Dumplin' (Dumplin', #1)

by Julie Murphy

I get in my car and speed off out of the parking lot. I turn the volume on the radio up all the way in the hope that it might drown out everything rattling inside of me. Lucy, my mom, Ellen, Bo. Little versions of each of them seem to live inside of me, one louder than the next. The only voice that isn’t there—the one I need the most—is my own.

I wonder if that’s why the pageant has bothered me more this year than in the past. The girls who enter have got to be proud enough of themselves to say they deserve to compete. That kind of unflinching confidence makes me uneasy in a way it never has before.