Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
I’d spent years in Vegas, and the lights and madness of my town were nothing compared to the crescendo of Mardi Gras.
If Friday night had been a party, Saturday night was a full-scale assault against anything rational or moral or real.
It was like walking through a giant cartoon…
the kind that looked like the artists had tripped on acid and nothing but swirling colors and pink elephants and madness filled every inch of the screen.
But this wasn’t on a screen. It was around us, like a technicolor explosion blew up a glitter factory, a feather factory, and a light factory all at once, creating a tapestry of colors and sounds and sights I could hardly believe.
Marge pressed her hands to her head, spinning in circles, a sea of people on Bourbon Street everywhere we looked. “It’s… I don’t even… Where do we… This is… It’s… it’s… CRAZY!”
Her face was unmasked joy, which was the opposite of Doris, who looked like she might faint at any moment.
Sylvie looked overwhelmed as she took it all in, but her eyes glittered with wonder… or perhaps it was just the reflection of the woman in the giant glittering orb costume causing those sparkles in her blue irises.
“What do we even do? Where do we go? I don’t understand what’s happening. Why are there so many people?” Doris spun in circles, then covered her eyes when a man wearing nothing but a sock over his penis strolled by.
“This is the big night, Doris,” Marge explained, practically shouting so we could hear her over the crowds and music.
“The Endymion parade. All these weeks of celebrations lead up to this one big finale.” She paused.
“Well, at least, I think that’s what’s happening, if I remember that program I watched correctly. ”
“That’s what’s happening,” Sylvie said, her voice still stunned. “I googled it all last night.”
Coming to Mardi Gras and sharing my breasts with the world one last time had been my wish, but this was our second night and I still didn’t have the foggiest idea of how, when, or even if I would do it.
I was so overwhelmed with the excitement around me that I wasn’t sure if I should just lift my shirt and earn my beads quick or if I needed some special moment that might never come.
As we stood, too stunned to move, a marching band came crashing around the corner. The crowd moved like a tidal wave, the band sweeping through the cheering, dancing spectators, blending in as they moved through.
The swell of bodies pushed us around, and Marge grabbed my hand. I reached for Sylvie. Her fingers gripped mine as we held on to each other, pressing close to stop from being ripped apart.
“Doris!” Sylvie screamed, and I looked to see her outstretched hand empty.
Cymbals crashed by my head as I called out Doris’s name, the drums and horns so loud I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I looked left and right, but all I saw were bodies and Marge and Sylvie, their mouths opening and closing as they screamed her name, but I couldn’t hear them either.
We huddled closer together as the crowds tried to rip us apart, and we stayed that way until the band washed on through, leaving us behind like seashells after the tide.
“Where is Doris?” Marge barked, and I could finally hear her voice.
“I don’t know!” Sylvie spun left and right. “I grabbed her hand, or at least, I thought I did, but when I looked down, I was holding the hand of a stranger and Doris was nowhere to be found!”
Panic flooded my chest. “She’s lost? Are you kidding me?”
“Alice! You’re the tallest! Can you see her?” Marge hopped up and down, trying to see over the wall of bodies, but she was too short to even clear most people’s shoulders.
I rose on my toes, my high heels already lifting me four inches over my normal height. But with the wigs and hats and costumes, I couldn’t get tall enough.
“I can’t see her!” I called back.
“Sylvie! On my shoulders! Do it! Do it now! Every second wasted is a second she could be in the grip of a kidnapper, a serial killer, or a freaking vampire!”
Sylvie looked startled, but Marge knelt, patting her shoulders. Without hesitating, Sylvie climbed on.
Marge grunted and shook but rose like a phoenix, lifting Sylvie high above the crowd like a human periscope.
“Well? Report in, soldier! What do you see?” Marge tightly gripped Sylvie’s thighs as she teetered.
“Just… people! Everywhere! Doris! Doris!” Sylvie called in every direction.
Panic clawed at me from inside my chest. “What do we do? Stay here and wait? Look for her?”
Marge spun Sylvie around, the jerking movement almost sending Sylvie toppling off.
“Normally I would say stay and wait—that’s what they teach you in Scouts—but in this case, there are no landmarks for her to identify us.
If she got swept into that crowd and turned around, she won’t even know what direction to go! ”
“Doris!” I screamed, my panic rising.
“Wait!” Sylvie pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll call her!”
“Oh my God. Of course.” I breathed a sigh of relief, sanity starting to calm me down.
Sylvie held the phone to her head, and her face lit up. “Doris? Doris? Can you hear me? Doris! Where are you?”
This went on for almost a minute. Then Sylvie hung up her phone, peering down at us from her perch on Marge’s shoulders. “It’s too loud on both our ends. I can’t hear her.”
“Can you text her?”
Marge shook her head, the movement bumping her bowl-cut hair into Sylvie’s thighs. “Doris doesn’t text. You know that.”
“Damn it, Doris! I’m teaching her to text after this!”
We continued moving around, calling Doris as the minutes ticked by, seemingly speeding up like my heart rate. How would we ever find Doris in this mess?
“Do you think she went back to Bertha?” Sylvie asked.
“Do you think she could find Bertha?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“No,” Sylvie and Marge answered in unison.
“This is hopeless!” Sylvie called down over the music that grew louder as we passed a small street band. “We’re never going to find her!”
“I’m making you all get implanted with dog GPS tags!” Marge grumbled. “I don’t care if it’s illegal. We’re doing it so I can track you if some bastard takes you!”
“Well, she answered her phone, so she hasn’t been kidnapped,” Sylvie said rationally. Then her face lit up. “Wait! GPS! I think I have the Find My on there for her after we lost her phone a few months ago in that snowbank after playing with Emma. We added her to my list so we could always find it!”
Marge looked up at her. “Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place! Go! Do it! Locate our lost soldier!”
Sylvie typed away on her phone. Then her face exploded in a smile. “I got her! She’s at least five blocks away already. Go! That way!”
Marge spun and marched in the direction Sylvie pointed, and I hurried to stay with them as she pushed and cut her way through the crowd, Sylvie guiding her every step.
“Left! No, the other left! Straight… straight! No! She turned. She’s going the other way!”
“Cripes! How many cocktails has she had? She’s running around like a drunken monkey!”
We followed Doris’s moving dot until it finally stopped moving.
“She seems to have found somewhere to stop,” Sylvie said.
“Hopefully of her own volition!” Marge barked back. “Because if she’s being held against her will when we find her, I’m gonna rip the arms off anyone holding her captive and beat them to death with their own fists!”
It took us almost ten minutes to cut through the crowds and find our way around blocked streets to get to her unmoving beacon.
Suddenly, Sylvie screamed. “There! I see her! I see her!”
Marge took off at a jog with Sylvie bouncing on her shoulders like a bobblehead.
We pushed past stilt walkers and drunk frat boys until we reached a gated courtyard filled with enormous floats in various states of readiness arranged in a long line that disappeared around the corner.
Generators humming. Crew members in yellow vests moving with purpose. Music pulsing from somewhere ahead.
And there, near the second float, sitting on a folding chair with a Hurricane in one hand and a pink boa around her neck, was Doris.
And she was surrounded by drag queens.
Six of them, in Mardi Gras costuming that was so spectacular it required a moment simply to absorb—feathers and sequins and headdresses that added two feet to their already considerable heights, faces painted with the precision of artists who took their craft seriously and the joyfulness of people who loved every second of it.
“Just hold this drink and hand me that needle and thread. I’ll sew it for you, sweetie.” Doris stuck out her drink, and the six-foot-four drag queen in a blinding rhinestone-encrusted showgirl outfit took it from her.
We stopped, watching silently for a moment as she spun around and stuck out her ass, and Doris went to work sewing a tear in her costume.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Marge grumbled. “We’re in a panic thinking she’s been kidnapped and she’s over here having cocktails with queens.”
“Doris!” Sylvie cried out.
Doris looked up from her work, her face exploding in a smile when she saw us.
“Oh, I knew you’d find me! I knew it!” She waved big and wild like a little kid greeting their parents picking them up from summer camp. “See, Diamond! I told you they’d find me!”
We hurried over to her, and I grabbed her and pulled her into a hug. “You scared us, Doris. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Marge slowly kneeled, her legs shaking as she got onto her knees. Sylvie slid off and pulled Doris in for a hug next.
“I just… I need a minute.” Marge remained on the dirty pavement, her shoulders heaving with her breaths. “Adrenaline is leaving my body and now everything hurts and I think I might be dying.”
“Did you really carry Sylvie on your shoulders to look for me?” Doris released her grip on Sylvie, a gentle breeze blowing her pink boa.
“Tactical advantage having her on my shoulders to spot you.”
Doris puckered her lips. “Oh, Marge. You always think of everything to save us, don’t you?”