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girl didn’t have to relinquish her dreams on her wedding day.
    “She looks like she walked straight out of the fifties,” Ally said, “With her blond hair flipped up at the ends like on Carrie’s Barbie doll.”
    “I expect the judges are partial to that, though,” Kath said. “Lee surely is.” And she took a big slug of her sidecar, then another, draining the glass.
    I was about to offer her another drink—a third—when she went to the kitchen and fixed it herself. We all watched her for a moment, then tried not to watch. “Lee?” I mouthed to Linda, but she only frowned.
    “I used to think it would be neat to be a writer, too, a poet or a novelist,” I said, the confession spilling out with my own second drink. I’d written one novel already, a mystery set in Renaissance Italy, but I’d buried it in a drawer; even I could tell it was awful. That truth, though, would have to await considerably more alcohol.
    Kath, back in the family room, fresh drink in hand, bobbed her head agreeably, but something in the set of her strong chin said
An astronaut and a novelist? You ladies are insane.
    “Or a librarian,” I said, backpedaling.
    “A novel,” Linda said. “That’s what I wanted to write, too.”
    “It’s not like I ever really thought I could,” I said. “It was just . . .”
    “Like wanting to be Miss America,” Ally said.
    I thought of the bright red A+ circled at the top of the first poem I’d turned in to Sister Josephine, of her urging me to write for the school newspaper, and making me editor in chief. Kath was right, though: I might have been the prom queen of high school English class, but no prom queen from my little neighborhood had ever gotten to the Miss Illinois contest, much less to the Miss America walk.
    “If you wanted to, Frankie,” Linda said, her voice surprisingly tentative, “we could start writing together.”
    I glanced at the television (a mother being mistaken for her daughter in the pool because she ate Grape-Nuts), imagining frank, take-no-prisoners Linda wielding a red pen over a poem or story of mine.
    “Just you and Frankie?” Kath said, and you could tell from the way she ran a finger over her fake-braid headband that she was feeling excluded.
    “We could start a writing group,” Linda said. “All of us.”
    There was a long pause, the only sound a Coke jingle on the TV, before Ally said she couldn’t write and Kath said, “How about a book club?”
    “But we already talk about books!” Linda said. “Wouldn’t you like to try writing one?”
    “Just for fun, maybe?” I said. “Nothing serious?”
    Kath asked where we’d ever find time to write, and Brett, too, seemed hesitant, but Linda rolled ahead in typical Linda fashion. “You could write a
Pride and Prejudice
set in the American South, Kath—”
    “Mr. Darcy Goes to the Derby!”
I said.
    “Just for fun, like Frankie said,” Linda said. “It’s not as if we’re thinking we’re going to be the next Sylvia Plath.”
    From the smile hinted on Brett’s bow lips, I figured she was thinking what I was thinking—
Methinks she doth protest too much
(and knowing whom she was quoting, which I did not). But Linda started laying out a plan as if it had been decided: we’d all bring something we’d written to the park Wednesday; we’d move from our bench to a picnic table; we’d read our work and everyone would comment, like they’d done in Linda’s college writing class. Never mind that Kath was swearing on her aunt Tooty’s grave and Ally was talking about boys in high school sniggering at her poems and Brett had yet to say a single word. And the Miss America Pageant went on at its usual pace for quite some time, and not one of us could have told you what the talent was after Miss Illinois.
    By the time we returned our attention to the TV, Bert Parks was announcing the finalists. Kath must have been right about the judges liking that old-fashioned hair because Miss Illinois won despite