sally Campbell’s lips had started to look that way at the beginning of fifth grade. Sally was pretty, and pretty girls were always ahead of the rest of us. Sally’s lips and also her mouth smelled of strawberry bubblegum. Kelly and I were jealous of both the shine and the scent. In order to make us feel better, I told Kelly that the word “Sally” tasted of pumpkin, without the brown sugar or the cinnamon. Just a squash.
    Sally, nonetheless, set the example for us. Lips that could be seen from across the classroom we understood were desirable, and gloss for them had to be our first acquisition. Kelly begged her mother, Beth Anne, and then resorted to a promise of future weight loss for a shade of pink called Flamingo Paradise, which Beth Anne picked out for her. Beth Anne, at the time, didn’t pay attention to Kelly. Beth Anne completely ignored the fact that her only daughter had asked her for lip gloss, strawberry-bubblegum-flavored. Flamingo Paradise was lipstick, the kind that my grandmother Iris wore. It went on creamy but soon became cracked and dry. The only flavor it gave to our lips was something that also belonged to Iris: talcum powder mixed with a crushed vanilla cream wafer. Kelly and I hated everything about Flamingo Paradise. We even hated the name. Paradise better have something else in it besides a flamingo, we thought.
    By mistake or as an extra incentive, Beth Anne threw in a case of blue eye shadow, Ocean Lite, which Kelly and I immediately tried. The way it sparkled and became almost silver on our lids made us feel trashy. We were old enough by then to know what that word meant, and we didn’t want to be trashy. We were also old enough to know that our idol Dolly Parton had a heavy hand with the makeup brush and shouldn’t be used as a template for our own efforts. We still secretly loved the way she looked in all her photos. She shone. She would become more and more otherworldly with each passing year. She would no longer walk beside us, though (because we were embarrassed by her), a good mother who could help us cross the street or sing us to sleep at night. She hovered above us now, out of sight.
    From the start, Kelly and I pooled all of the little tubes and cases of makeup and kept them in her bedroom. Her canopy bed, the yellow eyelet bedspread, the daffodils painted on the white dresser drawers and matching mirror, all said “GIRL!” and they provided the perfect laboratory space for me to become more like one. Kelly had always been a girl. She might have been Beth Anne’s fat daughter in waiting, but from the day she was born she was her father’s princess.
    I was my father’s tomboy.
    From as far back as I could remember, my room was done up in a plaid of green and blue (Yale blue, as it turned out). The furniture (American Colonial) was dark oak, and the pictures on the walls were of tall ships (whaling vessels). I loved these framed prints, a triptych of the same vessel during three different voyages at sea. I woke up every morning to the waves