Beauty Queens (19 page)

Shanti raised her hand. “I move we officially ban the word
sorry
from our vocabularies while we’re here.”

“I second that, if that’s okay,” Petra said, grinning. “If not,
sorry.”

“I third it.
Sorry.”

“I just scratched my nose.
Sorry.”

“I just scratched my ass.
Sorry.”

“I’m getting up to stretch my legs.
Sorry.”

“Sometimes I just want to burn down all the rules and start over,” Mary Lou said. Everyone waited for the punch line of “sorry,” but it never came.

“What would you really like to say up there to that studio audience?” Adina asked.

Petra pretended her fist was a microphone. “Well, Fabio. I’m glad you asked.”

“Don’t you dare call me Fabio,” Adina said, giggling.

“Would you rather be Fabiana?’Cause you know I’m flexible. I’d say …” Petra crossed her legs, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d say, I am too fucking fabulous for one gender. Oh, and can we please get rid of the cheesy dance numbers? It’s like torture by step-ball-change.”

“I’d say I am not a race. I am an individual,” Nicole said.

Brittani hugged her. “You’re so nice, Nicole. It’s like you’re not even mad at me for being white.”

Nicole cut her eye at Brittani, then looked over to Shanti, who rolled her eyes.

Sosie moved her fingers gracefully, but no one understood. She waited for a moment. “I would say, learn to hear me in my own voice. I’m hearing impaired, not invisible.”

“I feel invisible sometimes, too,” Tiara said softly.

“What would you say, Bollywood?” Nicole asked.

Shanti had been telling her story at pageant after pageant: How her parents came to this country — the land of dreams and opportunity — from India. How they had opened a business, a restaurant, and taught their daughter that with hard work, she could be anything she wanted to be. How they taught her to honor where she was from but to love and embrace the customs of the new country. Shanti had told her story so many times, she had even started to believe it. She’d built herself into something perfect and unassailable. Now, under the clear night sky, she wondered if it might be the time to break it all down like some elaborate pageant set the day after the show. But what to put on the bare stage that remained?

“I’d say I need more fish!” She reached for what was left on Miss Ohio’s plate.

“Hey!” Miss Ohio protested, but she let her eat it anyway.

“You know, instead of some old, backassward pageant competition, we should have a con. A Girl Con! How awesome would that be?” Adina said.

“What would we do at Girl Con?” Jennifer said, giving the words a cheesy announcer’s voice.

“We could have some wicked cool workshops — writing, film, science, music, consciousness-raising… .”

“Comic Nerds with Ovaries!” Jennifer shouted. “I will lead that one. And a seminar on DIY zine production.”

“My platform is about climate change,” Miss Montana said. “It’s so beautiful in Montana. I really do want to save our environment.”

“Miss Montana is down for a Save the Environment panel,” Adina said. “Who else?”

Miss New Mexico raised her hand. “I always wanted to make films. I love French New Wave. Godard. Truffaut. I made a
short about my school cafeteria called
Meatloaf, Tu Es La Morte à Moi.

“I work at a center for LGBT kids. I was thinking of starting my own nonprofit LGBT center in college,” Petra said.

“Love it!” Adina yelled. She lay sprawled in the sand, her head resting on a tree limb.

“Can we also … sorry! Was I interrupting?” Brittani winced.

“Thou shalt not say sorry!” Mary Lou chided in a deep voice.

Brittani smiled. “Right. I forgot. Sor — I mean, can we do makeovers at Girl Con?”

“Do we have to?” Adina said with a sigh. “How is that empowering?”

“Things don’t have to be empowering all the time. It can just be fun. Way to cut a fart in the middle of the party, New Hampshire,” Jennifer said.

“And I
like
makeovers,” Tiara said.

Petra gave her a high five. “So do I.”

“And me,” Shanti added. “If I only had ten minutes left to live, I would spend it at the makeup counter at the Nordstrom in the Galleria.”

“Really?” Adina made a face.

Shanti shrugged. “If you find me in that jungle dead of a rare spider bite, make sure you put my eyeliner on.”

Miss Ohio flailed with excitement. “Makeovers are so fun! It’s like the Superman phone booth of girl.”

Adina sat up. “It’s denigrating and objectifying.”

“No. It’s eye shadow and lipstick and sex and mystery and magic and transformation and fun. And nobody’s taking that away from me. You will pry my Petal Power lip gloss out of my cold, dead hands,” Shanti insisted.

Adina rolled her eyes. “Okay. Democracy rules. Makeover panel, too.”

Tiara clapped. “Yay!”

“Dancing,” Sosie called out defiantly.

“Sex Monkey!” Petra shouted.

Miss Montana sputtered. “Sex Monkey? What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I just really want to go to a workshop called Sex Monkey.”

“Honoring Your Inner Wild Girl,” Mary Lou said softly.

“Wow. Great title,” Adina said.

“You calling us wild, Nebraska?”

“Huh? No! It’s … nothing. Sorry.”

“SORRY!” the girls yelled as one before dissolving into laughter. Mary Lou didn’t laugh. Somebody passed around half a coconut and everyone took a small bit.

Nicole chewed on a piece of bulrush. “We could take the world by storm, you know? It’ll be like we proved ourselves, like all those heroes’ journey stories about boys, only we’re girls.”

“Damn straight.” Adina high-fived her.

Taylor emerged from the shadows. The firelight deepened the planes of her face till she seemed an X-ray of a girl. “You know, ladies, I’ve been listenin’ to y’all over here talkin’ while I work out because I am a very good multitasker. This is not about Girl Cons and Sex Monkey workshops, which, frankly, makes my mouth feel soiled just sayin’ it. This is about Miss Teen Dream! The pinnacle of teen girl perfection.”

Adina stacked pieces of fish on her stick and twirled it over the fire to cook them, as she’d learned to do. “Taylor, I think we’re kind of beyond Miss Teen Dream now. I mean, look at us — look what we’ve built here in the past however long we’ve been here.”

“Beyond Miss Teen Dream?” Taylor sat on a log and stared at the girls, dumbfounded. “Miss Teen Dream is all I ever wanted from the time I was six years old. This is the big one. The one that matters. Don’t y’all remember why we’re here?”

The girls looked at one another.

“Maybe that’s where I started, but I’m not sure now,” Miss New Mexico said. “Doesn’t seem like enough anymore.”

“Well, you can be a quitter if you like, Miss New Mexico. I’m in
it to win it. And as team leader, I say that we need to get back to practicin’ and beautifyin’ if we’re gonna be ready to go when we get back. Once they rescue us.”

“But what if they don’t rescue us?” Nicole asked.

“They will.”

“But what if they don’t?” Nicole said. “I just think maybe we should think about trying to rescue ourselves. Sorry, it’s just what I think. I mean, no, I’m not sorry. It’s what I think.”

Taylor fell into her three-quarters pose, a reflex, a battle stance. “Miss Teen Dream is the ideal of young womanhood.”

“The ideal? What ideal?” Sosie asked. “Says who? All they do is keep raising the bar, adding things we have to do or prettify or fix to be accepted. And we take the bait. We do it. That’s what Miss Teen Dream represents. Well, not me. I’m out. I mean, Taylor, what are you going to do when your pageant years are over?”

“Over?” Taylor repeated. “They’re never over. Life is a pageant, Miss Illinois. Everything I’ve learned will help me on my path.”

A bloodcurdling scream interrupted the standoff. “My ring! It’s gone!” Mary Lou held up her ring finger. All that remained was a band of pale skin where the ring had been. “You have to help me look for it! Please!”

“Okay, okay, calm down,” Petra said. “Is it a family heirloom or something?”

“No, it’s just — it’s very important,” Mary Lou said, near tears. She crawled in the sand.

“It keeps her purity vacuum-sealed to preserve its freshness for her future husband,” Adina sniped.

Petra glared. “Just because you’re funny doesn’t mean you get to be cruel,” she said in a low voice.

Adina swallowed hard. She got down on her knees and patted the ground, searching for a glint of silver. The girls lit torches and combed the immediate area, but the ring was nowhere to be found, and it wasn’t safe to go any farther.

“Sorry, Mary Lou,” Tiara said. “I know we’re not saying sorry anymore, but I’m still sorry we didn’t find your ring.”

“Thanks,” Mary Lou said. She sat on a rock staring out at the ocean, her face full of misery.

“Hey. Don’t worry. We’ll find it tomorrow.” Adina put an arm around her friend. She hated everything the ring stood for, but it mattered to Mary Lou and so it mattered to Adina. “It’ll be okay.”

Mary Lou shook her head and placed a shaking hand against her St. Agnes medal. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand at all.”

Please fill in the following information and return to Jessie Jane, Miss Teen Dream Pageant administrative assistant, before Monday. Remember, this is a chance for the judges and the audience to get to know YOU. So make it interesting and fun, but please be appropriate. And don’t forget to mention something you love about our sponsor, The Corporation!

• I grew up on a farm in a town of only a thousand people.
  
• My platform is called Animals Are Awwww-some. We find foster homes for older pets.
  
• For obvious reasons, I am a vegetarian.
  
• I’ve never been to a water park! I can’t wait to go on the slides.
  
• The most important quality in a friend is to be yourself. Unless you’re not a very nice person. Then you should try to be somebody else.
  
• My favorite Corporation show is
  Captains Bodacious.
  I’ve always thought it would be cool to be a pirate. My sister, Annie, and I used to pretend we were pirate queens. We always thought one day we’d get a boat and sail the seas,
  find buried treasure, fight villains and monsters, and live outside the rules. We’d have total command of our ship
  ^*
  
• The thing that scares me most is letting go.
  

The dream had been about a sexy pirate captain, and when Mary Lou woke, panting and undone, the sensual moon lay back like a lover against the soft bed of night, and her palms itched. Shaking off sleep, she touched her bare finger, remembering with panic that her ring was missing. The itching intensified. It always started with the itch, and the beauty queen stifled a small cry. This was what she had feared, and now she was defenseless against the change.

She remembered the first time it happened. She was twelve and watching the original
Captains Bodacious
on TV. All those handsome men parading around shirtless. She’d watched the show before and had felt nothing but an embarrassed gigglyness. But that night, something new and dangerous stirred within her. “Let’s watch something else,” her mother had said suddenly, and she’d changed the channel to a show about quilting. The exciting feeling inside Mary Lou had passed.

Later, as she lay in bed thinking of pirates, fantasizing about them in their formfitting breeches, her hand wandered beneath the sheets. Her breathing grew rapid. Her blood quickened. Warmth suffused her cheeks. An intense pleasure rippled through her. How alive she felt! How good and right it was that her body could do this!

The backs of her hands began to prickle, faintly at first, then insistently. No scratch would ease it. Terrified, she stole into the bathroom, locking herself in. In the mirror, she saw that her pupils were enormous. Her teeth seemed longer and sharper, her lips full as cabbage roses and just as red. Her hair was a corona of curls. A light
growl-purr clawed its way out of her mouth from somewhere deep within, startling Mary Lou with its insistence. She stepped into a cold shower, letting the unpleasantness of the icy water pelt her until her skin was red but normal again.