Page 189 of While You Were Trending

“Oh my stars, are you really going up there?” she whispers.

“Wouldn’t be the first timeFoxy Goes Thereon a drag stage.”

She gapes at me, and then she throws her head back and laughs in a way that I have no business watching if I’m getting on that stage in thirty seconds.

“Asking permission, darling?” Peppermint drawls at me. “It’s fine. I’m not intimidated by some floozy with better lips than I have. And she can’t do”—Peppermint twirls and does a quick tap dance number that ends in a shimmy-shake of her drag boobs—“this.”

“I’m not participating in this,” Cherry declares.

“I am!” Fuchsia Fallenout replies. “You be quiet. I’m working on a number about glittery hairballs.”

Ginny legit chokes as she laughs harder, eyes bright and happy, everything about her absolutely shining.

Peppermint pulls anewface that goes from just in her lips to some of her tongue sticking out too, like she’s trying to wipe away the idea of a glittery hairball. “Foxy, please get your tight tushy up here before that wig starts singing something none of us can unhear.”

Ginny’s wheezing, but she takes my phone as I rise.

Thunderous applause explodes around me unlike anything I’ve heard before outside of a skating rink, and even then, it was rarely just for me.

“Oh, wow,” Peppermint says. “Do you do a podcast or something? I want to do a podcast. But it would be a…bodcast.”

She shimmies her boobs again, and Cherry makes a gagging noise. “Are we not done with that joke yet?”

“Shut up, you old hag,” her wig says. “You’re sitting this out. Peppermint and I are gonna make this man astar.”

“You’re not seriously going up there, are you?” Ginny says as I head toward the stage.

I don’t answer her.

Because it’s far more fun to give her a night out that she’ll never forget.

37

MISTER CONGENIALITY

Ginny

If I thoughtI might’ve liked Declan before, watching him let Cherry Slapstick and Peppermint Sinbin put him in drag makeup and a dress onstage has completely ruined me for any chance of denying just how down bad I am for him.

And the improv show the queens put on as they—and Cherry’s wig—decided what his look needed to be?

And that Declan rolls with while matching their witty banter beat for beat?

Absolutely priceless.

“I’m so sorry my camerawork is shitty,” I say to him as I join him and the two queens backstage after the show. “It’s hard to film when you can’t stop laughing.”

He grins at me, his lips bright red and well-defined, the contour on his cheeks making him look like his already chiseled cheekbones are sharp as glass, and his eyes—I giggle, then snort, then giggle and snort more until I’m coughing.

His eyebrows take up half his forehead, and where Cherry and Peppermint’s eyebrows are high and exaggerated andmatch, Declan has one brow that looks like a caterpillar on steroids, and the other is an homage to all of the women who overplucked in the nineties without realizing eyebrows don’t grow back.

“So you had fun?” he asks me in the voice he uses when he mimics his brother.

“Stop mocking me.” Cherry whips off her wig, pets her once, kisses the lips, and then sets her on a wig stand.

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” Declan replies, still in his drag queen voice.

“Foxy went there, and Foxy’s never going back,” Peppermint says.