Convertibles and Pretty Smiles

Short Fiction

The town had barely changed since Annette had left for Chicago twenty years and three best-selling crime novels ago.

It didn’t hit her hard when she visited once a year, but the town’s conservative nature clobbered her when she realized that this time she and the family would be residents. 

Dad was thrilled that his family was coming to live with him; Annette, her husband Jeff, and Dad’s namesake grandson Karl, who he now loved as a girl named Karrie. 

But not everyone in this town was going to be as supportive as her father, Annette was convinced of it. 

“Pearl Gonchar’s daughter Misty will be in Karrie’s grade,” she told Jeff. “I told Pearl to explain Karrie’s situation to Misty. Apparently, she’s quite popular, socially, and will help ease the...well the transition... to the new environment.”

“Hope for the best, expect the worst,” Jeff said, knowing Karrie couldn’t hear them with Run the Jewels blasting through her earbuds.

Pearl and her family were on the Kingman’s front porch before Annette had had a chance to fill one dresser drawer in her dad’s place.

Misty Gonchar took Karrie down to the FrostyWhip. Annette noted that Misty seemed like a bright, energetic girl.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Misty said before they had even crossed Karrie’s grandpa’s property line onto the winding two-lane.“It’s gonna be totally Kosh...I have to get a few more people who are kinda on the fence to buy in, but I’m pretty sure we already have it worked out for you to be homecoming queen.”

Karrie stopped, stiff-legged like a cartoon coyote. 

“Hi. We just met. I appreciate the...help...umm, but yeah, thanks, NO.”

“No, what?” Misty asked, genuinely confused. “See, the way it works is that if you’re homecoming queen, next year you’ll at least have a shot at prom court, and you gotta make prom court to have any prayer of becoming Melon Queen at the Fall Festival and really making a statement. We are gonna make this stupid old town pro-gress-ive if it kills me.”

Karrie extended her hand. “Let’s start over. My name is Karrie. I wouldn’t mind being a member of the chess club because I love chess, but I don’t wanna be an officer, like Treasurer, or anything like that because paperwork bores me. I play the flute, pretty okay if you ask me, maybe even first chair around here, because the town is small and there’s probably less competition, no offense, than Lincoln Park, where I’m from.

“I’d like to pole vault if the state high school athletic association will allow me to, but if they make me compete in the boy’s division I might just do it anyway, provided there are separate facilities, I haven’t decided.

Here are a few things I don’t like: I don’t like reptiles, I mean I respect them as living creatures, but they’ve always kinda given me the creeps since I was a little kid, I don’t like soft boiled eggs, only hard, kinda picky in a world where not everyone had enough to eat, but I just think the texture is gross, and the other thing I don’t like, is pageants. I have no desire to smile pretty or wear gloves,I prefer flats not heels, and I think it’s fascist to judge people on physical attractiveness in the first place. I hope we can be friends. But if you set me up in any competition that involves a sash or a tiara, I’m going to be more inclined to punch you in the mouth than be your friend. We’ll find another way to make a statement. I promise.”

Misty Gonchar felt like she had been hit by the coolest truck in the world and immediately started texting her crew to let them know that the trans chick was out, and that for two thousand bucks, Brandy Listenberg could still be homecoming queen.

***

Photo by Frankie Lopez on Unsplash