Beauty Queens (7 page)

Taylor jogged in place on the beach, punching the air in a series of dancey boxing moves. “Let’s go, go, go, ladies! Miss Michigan, you’re up! Miss New Hampshire, you’re doin’ great. I almost believe you’re Fabio himself.”

“I almost believe you’re not a colossal jerk,” Adina muttered under her breath. She was hot and tired and thirsty. Her words were like gunshots. “Miss Michigan! Yo! Front and center!”

“I don’t think Fabio would say, ‘Yo!’” one girl complained, and Adina had to resist the urge to strangle the girl with her own hair extensions.

Miss Michigan, Jennifer Huberman, sauntered over. Unlike the others, she looked like she enjoyed the occasional cheeseburger. She had real curves and a pantherlike walk. “Yeah. Hi. Jennifer Huberman, Miss Michigan. Go, Blue! I’m from Flint, the smaller Motor City. Well, before they went bankrupt. Now, I’m from Repossessed City. Sorry. Little gallows humor there.”

“Great. Swell. Why don’t you tell us about your platform?”

Jennifer gave Adina a shove. “Yeah? Why don’t you tell me about your platform, Homeroom?”

“Whoa. Chill.”

“Why don’t you chill?”

“What pageant did you enter, Miss Orange Jumpsuit? What’s with the hostility?”

“Maybe I don’t like people asking so many questions.”

“Okaaaay. That’s kind of an important part of the competition.”

“It counts for forty percent of your overall,” Tiara said as she practiced a circle turn in place.

Jennifer relaxed. “Sorry. I don’t mean to get all up in your face. I’m just not used to this beauty stuff.”

“You aren’t?”

“No. First time. My guidance counselor got me into it. Some new program they’re trying out for at-risk girls.” Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Like this isn’t a gang. Please. It’s the freakiest gang ever.”

“Just curious: How did you manage to win Miss Michigan?”

“I didn’t. I was second runner-up.”

“What happened to the winner?” Adina asked.

“She tripped.”

“And the first runner-up?”

Miss Michigan cracked her knuckles. “She tripped, too.”

Adina swallowed hard. “Right. So, Miss Michigan, can you tell us about your platform? Please. I mean, if you’re okay with that.”

“Oh. Sure. My platform’s called Don’t Even Think About It. I go into schools and I say, ‘Whatever bad thing it is you’re thinking of doing, don’t even think about it. ’Cause I can see into your soul, and I will hide in your closet and come for you in the night, and the last sound you ever hear will be my sharp teeth popping through the flesh of my gums, ready to eat you.’ Their eyes get all big. It’s awesome. I love little kids, man. They’re the cutest.”

“Next!” Adina practically shouted. “Tiara, Miss Mississippi, right?”

Tiara stared. “Is that my question?”

“It is
a
question. I just wanted to make sure I got your name right.”

“Oh. Hi, y’all! I’m Tiara Destiny Swan from Jackson, Mississippi, which is spelled M-I-double-S-I … um … shoot.”

Adina looked to Taylor to end this travesty, but Taylor was trying to keep the signal fire going. The ominous clouds had moved closer to the island, and a strong wind came up, blowing sand and promising rain. “Tiara …” Adina had lost all steam. “What’s your favorite color?”

Tiara’s eyes darted left and right in fear and her smile was strained. “Um. Thank you, Fabio. I personally believe that we have a duty such as … as Americans … to help other people who are not Americans such as the peoples of the China and the Alaska and the freedoms we enjoy in our great nation and such and that is my opinion which I personally believe will make us a stronger nation. Thank you.”

Adina squeezed her hands against her head. “What are you even saying? You just made my brain die a little. You know, people, just being beautiful isn’t enough.”

Tiara looked confused. “But … it always has been.”

Petra gave a sudden cry, startling the others. “There it is!” She barreled down the beach in the direction of the skull-shaped rock and its long tongue of a jetty.

The cry went up. “Oh my God! Is it a ship? It must be a ship! Ship! Ship!”

The girls stumbled over one another on their way after Petra.

Nicole cupped her hand over her eyes. “Where? I don’t see anything but some nasty-looking clouds out there.”

Petra waded into the chest-high water, fighting the heavy surf, and grabbed at a small, green leather satchel. “Oh, Holly Go-Overnightly — thank God you showed up!” Grinning, she held the luggage aloft. “My overnight case — I found it!”

“Are you kidding me?” Shanti complained.

The wind rose, blowing sand into the girls’ faces. The cloud army advanced. It began to rain hard, then harder. The strip of beach seemed to vanish within seconds, and the girls were calf-deep in the sea.

Nicole pointed out at the horizon. “Um, does that ocean look kind of high to you?”

“How can the ocean get high? It can’t inhale. I know a lot about it. My platform is called Don’t Do Drugs Because They Make You Dumb,” Brittani explained.

“And I thought it was just inbreeding,” Petra quipped.

Nicole began to back away from the beach. “Hey, y’all, I don’t like the looks of that wave out there.”

The back of the sea curled up and fanned out, blocking the sky, threatening to bear down on the island.

Taylor gave three short, attention-focusing claps. “Miss Teen Dreamers! This is your team captain speaking. It is time to get our Rumpelstiltskins in gear and run for higher ground. Ready? Okay!”

Taylor tried to lead the way, but many of the girls ran scattershot for the forbidding jungle, scrambling over brambles, scraping their
tender flesh against the prickly trunks of the palms. They were nearly up the first hill when the wave hit full force, upending girls like bowling pins, the fast-moving current carrying them down, out, under.

Tiara, Shanti, and Nicole had managed to climb into the branches of an ornately limbed tree. Below them, Petra held tight to a low-lying branch with a precarious crack in it. The water tugged at her overnight case, bending the tree dangerously close to the raging waters and threatening to bring them all down.

“You have to let go!” Shanti yelled.

“I can’t!” Petra shouted. If she let go, her pageant dreams and her secret, more important dream would wash away with it.

“Let it go!” Shanti tried to kick the case loose. The strain broke the tree’s limb, and the four girls plummeted into the water and were borne along by the fast-moving current. They bobbed up and down like a wet Whack-A-Mole game, their screams cut off only when they disappeared for a few seconds before fighting their way back to the surface. They barely even noticed the falls as they slipped over them.

Jennifer had been the first one away from the beach. She broke right, running hard and fast toward the volcano and the mist-shrouded circle of mountains that bordered it. The water caught her like a giant Slip ’N Slide, spinning her through trees, making her dizzy.

“Holy f —!” she managed before going under again, as if the water sensed that young ladies of such beauty and promise should never curse.

“Move, move, move!” Taylor shouted to her crew as the angry sea chased them relentlessly. “Go higher, Teen Dreamers!”

The girls clambered over the steep terrain. The growth was thick here, and the ground turned to mud as if by an alchemist’s touch, but they managed to reach the top of the mountain.

Taylor addressed the soaking, exhausted survivors. “Ladybird Hope says a lady’s true colors come out in times of crisis. These circumstances are not as big as you are! We are bright, shining lights in the darkness, and nothing can extinguish the fierce light of a Miss Teen Dream’s true heart.”

“That’s mixing your metaphors!” Adina spat out bits of mud and grass.

“Don’t be a hater, Miss New Hampshire,” Taylor scolded.

“I hate everything about this! It’s the beauty pageant from hell! I didn’t even want to be a Miss Teen Dream! Do you know why I’m here? I’m an investigative reporter for the New Castle Knights school paper. I embedded myself so I could expose the pageant from the inside.”

“That explains the budget weave,” Miss Ohio said.

Adina whipped around. “This is my own hair.”

Miss Ohio put her hands up in a “whatever” gesture.

“Why did you want to do that?” Mary Lou asked.

“Because it’s wrong! It exploits women. We’re parading around in bathing suits and evening gowns, letting people judge us for the way we look. No wonder the world doesn’t take us seriously.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to look pretty?” Brittani asked.

Taylor’s face was as hard as the lava cliffs jutting up from the island green. “I am shocked, Miss New Hampshire. You are a real Judas. When we get back, I intend to make a full report to the pageant officials and have you replaced with your state’s first runner-up.”

Adina threw her hands in the air and laughed bitterly. “Fine. You do that. IF we ever get back, Little Miss Perfect!”

“For your information, I have not held the title of Little Miss Perfect since I was six. We
will
be rescued, Miss Teen Dreamers. I have absolute faith in that. And
you,
Miss New Hampshire, will be reported.”

“Cripes, you guys. Let’s not fight. At least we’re safe here,” Mary Lou said.

The muddy ground shook. Adina’s eyes widened. “Oh sh —” The earth beneath them gave way suddenly, and the girls were swept down the mountainside in a spiral of mud and sequins and screams.

BARRY REX:
Ladybird Hope, thank you for joining us tonight.

LADYBIRD HOPE:
You betcha, Barry. I just want to assure everybody out there in our great nation that we’re doing everything we can to make sure we bring these girls home safe. You know, Barry, it just makes my heart kinda sick when I think of all the bad girls whose planes could have gone down. It’s such a tragedy that these sweet girls who follow the rules set down for women through the ages while also learning to walk in bathing suits and heels are the ones who are now missing. Some of those bathing suits are from my own Ladybird Hope, Pageant Princess swimwear line, which is America’s bestselling teen swimwear line, by the way.

BARRY REX:
The plane was a Corporation plane, which have been rumored to have navigation troubles. The Corporation has been accused of cutting costs on its airlines. Do you think that could have something to do with this? Does this reflect badly on The Corporation?

LADYBIRD HOPE:
I like your suit, Barry.

BARRY REX:
Can you answer the question, please?

LADYBIRD HOPE:
Barry, my opponents will stop at nothing to smear me just because I’m a straight talker who loves her country and her pageant. I can’t talk too much about it, but there’s evidence, Barry, that the plane was shot down by hostile forces. That this was a terrorist attack on this country’s best and brightest. The sort of scenario I warned about in my new book,
Get Scared, America!

BARRY REX:
What are you saying, Ladybird?

LADYBIRD HOPE:
I’m saying that if I were president, this wouldn’t have happened. Not on my watch.

BARRY REX:
The call-board is lighting up like a Christmas tree over here!

LADYBIRD HOPE:
Well, it’s no coincidence that Christmas is Jesus’s holiday, Barry.

BARRY REX:
We’ll take your calls in a moment. But first, Ladybird, you’ve come under fire recently for your promotion of a pageant that some see as antiquated. That the system rewards girls for being pretty and it values compliance and conformity rather than the boldness and rule-breaking that we pride in our boys and which often help them feel entitled to success, to getting ahead in life.

LADYBIRD HOPE:
Well, frankly, that’s the sort of stuff I expect my critics to say, because they want to turn all women into sluts who can get an abortion at the drive-through while they’re off at college gettin’ indoctrinated with folk-singin’, patchouli-wearin’, hairy-armpit-advocatin’ feminism, which is just one step away from terrorism, and we should all be afraid of that.

BARRY REX:
I’m not sure I —

LADYBIRD HOPE:
Barry, let me give you a history lesson, Ladybird Hope-style. When the Vietnamese got kids hooked on drugs and we had to fight a war to stop it, did we give in?

BARRY REX:
Uh …

LADYBIRD HOPE:
No! We said “Crack is wack!” and we made sure everybody could have guns instead of drugs. Back before the British were our friends, and they had a mean king who made us
pay too much tax instead of just having hot princes who go to nightclubs, they wanted to keep us from bringing freedom to the people of Mexico and making it a state, and George Washington had to chop down a cherry tree and write the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and that’s the reason we fought World War II, and why we keep fighting, because those freedom-hating people out there want to take away our right to be rich and good-lookin’ and have gated communities and designer sweatpants like the ones from my Ladybird Hope Don’t Sweat It line, and they want us all to learn to speak Muslim and let the lawyers stop us from teaching about Adam and Eve and that will be the day that
every
child gets left behind. Our country needs something to believe in, Barry. They need us to be that shining beacon on the hill, and that shining beacon will not have all these complications and tough questions about who we are, ’cause that’s hard, and nobody wants to think about that when you already have to decide whether you want Original Recipe or Extra Crispy and that little box is squawkin’ at ya. And let me tell you something, Barry, that shining beacon will have a talent portion and pretty girls, because if we don’t come out and twirl those batons and model our evening gowns and answer questions about geography, then the terrorists have won.

BARRY REX:
Your Don’t Sweat It line is made in China.