particular. She was vivid enough to live without shame, and any mistakes she'd made were burned clean by the radiance of what she'd become.
“Marcia can't win,” Susan said. “She can't. You're going to win.”
“No, I think you are,” Rosemary said. “I have a feeling, I just do.”
Impulsively, Susan squeezed Rosemary's hand. All right, she'd admit it, at least to herself. She desperately wanted to win. She needed to win, more than Rosemary did. She permitted herself a prayer. Please, God, let me be chosen. Let me be the one.
At halftime, as the band marched onto the field, Susan waited with Rosemary and Marcia at the fifty-yard line. Susan and Rosemary wore their cheerleading outfits. Marcia wore a low-cut powder-blue dress and a sapphire on a thin gold chain. She had a prominent collarbone and a small, well-shaped head. She'd outlined her eyes with heavy black pencil, and brushed sparkling blue shadow from her lids to her brows. She looked at Susan and Rosemary with the sleepy, irritated expression that had become her trademark.
“This is it, girls,” she said.
Rosemary smiled, and picked a speck of lint from her sweater. She hated Marcia the way a housewife hates disorder. Susan harbored a certain admiration for Marcia's harsh self-confidence, but so feared the fate Marcia would make for herself that she felt a twinge of nausea in her presence.
“Right,” Susan said wanly. “The big one.”
Todd walked up to them, grinning, his shoulders thrown back and his left hand thrust casually into his pocket. He moved as if this occasion, the next second and the next, contained a series of openings exactly his size. He held the sealed envelope. It was his duty as class president to read out the name of the winner. He wore his gray slacks and navy-blue blazer, which Susan knew as intimately as she knew her own clothes. She felt related to prominence, magnified, because she had lain with her head on that blazer, bare-breasted under the stars. Then she felt shamed by what she'd done, accused. It was impossible to know what to feel.
“Hi, everybody.” Todd smiled. “You ready?”
Because he believed in duty, Todd didn't look directly at Susan. He didn't wink at her, or sneak her a special smile. In his official capacity he conducted himself as if he were on cordial but distant terms with all three contestants, and Susan briefly and bitterly hated him. She glanced at Marcia, who probably considered Todd a joke. A team player, too dull and honorable.
“Let's get it over with,” Marcia said. Susan wondered if she was so certain, so lost to her own future, that she genuinely did not care about being chosen. If she won—for being foolish and beautiful and doomed—would she end the evening drunk, laughing, makeup smeared, setting the rhinestone crown over Eddie Gagliostra's erection? Susan felt an envy more potent than anything she'd known with Rosemary or the other celebrated, well-behaved girls. By being mean and sluttish, Marcia had taken herself to a realm where losing meant nothing because winning meant nothing.
Rosemary pinched Susan's arm, gently, through her sweater, and Susan returned to herself. Rosemary was her best friend, her true sister. Rosemary was what she wanted to be. Todd led all three girls to the middle of the field, where the band members had arranged themselves in a half circle around the pale green Cadillac convertible that would drive the queen and her court around the track. Underclass boys stood ready with flash cameras. Peggy Chandler, last year's queen, waited to crown the new winner. Peggy, a handsome, forceful girl wearing an expensive dress covered with red poppies, had taken the train down from Albany, where she would soon marry a state attorney's aide. “Good luck,” Rosemary whispered, and Susan said “Good luck” back. She felt dizzy, short of breath. The world shrank before her. Please, she said silently. Please, God. Neither Rosemary nor Marcia needed the crown the way she did. They were already on their way to the places they were going.
The girls stood in a line before the Cadillac, facing the bleachers. Peggy Chandler stood on one side, waiting, staunch and satisfied within her dress. Susan knew where her family was sitting, though from where she stood they were merely part of the shifting, admiring crowd. The world was so large. There was so much to win or lose. Todd stepped up to the microphone stand. He adjusted the mike, grimaced over its squawk, then smiled expansively at the crowd.
“Welcome, everybody.”