I reach under my bed and grab my laptop. “I did a thing last night and if I show you, you can’t make fun of me.”

“Waylon, I would never make fun of you.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

She nods, conceding. “Okay, but I would never make fun of you for something that was actually important.”

She gasps. “Is this why you called for an emergency pep talk?”

My stomach turns at the memory of sitting in the back room, waiting for Lucas to return. “Not quite,” I say as I open up the video and hit play.

I wait for her to say something, but she watches in silence.

On-screen, after introducing myself, I lip-synch to Lizzo’s “Good as Hell,” Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” and “Lady Marmalade” from Moulin Rouge. At the time, I felt my selection showed range. Thankfully, the middle-of-the-night blaring music coming from my room is nothing new for my parents. Between each song, I tell funny stories about myself. The first and only time I wore a skirt in public (outside of Halloween), which happened to be at school in eighth grade because Clem got in trouble the previous day for wearing a skirt that was shorter than her fingertips even though the cheerleaders routinely wore their uniforms to school, which were much shorter. And besides, my sister has very long arms and shouldn’t be punished for our father’s genetic makeup. There was nothing in the boy’s dress code about skirts and definitely nothing about hemlines. Of course, I was tormented for weeks, and I think this was probably the first time that I promised myself if I could just survive high school, there’d be a better version of my life waiting on the other side.

The second story is my coming-out story, and how I’d dreamed of the moment the way some people dream of their wedding day. In the end, though, the whole family kind of shrugged and said they knew all along while Clem stole the show (without warning me) and dropped the bomb that she was gay too. My third and final story was a recounting of last night and how my disappointment over the results of Fiercest of Them All had turned into a very specific kind of motivation that had spurred me on to create this very video.

“And that’s why I’m here in this wig and lipstick,” I said. “Eat your heart out, y’all. Miss Pumpkin Patch is here to slay the day and my fat ass won’t take no for an answer. Your season seventeen queen has arrived. Game fucking on.”

Clem sits beside me, her jaw unhinged. “That. Was. FIERCE.” She turns to me and grips my shoulder. “You never told me you wanted to do drag, Waylon!”