Outside my window, Clover City ripples by in a blur as we make our way through downtown, past the weathered gazebos in the main square, and beyond the civic center. I’m not supposed to love this place. For as much as I love the fat queens on Fiercest of Them All, the small-town queens always hold a special place in my heart too. It’s a reminder that incredible things happen in all kinds of places, even Clover City. This is the kind of place gay teenage boys like me are supposed to dream of escaping. But my relationship with my hometown is much more complicated than that. Yeah, I think about the wider world out there and what it might have for me, but there’s also some comfort in walking into a room and feeling like the most refined, smartest person there. Even though Clover City feels like one big joke sometimes, it’s my joke. My charming joke of a town that thrives on beauty pageants and dance teams and a football team that couldn’t figure out how to win a game if the other team had forfeited, but underneath it all, it’s more than that small-town stereotype. It’s a shithole. But it’s my little shithole.

As we pull into Grammy’s driveway, Clem reaches over Hannah and opens the door before the truck is even in park.

Grammy lives in a house with her two best friends and fellow widows, Bernadette and Cleo. If it’s true what they say and that in our old age, we revert to our youth, Grammy’s in her party-girl college years. The three of them are always driving out to New Mexico for the casinos and getting into trouble—sometimes even requiring bail. Basically, they’re everything I aspire to be.

I hope I live to be old and wrinkly with Clem, getting into as much trouble as humanly possible. Maybe I want to kill her more often than not lately, but the idea of riding into the sunset with her by my side is one hell of a way to go out if you ask me. (Assuming we both outlive our spouses, of course. Though I would be lying if I said I didn’t fantasize about being the town’s famous black widow, who wipes his tears away with piles of cash and furs. Just kidding. Murder is bad or something.)

Bernadette, an older Black woman with medium-brown skin who famously has a mole behind her ear in roughly the shape of Texas (seriously—she and it were in Texas Monthly), sits on the front porch in her rocking chair. “Darlinda! Your little chickadees are here and they brought that delightfully grumpy girl!”

“I’m not that grumpy,” murmurs Hannah as we get out of the truck.

I glance over the hood of the car at her. “Seriously?”

Clem catches her hand. “It’s endearing.”