I can’t help but wonder . . . what if I just did this? What if I went all in? What’s the worst that could happen? The end of my senior year is miserable? Someone tries to beat me up for wearing a dress? If someone is going to try to torment me for this, they’ve already made up their mind.

And then I envision something epic. Me as queen. Not just any queen. Prom queen. What if I not only did this whole prom thing, but what if I won? I don’t even know if I actually want to do drag, but what a great way to leave high school in the dust and step into the future. The thing that really gets my blood pulsing, though, is the idea that things could be different. Maybe prom queen doesn’t always have to be the same thin, pretty, and popular girl. Maybe the queen doesn’t have to be a girl at all.

Prom is one giant charade anyway—a night where we play make-believe and pretend to be the adults we hope we might one day become. Elegant, refined, and a little bit sexy. That’s not reality, though. Our real adult lives will be about bills and tough decisions and parents getting old and deciding to have families. Not evening gowns and tuxes and crowns. So if prom is one giant fantasy, why can’t I be a part of the illusion?

Twelve

I sit down beside Hannah in the home ec room on Monday after school. “When you manipulated me into actually doing this thing, you didn’t say there would be meetings,” I whisper to her.

“Surprise,” she says. “There are meetings, I guess? I don’t know. I’m not, like, some prom court expert.”

“Well, you were in that pageant.”

“As an act of protest,” she reminds me.

“So what is this?”

She shrugs. “Something to keep me entertained until graduation.”

After my conversation in the hallway with Hannah on Friday morning, I walked back into Principal Armstrong’s office and told Mom to call off her dogs and that if Hannah was in, I was in.

Mom stared at me, and I could almost hear all the things running through her head that I knew she wanted to say, but instead, she turned to Principal Armstrong and said, “Well, you heard him. Let’s make this official.”

So here I am at prom court orientation, which I was not aware is even a thing. I figured I would throw my hat in, make some posters, and leave the rest to be decided by the high school ecosystem fates, but it turns out that in Clover City, prom court is a thing, because of course it is.

“So if the pageant was a protest, did you get what you wanted?”

She side-eyes me. “I think that’s a battle I’ll be fighting for a long time, but I made a dent.”