She didn’t sweat. That was the first thing I noticed about her.
This was Georgia in July. Church fans fluttering like moth wings, sundresses sticking to the small of your back. Pews tacky to the touch. But that girl, that new girl in the peach dress, stayed dry as chalk. No pit stains. No shine on her lip. Nothing.
She wore that same peachy-pink dress every day of music camp. It didn’t look expensive—just clean like it had never touched dirt. So we started calling her Peach Dress, not to her face, just among ourselves. It was easier than using her name. Nicknames helped with distance.
‘She’s not from around here,’ my cousin Willa told me. Like that explained everything.
We were sitting on the slate steps of the rec center, our choir folders laid flat between us like little shields.
‘Chicago,’ Willa added. ‘You can tell.’ She made it sound like a diagnosis. ‘Came down to stay with her aunt. You can tell she thinks she’s better. A diva.’
I didn’t know what a diva was. And I didn’t know if Peach Dress thought she was better than us or not, only that Willa’s words gave us permission. My cousin could make anything sound like an insult—Chicago, visiting aunts.
Peach Dress never joined in during lunch. She brought her own food in neat little Tupperware, fruit slices without any brown spots. She sat alone by the chain-link fence, reading from a book with no title on the cover.
That dress was perfect every day, which seemed strange. Even my Sunday best came home with at least one Kool-Aid stain or bug squish. And the way she sang. That was the other thing. She had a voice like honey on glass. Not syrupy, not fake. Just clean. Just still.
‘She fixes her vowels,’ someone said once. ‘Like she’s in the opera or something.’
We were supposed to be preparing for the Youth Jubilee. Three songs. A skit about the loaves and fishes. Sister Jolene said it was about witnessing, but it felt more like a pageant to me. We were all supposed to blend. Wear the same T-shirts. Be the same joyful sound.
But Peach Dress wouldn’t blend. Wouldn’t even pretend.
It was Willa’s idea to talk to her. ‘She’s gotta be confronted,’ she said. The way Willa said ‘confronted’ made my stomach pull.
Four of us followed her—me, Jacey (who always picked her mosquito bites), and the twins, who didn’t count as two unless they were arguing.
We caught her behind the church kitchen, where the dumpsters buzzed with flies. It smelled like old bananas.
When Peach Dress came around the corner, she didn’t flinch. She stopped as if she’d been expecting us.
‘You got something to say?’ Willa asked.
‘I don’t even know you,’ Peach Dress said. She wasn’t scared. I remember that.
‘You don’t like how we sing,’ Willa said, leaning in, folding her arms tight.
‘I never said that.’
‘You said we were flat. You told Sister Jolene.’
‘I was trying to help.’
‘Well, you don’t belong here,’ Willa said.
Peach Dress didn’t answer.
‘You think you’re better than us.’
‘No,’ Peach Dress said. Her voice didn’t rise or shake, which somehow made it worse. She just stood there, hands at her sides, fingers curled like she was holding something. Invisible strings, maybe. A thread she wouldn’t let us cut.
I didn’t say anything. My hands were sweaty on the edge of my shorts. I kept thinking about how Peach Dress had smiled during warmups, not big, just polite. Like we were all noise, and she was something tuned.
Willa reached out and tugged the hem of her dress. Not hard, not enough to rip, just enough to leave a mark, like a smudge on a canvas. The fabric fell back into place.
Peach Dress stepped away. Her eyes flicked to each of us. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She just turned around and walked off like it was finished.
Nobody said much after that. We watched her go, and the cicadas trilled in a high register, filling in the silence. Somebody kicked a pebble.
Later that night, after supper, my mother made me shower again and brush out my hair even though I was going straight to bed. She said I’d tracked in too much red clay and shame.
‘I got a phone call. Heard you and Willa had quite the conversation with the new girl.’
‘She doesn’t fit in,’ I said, and my pronouncement sounded small even as I said it.
My mother handed me a towel. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have the words.
At the Jubilee, Peach Dress sang ‘This Little Light’ like it was a secret. Her voice didn’t waver or swell; it just stayed, steady and whole. When she hit the last note, the room got so quiet you could hear the AC kick on. Then came the clapping. Not wild. Not polite. Something else. Everything was silent in the center, like a spoon balancing on its edge.
After, while the grown-ups folded chairs and slapped mosquitoes, while we kids packed up our sheet music, I saw Peach Dress outside, standing in the patch of sun near the swings, her dress glowing like a lamp. I thought about going over, about saying sorry or at least something.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I went home and wrote ‘Peach Dress’ at the top of a blank page in my notebook. I wrote her real name under it. I spelled it right, underlined it twice.
Not because I thought it would fix anything.
Just because I wanted to remember that I had seen her. And that she saw me.
In “Diva,” the combination of vivid imagery and subtle characterizations of what is being told between the sentences make for a resonating coming-of-age story, one that echoes in nostalgia of growing up, taking us back and filling our memories of solitude and power—a time in our lives when sticking out against the many requires bravery and fortitude.
Shome Dasgupta
I’ll never forget that peach dress, nor the apparent simplicity—in the language, in the plot—with which the author tells us this tiny story, this story that neither begins nor ends with the narrative, but that, somehow, allows us to get to know the characters beyond the words: we have been those characters. Diva is a story that, at times, reminded me of Carson McCullers and, at times, reminded me of myself envying—and falling in love with—the girl with the perfect dress and the perfect voice, the girl who does everything right versus the catastrophic, small-town girl. I loved it.
María Fernanda Ampuero
Cate McGowan writes across genres. She is the author of Sacrificial Steel (Driftwood Press, 2025), winner of the Driftwood Editors’ Prize, and Writing is Revision (Brill, 2025), a collection of essays. Her novel These Lowly Objects appeared with Gold Wake Press, and her debut short story collection, True Places Never Are, received the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. McGowan’s shorter work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton), Glimmer Train, North American Review, Shenandoah, and Trampset. A Georgia native, McGowan holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. and teaches writing and literature in Florida, where she lives with her husband and a few pets who think they own the place.
Business Stock photos by Vecteezy
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 