Beauty Queens (22 page)

“Ow!” Jennifer said, rubbing her lips. She tried again, and this time, they fit. Sosie’s mouth was warm, her tongue skittish. Jennifer made small circles around it with her own, drawing Sosie more into her mouth. She pulled back, cradling Sosie’s face in her hands, kissing her intently, hungrily. Shifting onto her back, she drew Sosie on top of her, letting her hands rest on the muscular curves at the back of her thighs, letting one hand wander to the small of Sosie’s back, pressing gently there.

To Sosie, Jennifer’s body was a surprise — the curves where she had expected straight planes, the pliability of a breast in her hand, the silky skin of her arms. She had made out with only two boys and had shared a quick, truth-or-dare kiss with a girl named Eve at a seventh grade dance party. This was very different, and her mind could scarcely keep up with all the new sensations. Was she a good kisser? Was she lame? With renewed vigor, she suckled Jen’s neck, wanting to brand her with a love bruise, then felt suddenly shy about it and stopped.

“Need some air,” she managed, before staggering out.

Sosie left the hut so abruptly that Jennifer was afraid she had done something wrong. She followed her and found Sosie stretched
out on her back in the sand, watching the clouds and stars perform their own choreography. Awkwardly, Jen lay beside her, her left shoulder just grazing Sosie’s right. She didn’t know how far she should take things. Should she kiss her again? If she were her alter ego, the Flint Avenger, she’d sweep Sosie up into the sky and they would fly over the island, defying gravity with their kisses, building an exquisitely intolerable friction with the press of their bodies.

Jen finally found the courage to sign, “Okay?”

Sosie nodded, smiling. She snuggled closer and threaded her fingers through Jen’s, holding fast. There was more truth and hope in that one gesture than in all the things that had come before. These were the moments that kept you going, Jennifer thought. When you looked up to the sky and cried “Why?” sometimes the sky shrugged. Yet other times it answered with the warm assurance of linked hands. “Sorry,” it whispered on the wind. “Sorry for all the pain and loneliness and disappointment. But there is this, too.”

It was enough.

The girls had lost track of how long they had been on the island. During the daylight hours, they dove into the surf with abandon, emerging tanned and sure-footed, as if they were selkies who had let their timidity float out on the tide like a false skin. Only Taylor remained vigilant in her pageant work, getting up every morning, rain or shine, to go through the paces of her routine, from first entrance to talent to final interview.

“When we get rescued, I guess I’m the only one who’ll be in fighting form,” she’d say while circle-turning and practicing a stiff wave.

“I’ve been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island,” Mary Lou said to Adina one afternoon as they rested on their elbows taking bites from the same papaya.

“Lord of the Flies
. What about it?”

“You know how you said it wasn’t a true measure of humanity because there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls?”

“Yeah?”

Mary Lou wiped fruit juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. “Maybe girls
need
an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one’s watching them so they can be who they really are.”

Adina gazed out at the expanse of unknowable ocean. “Maybe.”

There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping.

They were becoming.

They were.

The Corporation would like to apologize for the preceding pages. Of course, it’s not all right for girls to behave this way. Sexuality is not meant to be this way — an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.

The Corporation would like you to know that they are deeply regretful of this tawdry display. So often these books for our young people do not enforce a moral. The Corporation would like to take the time now to present this moral in the following montage.

1.
The beauty queen made the first move and kissed the prince. “You know what I really like?” she whispered into his ear. Seconds later, he was sliding his mouth down the curve of her stomach. As he did, she looked up and saw the boulder teetering on the edge of the cliff above them.

“Oh my God! Look out for that boulder!”

“What bould —?”

The rock fell off and killed her dead. The prince was blinded in the accident, but was later healed by the love of a goodly, virginal maiden who suffered a lot first.

The End.

2.
The savage warrior girl raised her spear. “I’m not going to keep quiet anymore! I’m going to say what I need to say and not worry about whether or not it upsets somebody or makes me seem unfeminine. Because you know what? I have opinions. I have feelings and needs, and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t voice them or I’ll get ridiculed or attacked!”

In the firelight, it was easy to see that she was the least attractive girl of the bunch and she probably smelled bad. Just then, a giant snake lurched out of the trees, bit her in two, and swallowed her down. And the other girls realized they should probably keep their mouths shut.

The End.

3.
The girl felt feral and strong. She felt feral and strong because, of course, she had been contaminated with the alien virus, which made her not like a normal girl, but more like an alien. With alien desires. The kind that are not normal.

“I killed everybody I ever kissed,” the beautiful, long-legged girl with raven hair and full lips purred.

“I knew it. You’re an alien,” said her former best friend, the pale, bespectacled creature with the spectacular cleavage.

“Yes, I’m an alien and I
still
made cheerleader. And now I’m going to steal your boyfriend to prove girls can’t really be friends.”

“I sat back timidly when you torched my house, killed my parents, and ate my dog. But now you’re stealing my boyfriend? That’s a step too far!”

The bespectacled good girl with the nice rack plunged the jousting lance — constructed in Latin club — through the hot alien cheerleader’s stomach in a deeply Freudian display.

“Hasta la vista, bitch
²⁷
.”

The End.

4.
The wind blew the beauty queen’s skirt higher, exposing the curve of her butt beneath her panty. The humidity made her perspire in a sexy way, almost as if she’d been squirted with a mixture of water and baby oil by a makeup crew. She arched her back. “This jungle heat sure is all hot and stuff. Mind if I take off my top?”

“No! Let’s all take off our tops!” said the other girls.

“Mmm, if there’s anything I like better than taking off my clothes, it’s using new Tan-So-Right
²⁸
to keep my skin sweet and supple,” the beauty queen said. She reached behind a rock for the bottle of liquid tanner and spritzed herself. As it hit her skin in a slow-motion mist, she gasped in pleasure and bit her lip.

“Hot,” said a redhead in a thong.

“So hot,” they all agreed.

“Oops, I just dropped my bottle of tanner. I’ll just bend over slowly to pick it up,” said the beauty queen.

“That’s hot.”

“Totally.”

“You know what else is hot?” said a nameless blonde as she put her arm around the one black girl.

“What?”

“Bisexuals.”

“Totally. Well, not like real bisexuals who are just sort of your everyday people, but, like, the kind of bisexuals you see in magazines wearing nothing but body paint and kissing both boys and girls to promote a new single.”

“Totally, totally hot.”

Laughing and frolicking, the girls jumped into a bubbling island spring that was a lot like a hot tub, and then a rugged explorer type jumped in. The girls fawned all over him because he had used Stud Muffin Body Spray for Guys
²⁹
.

The End.

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!

• My dad and my Auntie Abeo are both doctors. My mom is a former Laker Girl.
  
• My personal motto is You Gotta Go Along to Get Along.
  
• I am pre-premed. I like to read
  Gray’s Anatomy
  just for fun.
  
• My hobbies include meteorology, bowling, skiing, and drumming.
  
• My favorite Corporation product was Miles of Smiles toothpaste. I really loved that it came in mint-choco-chip flavor. It’s too bad about the recall. Salmonella is no joke
  ^*
  
• The thing that scares me most? My mother.
  

For her whole life, Nicole had been playing a part in a story shaped by everyone from her mother to her friends, even to her beloved auntie. But now, she was ready to make up her own story, even if she was less than sure how that worked. And so, armed with a sharp stick in one hand, a knife in the other, and a bag of shiny hair accessories and jewelry tied to her rope belt, Nicole set off to explore the island. She decided to go left, toward a part of the jungle she had yet to see, promising herself that if it got too frightening, she would turn back. On her way, she passed Miss Montana and Miss Ohio, who were lying on their backs in the warm sand. They’d positioned scraps of silvery metal from the plane’s wing at chest level and were using them to reflect the sun.

“What are you doing?” Nicole asked.

“Working on our tans,” Miss Montana said. She had placed coconut shell quarters over her eyes. They looked like hairy brown sunglasses.

“I usually go for a fake-n-bake every week during pageant season,” Miss Ohio said. “Otherwise you look like Gothzilla. The judges like a tan.”

Nicole bit her tongue.
The judges only like
artificially
darkened skin,
she wanted to say. “Don’t you know anything about SPF? Skin cancer?”

Miss Montana eased herself up on her elbows and removed the small coconut shells from her eyes. “Are you always this much of a bummer?”

Fine,
Nicole thought. She needed to be about her adventure, anyway. The knife hacked at the thicket surrounding her. Below her feet was a tangle of vines and roots, and she had to be careful where she stepped if she wanted to avoid a turned ankle or wrenched knee. High above her, a flock of colorful birds perched on a limb, their aqua-and-orange tails trailing down like the fishtail hem on an evening gown. Nicole wiped away the mist that collected on her skin. As she walked, she affixed shiny doodads from her bag to the trees to mark her passage. Once, she thought she heard someone behind her, but when she turned, there was nothing but thicket. The vegetation grew less dense, and finally she came to a clearing where the land looked ruined, burned.

“What happened here?” she said. Totems still guarded the top of a hill, ghosts of an older civilization. It gave Nicole a funny feeling, as if she were trespassing, and she found herself thinking of the restless spirits who inhabited the forest in stories she’d heard from Auntie Abeo. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said. “I don’t mean any harm.”