Beauty Queens (15 page)

Shanti and Nicole stood side by side, but they’d left plenty of space between them. Nicole’s arms were crossed.

Shanti cleared her throat. “The first thing —”

“Who said you were first?” Nicole interrupted.

“Do you want to go first?”

“No. But it’s nice to be asked. Go ahead.”

“The first thing we really need to do is make sure we have drinking water.”

“I forgot — why can’t we just drink the ocean water?” Tiara asked.

“Because people pee in there all the time,” Brittani explained with assurance.

“Also, the bloat,” Miss Ohio chimed in. “I retain like crazy.”

“No,” Shanti said. “It’s because if you drink salt water, you’ll get sick. Drink enough and you’ll die.”

Tiara raised her hand. “But will you still be bloated?”

Shanti ignored her. “It’s a tropical climate, so we get some rain every day. We can make a tarp out of Miss Massachusetts’s ugly evening gown to collect that rainwater to drink.”

Miss Montana made a face. “Ew. That is so hurl.”

“Actually, so hurl is the way you look when you die of dehydration.”

Shanti explained the mechanics of the plan and the girls set to work. It was an intricate system of weights and counterweights. But the engineering was best-case scenario, and their meager resources were worst-case. Nothing was working and the girls soon grew frustrated.

“It’s too complicated,” Nicole said. “We need to simplify.”

“It’s not too complicated. You’re just not getting it!”

“Whatever!” Miss New Mexico said. Her face dripped with sweat. “Do you want drinking water or not?”

“That’s the whole point.”

“Then we need to try it another way.”

Shanti crossed her arms. “Like what?”

“Excuse me?” Tiara raised her hand. “One summer when I was about nine, my dad went off to rehab for his dryer sheet addiction. He used to huff ’em down in the basement, box after box. Then he’d come upstairs and start making these dioramas out of old cake mix boxes right on the kitchen floor and tell us that we should leave him alone because he was a serious artist and needed space for his work but that it was okay because the Fluffy Soft™ Laundry Puppy
²²
would look after us. I always wondered why he smelled like Spring Freesia.”

Adina dropped down into the sand. “Does this story have a point?”

“Anyway, after my mom flipped out, my dad went off to rehab to heal his wounded chi and he got this spirit guide named Astral, who was kind of annoying because my dad would be all, ‘Let’s ask Astral about that,’ even if it was just about whether or not to have Hamburger Helper for dinner, and my mom said she would personally kick his Astral to the curb if he didn’t shut up, and so he went to Jesus rehab instead, and my mom sent me to sleepaway camp for the rest of the summer. I loved it in the woods. But there were no toilets or anything, so we had to build a latrine.”

“’Kay. I’m now officially scared of where this story’s going,” Adina said.

Tiara’s cheeks reddened. “I let you talk.”

“Sorry, Tiara,” Adina said.

“Anyway, it was probably a dumb idea.”

“No. Tell it. I want to hear it. Go on.” Petra silenced the others with a glare.

“Well, I was just thinking that if we dig out the sand like a latrine and stretch the dress across it and hold it down with some rocks or something, maybe the water would catch in there?”

“How’s that going to help?” Miss Ohio asked.

“Hold on.” Shanti pulled the dress taut. She surveyed the sand around it. “That could work.”

“Yeah?” Nicole asked.

“Yes.”

Tiara brightened. “I said a smarty?”

“You definitely said a smarty.”

The girls used coconut shells to dig a deep trench. They packed sand around the edge into a high wall, stretched the evening gown, which they had ripped open to make it bigger, across the hole, and weighted the dress’s edges with rocks. Beneath the dress, they placed anything that could collect whatever rainwater fell through the fabric’s pores: empty coconut shells, high heels, and a jewelry cleaning unit they’d rinsed four times with seawater.

“Not bad,” Shanti said, inspecting it. “Not bad at all. Now we just have to wait for the afternoon rain shower.”

“I can’t believe we’re gonna drink out of a ground toilet!” Tiara trilled.

Adina put a hand on her arm. “Please never say that again.”

Right on cue, the skies opened up. Normally, the girls cursed the rain that soaked them and brought the bugs out after. But now, they cheered it. They do-si-doed around the dress like an offering dance and cheered as it filled up with water and tipped down to pour into the waiting coconuts.

“Bottoms up!” Petra said, and guzzled from the half shell of fresh rainwater. Her eyes grew large. She grabbed at her throat. The girls backed away. Petra grinned. “Needs a slice of lemon, but otherwise, it’s really good,” she said, and drained the shell of the last few drops.

By the end of the week, the girls had managed to erect eight huts, and Taylor announced that there would be a Miss Teen Dream cutest hut contest. The girls went about the business of survival, collecting rainwater, identifying and gathering edible plant life, catching small fish with their straightening irons. Miss Montana, who turned out to be from a family of fishermen and women, showed them how to plait seaweed and vines to construct loose fishing lines, which had netted them a decent catch in addition to the straightening iron haul. The whole thing had come to resemble a giant science fair, with teams of girls proudly showing off their various projects.

“Hey, you guys, over here, please!” Miss Ohio called. The girls lined up to see what Miss Ohio had put together. She’d shoved two sticks into the sand and rigged a piece of metal plane wreckage between them so that it caught the sun’s light.

“Careful,” she warned Nicole, who’d gotten close. “It’s really hot.”

“Now watch.” With a flourish, Miss Ohio dropped a fish on the metal’s steaming hot surface. It sizzled and popped.

“It’s a solar hibachi,” Miss Ohio explained, serving up a perfectly done fillet. “I used a safety razor to descale the fish, rinsed it in a little of the freshwater, and now …” Using the handle of a hairbrush, she scooped up the fish and dropped it onto a mound of clean rocks. “Miss New Mexico?”

Miss New Mexico took a bite and rolled her eyes in bliss. “OMG, this is so good, I’m not even going to make myself barf it back up.”

“Tiara and I caught the fish with these!” Brittani said, brandishing a pair of straightening irons.

“Awesome!” Mary Lou high-fived them.

“This is so cool. How did you come up with this?” Adina asked. “Hello!” Miss Ohio rolled her eyes. “I’m from the Buckeye State. We are serious about our tailgating parties. I can turn
anything
into a grill.”

Petra sat surrounded by fabric strips. That morning, she’d ripped apart swimsuits and dance costumes. She’d fashioned a needle from a fish bone and stripped plant roots down to a stiff, thin thread. From a dead girl’s evening gown, she’d harvested sequins; from another girl’s jewelry pouch, she’d taken rhinestone earrings. These elements she sewed into a colorful banner with sparkles to catch the sun. When she was finished, they would stretch the banner between two trees in the hope that it would draw the attention of a passing plane or ship. Petra had been hunched over in the same position for hours. Her fingers ached. At last she finished, smiling at the message she’d sewn into the center. If that didn’t get somebody’s attention, they were lost for sure.

Mary Lou and Sosie gathered rocks and pebbles from the beach and spelled out the word
HELP
along the shore so that it might be seen from a passing plane. At the end of the word, Sosie made an exclamation mark with a smiley face at the bottom.

“That way, they’ll know we’re friendly,” she reasoned.

Jennifer took off the back cover of the radio and examined the tangled inner workings. It was a mess and more complicated than anything she’d worked on before. Why had she been so quick to volunteer? To promise the girls that she could get it up and running? What if she couldn’t? They were counting on her. That in and of itself was an odd feeling. Nobody counted on her. Back home, she’d
been written off so many times and by so many people, she’d begun to feel like a comic book character who’d died but wouldn’t stay down. She knew what they thought when they saw her: Trash. Wrong side of the tracks. Dyke. Juvenile delinquent. Rehabilitation project.

When Jennifer had stepped in to take over for Miss Michigan after the first girl broke her leg skiing and the second had to go to anorexia camp, she knew no one expected much from her. “Just do your best,” her social worker had said, giving her a lame thumbs-up. Nobody expected anything from girls like Jennifer, except for them to drop out, get pregnant, fuck up. She stared hopelessly at the tangle of red, blue, green, and white wires. If she were like her comic book alter ego, the Flint Avenger, she’d have this up in a nanosecond. But she wasn’t. She was Jennifer, and she was utterly baffled.

“Can you fix it?” Sosie asked. She made the sign for
fix
and Jennifer repeated it. Sosie bit her lip, waiting for an answer.

Jennifer gave her a thumbs-up. Sosie hugged her and Jennifer closed her eyes, inhaling the slightly salty smell of her hair. She watched her go, then turned her attentions back to the radio and the strange, beautiful mystery of wires.

Adina and Mary Lou stood thigh-deep in the cool, clear lagoon where Adina tried her luck and her new, pumice-sharpened spear on the fish. So far, the fish had proved wilier than they’d imagined. Each time, Adina missed and the spear struck the muddy bottom, sending little tornadoes of sand swirling.

“I see one!” Mary Lou shouted.

Adina turned left and right. “Where?”

Mary Lou pointed. “There — by that rock. Oh. Not anymore. Boy, they’re fast.”

“Why didn’t you just spear it instead of telling me?” Adina said with some annoyance.

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“They have vegetarians in Nebraska?”

“Well.” Mary Lou thought for a moment. “There’s me.”

“If you’re a vegetarian, why did you volunteer to come fishing with me?”

Mary Lou shrugged. “So you’d have a friend with you.”

“Oh.” Adina hadn’t had a close friend since Roxie Black in fourth grade, who let Adina borrow her headband. Adina and Roxie both got lice and Roxie’s mom didn’t let her come over much anymore. “Well, thanks.”

“No problem. Still hoping for Miss Congeniality when we get back. Oh, there’s another one!”

Adina made a stab, but the golden fish was too swift. “You’ll never evolve!” she shouted as it swished away. “Just like Ray Marshall.”

Mary Lou laughed. “Okay. No love for Ray Marshall. Ex-boyfriend or something?”

“What? God, no. He’s this idiot in my Adolescent Issues class who spends the whole time putting things in his nose. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t need a man to be complete.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Plus, there is the small problem of none of the guys in my high school being interested. My teachers say that when I get to college I’ll meet guys who aren’t intimidated by a smart, confident girl.” With a grunt, Adina stabbed again and again at the water, coming up empty. “What about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No. I used to. Sort of,” Mary Lou said, playing with her purity ring. Her fingers were thinner, and it fit loosely now.

“A sort-of boyfriend? Is it like a time-share and you get him for a couple of weeks in May and November?”

Mary Lou fashioned a chain from grasses, carefully knotting them together, end to end. “We were dating. And then we weren’t.”

“Okaaaay,” Adina said. “That’s not cryptic. What happened?”

In her mind, Mary Lou saw Billy’s horrified face, heard him say,
“What’s wrong with you?”

“He didn’t really like me,” Mary Lou said softly.

“What? What the hell was the matter with him?”

Mary Lou allowed a small smile. “I think we might have more luck over there.”

The girls waded through the shallows into deeper water. It was a beautiful blue, and they could see tiny neon-bright fish darting about. What they needed was a big one, and they waited.

“Have you ever been in love?” Mary Lou asked after a period of quiet.

“Me? No. Not really. The closest I got was when I dated Matt Jacobs for one summer. He was smart enough. And nice. Too nice. He stared at me all moony-eyed a lot.”

“Sounds romantic to me,” Mary Lou said.

“It was irritating. Too much devotion feels like an obligation. Anyway, I think Matt and I were doomed from the start because of our musical disconnect. I mean, he burned me a CD with Feast for the Fishermen
²³
on it. Feast for the Fishermen! Such a sex killer.”

Mary Lou thought back to that night in the back of Billy’s station wagon. How close they’d come. Her heart beating so quickly, every sense sharpened. She had wanted to throw away all the rules and eat up the world. Even her skin had been full of want. And that want had been her undoing. Billy’s eyes wide with alarm.
What’s wrong with you?
Mary Lou had run off into the night, hiding in the sheltering stalks of the cornfields until it was safe to face the world again. Her mother had taken one look at her when she came through the door at dawn and she had known. They had the ring made the next day.

“Are you okay?” Adina was looking at her strangely.

“Yeah!” Mary Lou said quickly.

“You don’t have to do this if it makes you queasy.”

“No. I’m okay. Oh, hey, bulrush.” Mary Lou pointed to the tall stalks bordering the pond.

“What’s a bulrush?” Adina asked.

“This funny little plant. They grow wild on my uncle’s farm. You can eat the roots and this white part of the stem. It’s pretty tasty. And the tougher stems are really strong — we used them to make sit-upons in Girl Scouts. These’ll be good for tonight.” Mary Lou yanked one up by the roots. “So do you think you’ll ever meet The One and get married and have kids?”

“‘The One?’” Adina snorted. “My mom has had five husbands, and every single time, it was ‘The One,’ and every single time, it was like I lost her. Like she shape-shifted into whatever form the guy wanted till I couldn’t recognize her anymore. I’m never letting some guy come in and change me.”