"Okay, first question," Olivia said, consulting the numbered list in her notebook. "When did you start doing drag?"

Dulce cleared his throat and propped his elbows on the table.

His fingernails were painted a brilliant sunflower yellow.

"My senior year of college," he said. "I was a theater major. I did a lot of Shakespeare, a bit of contemporary work. It wasn't until after I turned twenty-one and started going out to bars that I got interested in drag."

Ryan cleared his throat hesitantly and looked to Olivia like he needed her permission to speak.

"Yeah, go ahead," she said.

"So how'd you go from, like, Shakespeare to being a drag queen?" Ryan asked.

"Alright, alright," Dulce said, scooting his chair up to the table and looking entirely too excited to play history professor. "So, drag is a type of theater. It's always been about performance, although in ancient civilizations—South America, Egypt, Japan—crossdressing was used in spiritual or religious ceremonies. It wasn't until the popularization of original dramatic works that drag really evolved. In Shakespeare's day, for instance, women weren't allowed to take the stage, so boys played the female roles and dressed the part."

Olivia and I groaned with displeasure at the same time.

"Right?" Dulce said. "Anyway, on to the twentieth century, and you've got vaudeville, which is a type of musical theater that centers around comedy. That's when female impersonation took on this new edge. It became about the personality, the caricature, the satire. So then we got Rocky Horror Picture Show—as you mentioned," he said to Ryan, "and RuPaul's Drag Race, and bam, it's today, and I'm getting paid to sing Cher at a Mexican restaurant. Living the dream."

Olivia frowned down at her bullet points, frantically trying to find the ones she could cross off.

When she'd reoriented herself, she asked another round of basic questions—where Dulce had been born, if he had siblings. I itched to jump in and pick up the compelling conversation Olivia had let drop (Dulce was clearly well-learned in the history of drag culture and theater, and though I'd tried stalking his LinkedIn, I wasn't sure where he'd gone to college), but I didn't want to bulldoze her.

"Have you always been a singer?" Olivia asked, finally circling back around to a more productive line of questioning.

"I did a capella in college," Dulce said. "And I grew up watching a lot of theater with my mom."

I saw an opening for the tricky question Olivia had delegated to me.

So I leaned forward, reached for the chip basket, and asked, "Were your parents involved in performance arts?"

Bodie propped his elbow on the table and rested his hand over his mouth, like he was covering a smile. I tried not to let it go to my head.

"No, no. Not their skill set," Dulce said with a laugh. "Dad's a lawyer, mom's a physical therapist. But she—my mom—she always liked watching musical theater with me. She took me to New York when I was in high school to tour colleges and see a few Broadway shows."

"So she's... supportive?" Olivia asked tentatively.

"Oh, she loves it," Dulce said with a bashful smile. "She comes a couple of times a year to watch. She gets rowdy. It's embarrassing, sometimes, but I perform with a couple of girls who don't even talk to their moms anymore, so I like to be thankful for what I've got."

I'd been five years old when my mom died.

Everything I really knew about her was from pictures framed around our house and stories my dad and abuelita told over and over again, until I couldn't untangle which memories were mine and which were theirs. I'd been too young, and she passed too suddenly, so I'd never had the chance to think, I am so thankful for this woman.

I wished I had.

And now I was tearing up in a Mexican restaurant.

Rock bottom, my name is Laurel.

I wiped one knuckle under my eyes and glanced across the table at Bodie. He was listening to Dulce, so he didn't seem to notice that I'd gotten emotional. I waited for him to bounce his knee or fidget with his hands, but he was perfectly still, his attention as sharp as it was on the field during a football game.

I tried to follow his lead.

Ryan had asked another question. I'd missed it completely.

"My goal isn't to pass as a woman," Dulce answered. "I don't care what pronouns people use with me while I'm in drag—it's actually sort of fun to walk the line. Because then people realize there's only a line because someone came along and drew one. It's pretty arbitrary, what we deem feminine or masculine. It's not as biological as people assume."

"Do you think that makes people uncomfortable?" Olivia asked, following my lead and skipping past several questions on her list to ask a more relevant one. "The walking-the-line stuff?"

"Oh, absolutely," Dulce replied. "For some people—you know, it just makes them feel weird. Because they've got this idea of what men and women are supposed to be. I'm a six-foot-four, plus-size black Cuban man. And then I get up there, and I'm singing Dolly Parton and looking fine as hell, and people don't know how to reconcile it."

Bodie cleared his throat.

"So when you're dressed up—when you're Dulce," he said, pausing for a moment to consider his words, "do you feel like you're, I guess, a different person?"

Dulce thought about this for a moment.

"You know, I don't," he said at last. "Who someone is on stage is never exactly who they are off it. It's always performative. But I do feel like Dulce is—she's part of me. She's an alter ego. I think that's the beauty of drag. The freedom you have to just—to be who you are, you know?"

"So you, like, find yourself through drag," Ryan concludes.

"You can, yeah. And I'm not saying you have to get up on stage in a dress and sing Cher. I know that's not for everybody. I'm saying, you gotta do you. You gotta do what makes you happy, even if you think it makes you less masculine—or less feminine—or whatever."

"So true," Olivia whispered reverently.

"As soon as you do it, you understand how much all of it is performance. Every single day. You wake up, and you're doing shit for other people's sake—and sometimes you want to do it, and sometimes you're just doing it because you feel like you have to. Once you figure out what you're doing for other people's sake... I mean, that's happiness, for me."

We sat in reverent silence for a moment.

Ryan finally let out a low whistle and said, "Damn, bro."

It wasn't eloquent, but it did sum up exactly what I was thinking.

"I think that's everything," Olivia said, eyes tracing her notebook one last time before she shut it. "Thank you so much, again. You're such a superstar."

Dulce put his hands down on the table, palms to the wood, and pushed his chair back.

"Perfect timing" he announced. "I've gotta start getting ready. It takes forever and a half to beat this face. It's was great meeting you three. And you," he turned to Olivia. "Tell me you dumped the deadweight."

"I did," Olivia said proudly.

"And you deleted his number?"

Her smile deflated.

Dulce sighed.

"Just do it, sis. Thank me later," he told her, then turned to the rest of us and said, "It was wonderful meeting you all. Hope you enjoy the show."

Bodie smiled, nodded, and said, "Thank you."

"Yeah, thanks so much," I added at the same moment Ryan went, "Break a leg, or whatever, if they even say that in real life."

Dulce bowed his head in thanks and left us.

I collected my phone from the center of the table and switched off the recording. Ryan, Olivia and I immediately launched into discussion. What quotes were we sure we'd use? How would we integrate what Dulce had said into the preexisting structure of our project without compromising context or content?

Our waiter appeared, took our orders, and—what seemed like sixty seconds later—swung back around with four plates of food. Olivia, the vegetarian of the group, kept talking through her list of bullet points while she stabbed at her cheese enchiladas with a fork. Ryan and I mumbled out our thoughts through mouthfuls of carne asada tacos.

Bodie, who had ordered a burrito the size of my head, ate in silence.

He had the stares.

I was considering nudging him under the table with my foot, just to tug him out of his thoughts before he became hopelessly lost in them, when our waiter materialized again with an enormous pitcher of sangria—wine's more festive cousin—and announced that Dulce D'Leche had bought it for our table.

My elation at being provided free alcohol was almost immediately crushed when our waiter asked to see our IDs.

While Ryan and Olivia handed over their driver's licenses, I propped my chin on my palm and watched perfect wheels of sliced orange float amongst ice cubes in a sea of deep burgundy.

La Ventana wasn't legally allowed to provide me a cup with which to consume the free sangria, but, when our waiter had left and no one was looking, Olivia slid hers across the table so I could try it.

It tasted like summertime in Mexico City.

We ate and we talked and we laughed—even Bodie, who didn't say much but chuckled at Ryan's jokes. The back room filled up steadily until, all at once, there wasn't an empty table in the house.

I kept stealing tiny sips of Olivia's sangria.

I was sure I'd never felt the effects of alcohol so fast. My smiles were coming easier and I kept laughing too loud and meeting eyes with the football player across the table. Given that the last time I'd gotten drunk, I'd spent the night trying to fight Bodie St. James and puking—in that order, not simultaneously, thank God—it seemed wise to take it easy.

So when Olivia offered the last of the glass to me, I shook my head.

"You sure? You had, like, three sips. We haven't even made a dent in the pitcher."

"I'm good," I said.

She poured herself a refill and kept drinking.

"So what kinda music do you think they play here?" Ryan asked through a mouthful of chips.

As if to answer his question, the lights came on, brilliant magenta and cyan blue, and Dulce appeared on stage.

Except Dulce was a new woman.

She wore a black bolero jacket and matching wide-brimmed sombrero, both intricately embroidered with gold thread. Her lipstick and dress were the red of a matador's cape, and her false eyelashes cast shadows like raven's wings. She was flanked on either side by performers in matching outfits.

There was a beat of awestruck silence before the room erupted with whistling and cheers.

"Bienvenidos a La Ventana," Dulce bellowed into a microphone. "We begin tonight with a tribute to the Queen of Tejano!"

The opening chords of a song I hadn't heard in years poured out from the speakers.

My heart lodged in my throat.

It was Selena Quintanilla.

My mom's favorite singer.

I didn't realize I remembered the lyrics until I caught my mouth shaping out the words. I hadn't heard the song in years—not since elementary school, it felt like—but my brain had filed the lyrics away for safekeeping, like I'd somehow known I would need them later.

Like I could've possibly known that, one day, I'd be at a Mexican restaurant, haunted by thoughts of my mom, and three drag queens would take the stage and reach right into my chest to hold my heart.

When the set ended, I couldn't stop smiling.

The low hum of conversation filled the room as the performers slipped off stage for a costume change.

"I should go put more money in the meter," Bodie said.

I watched him disappear down the narrow hallway between the bathrooms.

As soon as he was out of sight, Olivia leaned across the table, fingers folded together like she'd summoned me to a board meeting.

"So," she said. "What's the deal with you and St. James?"

A tortilla chip lodged sideways in my throat.

I spluttered and washed it down with her sangria.

"What?" I croaked.

"There's weird—I don't know. Tension."

"She wrote that article," Ryan said, startling me. "The one about Vaughn."

"That was you?" she demanded, then slumped with disappointment. "Ugh. Well that explains it, I guess. I was hoping for something more romantic, though. What a freakin' let down."

I snorted.

"Ha! Romantic. Um, no. Definitely not."

Olivia tilted her head to the side.

"He looks at you, Laurel."

She said this like I was supposed to know what it meant.

And maybe I did. But instinctively—the way your hand snaps away from a hot pan if your skin so much as brushes it—I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong. That I was invisible to Bodie, now that we'd agreed to disagree and wait the investigation out. That everything he did was motivated by his need to be liked, to be a good person. Carrying Hanna home and apologizing about my field pass and walking with me from Buchanan to my apartment with me had been for him. For keeping up his own opinions of himself. Not for me.

I'd dismantled all he held dear. He was not interested in me.

"Honestly, he doesn't even—"

My words were drowned out by the opening bars of a Cher song. While my group mates turned to watch the action on stage, I glanced at Olivia's glass.

How much sangria had I had? I felt lightheaded.

He looks at you.

I turned Olivia's words over in my head until they didn't sound like English anymore.

The Cher song ended. I didn't notice the music had gone quiet until Ryan set down his glass of sangria a little too hard and declared, "What the fuck? St. James has been gone, like, ten minutes."

It'd been thirteen and a half minutes, actually.

But Ryan had a point. It couldn't take this long to shove a couple quarters into the meter. I doubted anything dramatic had happened—Bodie wasn't exactly the kind of target you tried to mug, unless you wanted to be body-slammed into the sidewalk—but I still couldn't shake my concern.

Maybe something Dulce had said had gotten to him.

I pushed back my chair and stood before I could overthink what I was doing.

"I'm gonna check on him," I announced, wadding up my napkin and setting it on the table beside my empty plate. "I'll be right back."

Neither of my remaining group mates said anything, but I caught Olivia grinning against the rim of her glass before I headed towards the entrance, and I couldn't help but think that I was getting real tired of everyone smiling like they knew something.

_________________

GO GET YOUR MAN LAUREL.

I'll see you guys on Monday ;)

Your friendly author,

Kate