Beauty Queens Part 18

"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 s.e.x and mystery and magic and transformation and fun. And n.o.body'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.

"s.e.x Monkey!" Petra shouted.

Miss Montana sputtered. "s.e.x Monkey? What's that?"

"I don't know. I just really want to go to a workshop called s.e.x Monkey."

"Honoring Your Inner Wild Girl," Mary Lou said softly.

"Wow. Great t.i.tle," 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 pa.s.sed 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."

"d.a.m.n 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 mult.i.tasker. This is not about Girl Cons and s.e.x 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."

MISS TEEN DREAM FUN FACTS PAGE!.

Please fill in the following information and return to Jessie Jane, Miss Teen Dream Pageant administrative a.s.sistant, 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!

Name: Mary Lou Novak

State: Nebraska

Age:17

Height: 5' 4"

Weight: 135 lbs. A lot of it is muscle.

Hair: Curly black

Eyes: Dark blue?

Best Feature: My smile. I guess.

Fun Facts About Me: 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 s.h.i.+p*

The thing that scares me most is letting go.

25Verity Bootay, curvaceous former lead singer of the stripper-nurse pop group Nymphet.

26UConnect, a social networking site perfect for wasting time posting quizzes and party pics, until you discover that your mom and dad are on there reconnecting with old high school friends and leaving you hideously cutesy messages on your wall.

*The Corporation suggests changing this to something more feminine, like this: "My favorite Corporation show is Captains Bodacious. I think the pirates are supercute, and I'd love to find my true pirate love, get married, and sail away with him into the sunset and live happily ever after. With treasure!"

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The dream had been about a s.e.xy 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 s.h.i.+rtless. She'd watched the show before and had felt nothing but an embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed.

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 p.r.i.c.kle, 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.

In the morning, her mother appraised her over the orange juice. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Mary Lou said with irritation. Inside, her heart pounded. She wondered if some trace of last night's episode remained.

Then there was the time with Billy. She was fourteen and he was sixteen and so s.e.xy. Lying there beneath him, his s.h.i.+rt opened to reveal the broad expanse of his chest, the ripples of muscle across his stomach, she wanted him. The wanting was a physical ache. She'd pushed him onto his back and straddled him, her thighs squeezing gently against his sides. It started softly: She licked his neck. His smell undid her. She wanted more. She licked again.

"Hey, that's usually the guy's job," he said as if he were joking, but she could tell there was a scold in it. Like when she took an extra helping at the dinner table and her uncle would tease, "Putting on your winter coat there?"

A minute ago, he had been doing much the same to her. Why couldn't she answer in kind? She pressed her lips to his, tasting, enjoying, wanting. The itching in her palms began. But this time, it spread fast as a brush fire on a windy day. Her hunger was uncontrollable.

Billy's eyes widened at the sight of her in her wild state. "What's wrong with you?"

And Mary Lou had run away - from Billy, from the pa.s.sion surging through her. She hid all night in the cornfields, crying softly in shame. When her body finally settled, somewhere around dawn, she returned home. Her mother sat at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee, worry etched into the lines of her face, and when she looked up to see her daughter at the kitchen door, an expression of sad understanding softened her eyes.

"It's hard to be a woman," she said, and poured Mary Lou a gla.s.s of milk in a Princess Pony gla.s.s. Her mother waited until Mary Lou's tears stopped and she'd finished her snack, and as dawn's first light pinkened the claustrophobic kitchen, she told Mary Lou about the curse that had plagued the women in her family for generations. Wild girls, they were called. Temptresses. Witches. Girls of fearless s.e.xual appet.i.te, who needed to run wild under the moon. The world feared them. They had to hide their desires behind a veneer of respectability.

"But I feel so much - it's like I want to eat up the world," Mary Lou warbled through the snot-slick tears on her upper lip. "Why is that wrong?"

Her mother cradled her softly then. "You learn to hold it back, to numb yourself to it," she said in a bitter voice. "Until one day, the world forgets to look at you. And then it doesn't matter anymore."

The next morning, they'd gone to see about the ring that could contain her curse. She had taken the vows that were supposed to keep her safe from her own impulses, her own desires. Mary Lou learned to be afraid of her own body. What if it betrayed her again? Already, Billy avoided her, and hurtful gossip spread about "that wild Mary Lou." Stinging slaps of names bit at her skin in the school hallways: Wh.o.r.e. s.l.u.t. Nympho. Easy. Trashy. Trampy. Not the girl you bring home to Mother. But Mary Lou didn't really want to go home to someone's mother. She already had one of those and, frankly, one was more than enough.

Mary Lou wore the ring faithfully. She studied the coy girls, the ones who pretended not to get the dirty joke that made Mary Lou stifle a laugh. The ones who practiced the shy, downward glance, who pretended giggly outrage when a boy made a suggestive remark, who waited to be seen and never made the first move. The ones who called other girls s.l.u.ts and judged with ease. The good girls.

Occasionally, from the school bus windows, she would see other wild girls on the edges of the cornfields, running without shoes, hair unkempt. Their short skirts rode up, flas.h.i.+ng warning lights of flesh: backs of knees, the curve of a calf, a smooth plain of thigh.