What was she, sixteen?Īlmost seventeen, I say. But if things had worked out differently, I could have been your grandfather. You know I took her out a couple of times back when we were kids, he says. I know where this is going, and I’d like to avoid it. How’s Starletta? he asks me as I fasten the strap around his neck. They’re pretty beat-up, but he covers them with powder and pancake makeup and says he can get another couple of years out of them. He tells everyone that his fairy godmother gave them to him for his sixteenth birthday, and they look it. Most of the other queens create the illusion of cleavage using makeup, but Lola insists on these giant silicone boobs that he’s had forever. He’s sipping one now as he plops into the chair in front of the dressing room mirror and waits for me to put the fake breasts on him. Well, that and the mai tais he drinks one after the other starting at around three in the afternoon. Besides, getting onstage is the only thing that makes him happy. He owns the bar, so he can do whatever he wants to. But Dolly and I are the exact same age, and if she can still do the song in her shows, so can I.

I know what you’re thinking, he says, jabbing the air with a finger tipped by a long acrylic nail painted bright pink. But Lola is, well, not exactly the age Dolly Parton was when she took it to number one on the charts. The Dolly Parton number is 9 to 5, a song popular more than twenty years before I was even born. When Lola asks me to help him with his tits, I know it’s going to be one of those nights.Ĭome on, Sammy, he says, fluttering his long, fake lashes and puckering his red-lipsticked mouth.

He’ll spend his time working at the Eezy-Freeze with his dad cooking up some midsummer magic with his grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother (the Grands) and experimenting with drag with the help of the queens at the Shangri-La, the local gay club.īut when a new guy comes to town, Sam finds himself in trouble when they strike up a friendship that might be way more than that.Īs Sam’s birthday approaches and he still hasn’t quite fallen in love, the curse seems to get more powerful and less specific about who it targets.Ī mysterious girl Sam talks to on the phone late at night and a woman he’s only seen in a dream might have the answers he’s been looking for-but time is running out to save the people he cares about. Sam doesn’t plan to fall for anyone in the weeks before his birthday. The Weyward family has been haunted by a curse for generations-if a Weyward falls in love before their seventeenth birthday, the person they love dies.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only guy in my school who can replace a faulty kick-down switch and also create the perfect smoky eye.”

Michael thomas ford love & other curses