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“So how’d she do?”

Faison shakes her head. “Second runner-up. Everybody said she should’ve won, but the fix was in. You know how those pageant deals work.”

And with his vast experience in beauty pageants, Billy eagerly nods. For the moment people are leaving them alone.

“Not much you could call a big deal about Stovall these days.”

“That’s what I hear. Haven’t been since I was a kid, but when I saw one of the Bravos was from Stovall, I was like, Hey, Stovall! I felt like I kind of knew you in a way, I mean, Stovall, come on, out of all the places a person could be from? It just seemed funny.”

She grew up in Flower Mound, she tells him, and works part-time as a law firm receptionist while paying her own way through UNT, a mere six credits to go before she earns her degree in broadcast journalism. He guesses she’s twenty-two, twenty-three, a compact, curvy package with a pert, inquiring nose, green eyes strewn with flecks of amber and gold, and the kind of cleavage that makes men weep. At the moment she’s telling him how much his comments at the press conference meant to her, but he barely hears, so absorbed is he in the beautiful shapes her mouth makes as it forms the words

“You were so incredibly eloquent up there.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“No, yeah, you were! You put it right out there and that’s strong, a lot of people can’t talk about those kinds of things. I mean, like, death, your friend’s death? And you were right there with him? It can’t be easy talking to a room full of strangers about that.”

Billy inclines his head. “It is sort of weird. Being honored for the worst day of your life.”

“I can’t imagine! A lot of people would just shut down.”

“So what’s it like being a cheerleader?”

“Oh, great! A lot of work but I love it, it’s a lot more work than people realize. They see us on TV and think that’s all there is to it, just dressing out for the games and dancing and having fun, but that’s really just a very small fraction of what we do.”

“Really,” he says encouragingly. He feels light inside, refreshed, a physical state of hopefulness. Talking to this beautiful girl makes him realize just how precious his unremarkable life is to him.

“Yeah, community service is really the main part of our job. We do lots of hospitals, lots of stuff with underprivileged kids, appearances at fund-raisers and stuff like that. Like right now that it’s the holidays? We’re doing four or five service events per week, then practice and games on top of that. But I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for every minute of it.”

“Did you do the USO tour last spring?”

“Oh my God NO and I SO would’ve gone but I only made the squad this summer. Listen, I’m DYING to do a trip like that, no way they’re gonna keep me off that plane next time it happens. The girls who did it? They came back so enriched and that’s the thing about service, people say, ‘Oh, you’re so good to be giving so much of yourselves,’ but really it’s the other way around, we get so much back. To me that’s been the most satisfying thing about being a cheerleader, serving others. The spiritual aspect of it. Like it’s another stage in the journey, the quest.” She pauses; her eyes hold Billy’s for a long, searching moment, and just before she speaks he knows what’s coming.

“Billy, are you a Christian?”

He coughs into his fist, looks away. The confusion is genuine, but he rarely goes to the trouble of showing it.

“I’m searching,” he says finally, dipping into his repertoire of Christian buzz words, which, thanks to growing up in small-town Texas, is extensive.

“Do you pray?” She’s become softer in her manner, more solicitous.

“Sometimes. Not as much as I should, I guess. But some of the stuff we saw in Iraq, the little kids especially… Praying doesn’t come so easy after that.”

So if he’s laying it on a little thick, so what. His sensors haven’t picked up a false word yet.

“You’ve been tested in so many ways, I know. But a lot of the time that’s how it works, life gets so dark until we think all the light’s gone out of us. But it’s there, it’s always there. If we just open the door a crack the light comes pouring in.” She smiles and ducks her head, emits a shy chuckle. “You know how we kept looking at each other during the press conference? And I was thinking to myself, Now, why out of all the people here does he keep looking at me and I keep looking at him? I mean you’re cute and everything, you’ve got gorgeous eyes…” She giggles, regroups her seriousness. “But now I think I know why, I really do. I think God wanted us to meet today.”

Billy sighs, his eyelids flutter and his head tips back, meets the wall with an understated thunk. For all he knows every word she says is true.

“We’re all called upon to be His lights out in the world,” she continues, brushing a pom-pom against his arm, and thirty seconds into the story of how she came to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, Billy quietly, slowly, firmly, reaches underneath her pom-pom and takes her hand. Because, why not. Because he’s moved. Because in two days he’s back in the shit and what’s the worst that can happen compared to that? Faison doesn’t falter, in fact her rate of speech gathers speed. Her sternum lifts and swells; hothouse blooms of plum purple and fireball red dapple the regions of her face and neck. Her pupils dilate to twice their former size, and faint, shallow pantings swirl and ripple through her words as if she’s just trotted up five flights of stairs.

Billy is stepping backward, pulling her with him. One, two, three short steps and they are cached in the small dim space behind the backdrop’s flared edge, so that someone would have to stand flush with the wall in order to spy them out. Billy pivots, Faison’s back snugs up against the wall, and now she isn’t talking anymore. Her face is puffy, slack, a new thickness has filled out her cheeks and lips, the suddenly heavy swag of her free-swinging jaw. She could be falling asleep, she’s that yielding, and leaning toward her Billy knows that six weeks ago he wouldn’t have conceived of such a move, much less followed through. Three weeks ago, same, three days, check, so evidently something has happened to him. He keeps his eyes open the whole way in, and Faison’s eyes gradually merge into a single brilliant ball like a picture of Earth as seen from outer space. The first kiss feels like a pressure release, like bursting a bubble with a touch of the lips. He pulls back and discovers pleasure in the restraint. They stare at each other from a couple of inches’ distance. She seems stoned, out of it, then lifts her face and they kiss again. He wants to tell her how amazing her lips are, softer than anything he’s ever touched. Did you know he wants to say, but the tool is otherwise engaged as they linger, mouths drunk on soft-tissue probings, then it’s like a starting gun has fired because they’re going at each other like a couple of sophomores under the bleachers, a high-energy bout of gymnastical making out that seems to have as its goal the cramming, the actual forcing of their entire bodies down each other’s throat.

“This is crazy,” she whispers when they come up for air. “I could get kicked off the squad for this.” With that they fall on each other again, and for as long as it lasts Billy wants nothing more.

“What is it about you?” she murmurs at the next surfacing. “What’s happening to me?” When they lock lips again his pelvis drops and scoops into hers like a spoon driving into soft ice cream, pure motor reflex from the lower brain stem. He pulls back at once.