The Homecoming Crown Fifty Years Late

The Sheet

She held the tiara in one hand and the yearbook in the other, and she looked down at the sheet under the stadium lights.

I watched her find her own name. I watched her eyes go across the hash marks. Bundles of five. My pencil, from 1975.

Darlene, 132.

Connie, 101.

Her lips moved while she counted. She was a farmer’s daughter. She counted it herself. She was not going to take my word for it, and I loved her for that.

When she got to the bottom, she stood very still.

Then she pressed the yearbook flat against her chest with both arms, the tiara still hanging from her fingers, and she started to cry. Not loud. Just tears running down, in front of the whole town, and her chin going.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “Marlys, I never knew.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “That’s my fault.”

She looked past me then. Down the line of our classmates, to the far end.

Connie was already walking toward us.

What Connie Said

She walked straight down the line in her good wool coat, past Judy from the bank and past Gene, who had come down to stand at the rail. She stopped in front of me and held out her hand.

“Marlys,” she said. “Give me the microphone.”

I hesitated. I will be honest. For one second I thought she was going to say I made it up. I thought she was going to say I was a bitter old woman with a pencil.

Then I looked at her face and I handed it to her.

Connie turned to the stands. Her hand was shaking so much the microphone knocked against her teeth, and it made a sound over the speakers. She took a breath.

“My name is Connie Rasmussen,” she said. “I was homecoming queen in 1975.”

The crowd was silent now. Even the little boy who wanted a pop.

“I counted those ballots with Marlys,” she said. “Darlene won. I knew it that afternoon. I knew it when they put the crown on me, and I have known it every day since. Marlys didn’t do anything wrong. I did. I’m the one who wrote down the wrong number and took it to the office.”

She stopped. She looked at Darlene.

“I’m sorry,” Connie said. “I’m so sorry, Darlene. I needed something that year, and I took yours. That’s the whole of it. There isn’t any excuse that makes it better.”

Nobody clapped. It was not a clapping thing. I have never heard a football field that quiet, with three or four hundred people on it, and the lights humming, and the band standing in rows with their instruments down.

Connie held the microphone out to Darlene.

Darlene did not take it. She stepped forward and took Connie’s free hand instead, with the yearbook still pinned against her chest under her other arm.

“Connie,” she said. Not into the microphone. Just to her. But the microphone was close, and it picked it up, and the whole field heard it. “I’d have liked to know. That’s all. I’d have liked to know somebody picked me.”

“Everybody picked you,” Connie said. “That’s what was so awful. Everybody picked you.”

Connie stood there. That was the consequence, and she took it. She did not run back up the bleachers. She did not go home. She stood on the track next to Darlene in front of the whole town she had lived in for sixty-eight years, with her face wet, and she let everybody look.