Ellen

Ellen’s pageant entry tests a friendship built through years of closeness: when she chooses to compete, the decision forces both friends to confront whether loyalty means staying together or allowing each other to change. Seen largely through Willowdean Dickson’s perspective, Ellen is both a familiar source of comfort and a person with ambitions Willowdean cannot claim to understand for her.

Identity and Long Friendship

Ellen is Willowdean’s childhood best friend. Their closeness is captured in the small rituals Willowdean remembers: when Ellen’s parents once took her in an RV along the West Coast, Willowdean wrote her a letter every day and left each one in Ellen’s mailbox. Their separation lasted two weeks, and the reunion mattered enough that both mothers allowed Ellen to stay overnight for two nights in a row. The memory gives their later silence its measure. Two weeks without speaking has happened before, but then the distance was travel; now Ellen is nearby and choosing a life Willowdean feels shut out of.

The story also establishes how much Willowdean has come to rely on Ellen’s familiar pattern of anger and forgiveness. After their argument, Willowdean expects Ellen to ignore her at first, but assumes they will recover as they usually do. That expectation is not simply confidence in Ellen’s kindness: it is a habit of treating reconciliation as something assured. When Ellen does not text over the weekend, and the distance continues into the week, Willowdean’s confidence gives way to panic.

The Pageant and the Rupture

At the pageant registration gathering, Ellen first appears to Willowdean as a supporter. When the young planning-committee member Mallory Buckley hands out folders, Ellen receives one too. Willowdean assumes she is there only for moral support, then realizes from the folder that Ellen has entered the competition. Ellen answers Willowdean’s surprise as if entering had been part of the plan all along. In that moment, a familiar companion becomes a fellow contestant—and a person whose choice Willowdean had not anticipated.

Their argument turns on what the pageant means to each of them. Willowdean wants the experience to be something for herself and resents the possibility that Ellen’s decision will take attention away from that. She invokes the advantages she believes Ellen already has and asks to be allowed this one thing. Ellen rejects the idea that Willowdean can make her responsible for that feeling. She says they may be outgrowing one another and holding each other back, adding that she misses out on many things because of Willowdean. Her words recast the dispute: what Willowdean experiences as a plea for room to act, Ellen experiences as an attempt to restrict her choices.

The mention of Callie sharpens the break. Willowdean is hurt that Ellen has spoken with Callie about their friendship, while Ellen is unwilling to withdraw from the pageant to preserve the old arrangement. She calls Willowdean a bad friend, says she is done wasting her time, and leaves. The scene ends without compromise. Ellen’s participation is not a side detail in their disagreement; it is the choice she refuses to surrender, even when doing so costs her the ease of their friendship.

Estrangement in the Rehearsal Room

Two weeks later, Ellen is still close enough to see and too distant for Willowdean to reach. At rehearsal she sits in the front row with Callie, both wearing workout clothes marked with Sweet 16. Willowdean remembers that her last two-week silence with Ellen had ended when Ellen returned from the RV trip. This silence feels worse precisely because Ellen is in the room. Willowdean has nearly apologized, but believes she has waited too long and still feels that she was right. The unresolved conflict is therefore not presented as a simple misunderstanding that either girl can erase with a quick gesture.

Ellen’s continued participation also makes the separation visible. She is attending rehearsals as a contestant while Willowdean must watch from across the room. The physical distance echoes the emotional one: Ellen is present, but the shared intimacy that once made absence unbearable no longer gives Willowdean an easy way back in. Millie Michalchuk encourages Willowdean to talk to her, but the prompt does not undo the silence.

Performance and Narrative Significance

Ellen performs a clogging routine to German folk music. Willowdean knows she belonged to a clogging team until seventh grade and judges her as no better at it now than she was then. Yet the familiar awkwardness makes Willowdean smile. She claps unusually loudly after Ellen finishes, drawing even her mother’s attention. Ellen sees Willowdean but does not acknowledge her. The performance thus holds two facts at once: Willowdean’s affection remains, expressed in an almost excessive show of support, while Ellen does not answer that gesture.

Ellen’s role in these scenes resists the idea that a long friendship must preserve its old terms unchanged. Her decision to compete exposes a conflict between closeness and independence: Willowdean fears being left behind, while Ellen names the ways she feels held back. Because the events are filtered through Willowdean, Ellen’s private reasons are not fully explained; what the scenes do show clearly is her insistence on making her own choice and the cost that choice carries. The pageant becomes the setting in which their friendship is tested not by lack of affection, but by competing claims about what they owe one another.