Dumplin - Julie Murphy Page 0,76

impossible to see the audience, and that always made the whole thing bearable for me. But today the theater is lit and the stage lights are dormant.

“I can start now?” I ask.

I try not to count all the girls sitting in the audience because if I start I might not stop.

Mrs. Clawson, who sits next to my mom, nods.

I hold up an empty water bottle and pull a quarter from my pocket. “I’ll be doing a magic trick.” My mom’s face is unmoving. “I plan on doing other tricks, too, but this is just a sampling.” I wait for someone to tell me that that’s okay or that I shouldn’t worry, but I am only greeted by silence.

So here’s the quick and dirty of how this trick should work: I take an empty water bottle, which I’ve sliced a sliver of an opening in. I am to hold the water bottle so that the audience cannot see the cut in the side. After banging on the bottle and proving how normal it is, I hold up a quarter and slap it through the small cut in the water bottle. Bada bing. Bada boom.

“Here in my hands I hold a perfectly normal water bottle. One that I drank out of this morning to take my vitamins.” If I can make my voice sound all magician-y, maybe no one will notice what a hack I am. I tap the water bottle all over. “Totally average water bottle.”

I hold up my quarter. From the front row, my mom squints. I uncap the bottle to show that I cannot fit it through the top. The room is so quiet. Is this why magicians always tell jokes? Or play really intense music that sounds like lasers? I display the quarter once more before gripping it between my fingers like the book said and slapping it into the side of the bottle and through the crack I had created.

“Voilà!” I say, which might be cute, except I’ve spoken too soon. I shake the water bottle, but besides the few stray drops from this morning, it’s empty. I hadn’t checked to make sure that I was hitting the right side of the water bottle.

“On the floor,” calls Callie from the third row where she sits beside Ellen.

Ellen. She chews on her bottom lip.

Her in the audience. My shitty talent. This fully lit auditorium. I’m wasting my time with this pageant. I don’t think this is what Lucy imagined when she stashed that old registration form away in her room. And it’s no one’s fault but my own. Tears threaten at the corners of my eyes, but I force myself to hold them back.

I look down, and there at my feet is my quarter. Quickly, I bend over to pick it up before shoving it through the other side of the bottle.

Worst magic trick of all time.

The only applause comes from Millie. Of course.

“I’m still learning,” I say.

I stand at the edge of the stage as the committee members—my mom included—converse back and forth. Finally my mother says, “Approved.” But her face says it all. Disappointed. Underwhelmed.

I squeeze past Hannah and Millie to get to my seat. “Weak sauce,” whispers Hannah.

“Oh, like you have anything better planned,” I snap.

“Hannah Perez,” calls my mother.

Hannah stomps across the stage in her army-navy surplus boots.

Then—thanks to the kid in the sound booth—her music begins to play. It’s a song I remember hearing on Lucy’s record player: “Send in the Clowns.” It’s the type of song that settles in your bones and makes you sad for a reason you can’t quite pin down.

Hannah’s voice isn’t even all that amazing, but she really sings it. Like, she wrote it herself. The music crescendos and so does her voice. I stop seeing Hannah with her usual sour face and her huge teeth and her fading black clothes. And all I see is this girl who sings this heartbreaking song because she gets it even when the rest of us don’t.

The music cuts out in the middle of it fading, and there’s a brief silence before every single person in the auditorium claps.

When the applause fades, my mom says, “Hannah, that was lovely.” And she says it in a way that says, Now, that is how you do it, Dumplin’.

Hannah nods and takes the steps two at a time. She doesn’t say thank you. Just grabs her backpack from where it sits at her feet and leaves.

I watch every single talent. Callie does sign language