“Everything got worse, it seems,” Cleo Lehman tells Katie, seated at her patio table. “After the Rose Ball happened.”
“How do you mean?”
Cleo hesitates to answer, going into the pocket of her sweatshirt. “Are you sure I can’t smoke?”
“Yes, please.”
“Really? In my own house?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Cleo frowns and places her hands in her lap.
“Well, the following spring I dropped out of school.”
“When was this?”
“In ‘86.”
Katie could only conceive of this yawning passage of time by setting Cleo’s face in a mental split screen with half of her present physical state set beside the other half of her yearbook photo, even if the only bridge between them was her long, feathered hair. A defiant reminder of past glories, however modest. Everybody should have one, Katie thinks to herself, like a nice brooch your grandmother gives you that is disruptive to any outfit—of which Katie has around three.
“When was the first Ball again?”
“The first one on school grounds was in 1981. But mine was the first to have the color thing.”
“You were the White Queen?”
“Yeah, with Betsy FitzGerald as the first Red Queen. White didn’t ‘suit’ her, was what she said. So they gave her a red cape and a red rose bouquet. I guess that had some effect because they kept it. Not that it made a difference. Like a week after the Ball, Betsy got hit by a car riding her bike. Broke her femur, which isn’t fun. It felt like fate. Well, it was after nine at night and she was a little drunk. But it probably did feel like fate in the moment.”
“You don’t have her number do you?”
“We weren’t like that. She could be anywhere. Sorry if that bursts your bubble.”
“Oh, I’m not a Queen.”
“Why not? You’re pretty enough.”
Katie smiles shyly and looks out into the chainlink-fenced enclosure of rough and uneven grass, with a rectangular patch of untreated dirt where a swing set clearly used to stand, and a bird feeder containing water with the long-untouched opacity of a phone screen. Another person with shaky judgment in matters of surface aesthetics.
“Queens don’t really do planning committee things. That would be …”
“Unsuitable.”
“Yeah. But we had an idea of getting ol— … earlier Queens to attend this ceremony.”
“That’s one of the best things I’ve been asked in a while.”
“You’ll do it?”
“Hell no. I’d still refuse even if my life had turned out great. You rarely get a chance to reject something on principle.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry … again. That’s become a refrain for me,” she concedes, raising up two fingers as if holding an invisible cigarette. “Honestly, I didn’t even think the Rose Ball was still going on.”
“It’s a tradition.”
“Yeah but some traditions are stu— … Some traditions run their course. Some sooner than others. Some even before they are made into traditions.” Cleo regards this girl across from her, whose name has undergone at least three mutations in her head, sitting hunched and tensed as if she was listening to a life-size needle. At least she is a needle infused with teachable lived experience. “So the Red Queen is seen as being better than the White?”
“Not better exactly. Each Queen is representative in their own way of the best of our community. Students vote to decide which of those qualities best correspond to which color.”
Cleo purses her lips and cocks her head as if rummaging through the clutter of her synapses for any less abrasive answer than the one that keeps blinking over them.
“In that way,” Katie says in an abrupt but questionable rescue, “the Ball is everyone’s celebration. More so than a prom or a homecoming, because they are about the individuals selected. While students lay their hopes and priorities at the feet of their Queens. The Queens are people but also made of other people. It may be that, for whatever reason, Red is more coveted.”
“Maybe because the Red Queen won’t feel like a nurse on display. Like everyone in the audience has some sort of wound that she now has to heal.” She pauses to bask in a satisfaction waiting decades to come out of incubation. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s better to look like you won an award just for learning how to smile.”
“Did you become a nurse?”
“I walk dogs, which has a nurse quality. I did do some reading to the elderly not long after the ceremony, which I guess is just as nurse-like. They made me dress in a smock.”
“Was that attached to the role?”
“Insofar as it was penance for it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Does the Ball not feel unseemly to you? Like you’re participating in some elaborate mass denial?”
Katie lays her hands paw-like on the table and considers the question. “I’ve never been aware of any feeling like that,” she says with a spice-pinch of contrition.
“After I left school I also left the state. I went out west on a chain of under-the-counter video store clerk jobs. People’d ask me where I was from, and I’d say Jersey without elaborating. Not that they cared one way or the other, but I’d never mention the town because I was worried people would say, ‘Oh, you’re the horror homecoming queen.’ Which is not a stupid thing to worry about when you’re 18.” She flicks her invisible cigarette. “There are probably more Rose Balls in towns across the country than people want to admit. The only differences they tend to stay where they belong, probably, as with this one, in a basement apartment. Not in a graveyard or an abandoned hospital as some people will tell you.”
Katie shifts in her seat and motions habitually to her backpack.
“You don’t know? That’s not your fault. Imagine a school superintendent or whomever trying to explain the how and the why of turning the sad fantasy of a spinster teacher into some middle-class debutante ritual. With all the energy this town put into smoothing over a potential embarrassment, we could have cured cancer by now. Speaking of which, you seem like a nice gir— … a well-meaning young woman, but I really need a smoke.” She goes back into her hoodie pocket and takes out a pack of American Spirits. “But I think I covered all your bases?”
“Well, we’re thinking of doing a more direct charitable component this year.”
“Charity?”
“We want to do a community service.”
“I don’t think that’s going to make it better,” Cleo says, failing to sublimate her relish at the insipidity of the term.
“It doesn’t need to be better,” Katie retorts, having detached her cheer from her politeness. “I just thought it’d be a nice thing to do.”
Cleo shrugs indifferently as she lights her actual cigarette and takes a long opening drag. “You know, I may have been wrong. I don’t think anything got worse after the Rose Ball. I think you can get so caught up in it, in its weird idea of glamor, that some part of you would not like it to stop. That a new destiny awaits. So when it vaporizes, going back to how things were before that feels sort of degraded, though they were just waiting for your return. I don’t know, sometimes I think Betsy got off easy. Now I really do wonder what she got up to.”
“Thanks for talking to me. I apologize if I brought up any bad memories.”
“Don’t worry about it, hon.” Cleo takes another deep drag of her cigarette and inhales a perfect beam of smoke that dissipates into spectral swirls before Katie’s stomach. “They could be anyone’s.”
Katie texts Vanessa to pick her up at a nearby QuickChek, walking with an excess of eagerness to put the rows of bungalow homes with gravel driveways in her past.
“How was it?” Vanessa asks as Katie is in mid-leap from pavement to jeep.
“She was interesting.”
Vanessa snickers. “I bet.”
Vanessa monologues on what Katie is certain are important, not to mention negligently attended-to, matters of decorative budgets and DJ playlists, yet they are deflected from entry by Katie’s persistent unease as to whether a healthy society could simply tolerate such unguarded use of gravel.