Hank and Dahlia had been crafting top ten lists to combat the sads—or, apparently, the I-don’t-knows—for well over a decade now. It started during their parents’ divorce, when Dahlia was in fifth grade. Dahlia had a particularly hard time when their dad moved out, and one night, when Hank heard Dahlia crying, he came into her room and sat on her bed, combing her hair with his fingers until she calmed down. And then he asked her to list her top tenLizzie McGuireepisodes.
Dahlia had sat up in bed immediately, taking the task so seriously that she eventually had to find a notebook to scribble her thoughts, crossing out and rewriting until she had her perfect ten episodes. Then Hank had asked her to write down her top ten lunches from the New Bedford Intermediate School cafeteria.
Looking back, Dahlia was still floored by Hank’s genius, still didn’t know what made him ask her those things at that moment. But by the time Hank left her bedroom that night to return to his own bed, Dahlia felt significantly less sad. She fell right asleep.
“No more Britney. How about . . . ” Dahlia tapped her pencil against a blank page. “Top ten cheeses.”
Now Hank laughed. “No way we haven’t done that one before, too.”
“I swear we haven’t! I know we’ve done ice cream several times, but we haven’t done cheese.”
“Fine.” Hank sighed. “Number ten. Swiss.”
“Blech.” Dahlia stuck out her tongue at her phone. Her tears had dried completely now. “Let’s do Havarti for number ten.”
Hank groaned. “This is why I don’t do food lists with you anymore.”
“Hank! Havarti is not that snooty!”
“Dahlia Woodson, I literally have no idea what Havarti cheese tastes like.”
Dahlia smiled and listed numbers one through ten in her notebook. She wrote Havarti on the tenth line.
“I’m assuming you wouldn’t support American cheese for number nine.”
Dahlia chewed on her pen cap before answering.
“No, let’s do it,” she said. “American is delicious.”
As she wrote it down in her notebook, she grinned, imagining what London would say. They would stare at her list in dismay and then gesture wildly with their hands. “American cheeseisn’t even cheese, Dahlia,” they would say. And then she would kiss them.
Hank and Dahlia finished the cheese list. She was just getting ready to suggest a top-ten-times-Dad-locked-his-keys-in-the-car list when Hank swiftly changed the subject.
“So what’s going on, baby sister? Did you get kicked off the show?”
“Oh,” Dahlia said, her system feeling confused at the sharp turn back to reality. “I signed an NDA so I’m technically not allowed to tell you. But I’m, um, still in LA.”
Dahlia stood and walked to the bathroom, filling a glass with water.
“So . . .” Hank waited. “What’s wrong?”
Dahlia stared at herself in the mirror above the sink, at the shadows under her eyes.
Her mouth asked the question before her brain had even truly known it needed to ask it.
“Would you be disappointed? If I don’t win?”
She heard Hank cluck his tongue. “Dahlia,” he said. “Come on.”
“Mom would be disappointed, probably. I feel like I’m always disappointing Mom.”
“No shit.” Hank snorted. “For the record, she was hard onbothof us, you know. You don’t hold exclusivity on disappointing our mother.”
“You didn’t get divorced from her, like, favorite person because you didn’t want to give her grandbabies,” Dahlia retorted.
“You didn’t come out as transgender in your mid-twenties,” Hank countered.
Dahlia paused. “Okay, fair. Mom was pretty great about that, though.”
