Beauty Queens: Prologue–Chapter 9

On the other side of the cockpit door, fifty girls smile and preen and pose for the cameras.

One girl confesses this is her first plane ride as she stares out the window, her mouth open in awe, her mind completely unbothered by thoughts of who will live and who will “have her living options curtailed.”

In fact, when the svelte pinup Bananas Foster, famous for starring in a series of medical side-effect commercials, was arrested in a Vegas club for snorting cholesterol-lowering drugs while wearing a Roland jumpsuit, he pronounced her “too fat to steal my oxygen.

She was a lithe redhead with the panther-like carriage of a professional athlete.

Occasionally, one would divulge that she was an honors student or a cheerleader or a volunteer at a soup kitchen, as if, in this moment of collective horror, they could not divorce themselves from who they had been before, when such information was required, when it got them from one pageant to the next, all the way to the big one.

“I guess it wouldn’t be very congenial of me not to go. Will you come, too? I want to have one friend.”

Above them, the sun was a jaundiced eye.

“It came from over there!” Shanti pointed to a copse just beyond the ring of totems.

There was always that split second — something almost felt rather than seen — when the parents’ faces would register a tiny shock, a palpable discomfort with Nicole’s “otherness.”

The degree of difficulty had just gone up, but Shanti hadn’t spent two years under the tutelage of her handler, Mrs. Mirabov, for nothing.

Last year, I took down my first buck, which I cleaned, filleted, and vacuum sealed, and with my taxidermy skills, I stuffed the head and used the antlers as a super cute jewelry tree, which I plan to market for the Armchair Shopping Network in the spring.

Alan, who spoke in blowhard aphorisms like “A bird in the hand can still poop in your palm” and “If you want to beat a snake at its game, you have to think like a snake and not like a duck.”

With each victory, she felt emboldened and determined.

Then, whistling the jaunty Miss Teen Dream theme song about a world of pretty, the agent turned and disappeared into the jungle, covering any trace of his tracks.

(Smiling smugly, Mom pulls a large white plastic vat from her laundry basket.)

So enamored was Petra of her new self that she didn’t hear her mother come up from her art studio in the basement.

Somebody needs to learn resilience. It’s a miracle you’ve gotten this far in the pageant system, Miss New Hampshire.

The pageant has come under fire for perpetuating an unrealistic image of superthin girls as beautiful, and many people feel this is harmful to girls’ self-esteem.

Miss Michigan, Jennifer Huberman, sauntered over.

Adina looked to Taylor to end this travesty, but Taylor was trying to keep the signal fire going.

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

Below them, Petra held tight to a low-lying branch with a precarious crack in it.

The girls clambered over the steep terrain.

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.

Far overhead was a small clearing of blue sky bordered by the wizened branches of thick-trunked trees whose gnarled roots clutched the earth like the talons of some primeval bird frozen midgrip by a sorcerer’s curse.

The remnants of her sash read Miss Illin, and for a moment, Jennifer thought of her as being from a very cool hip-hop state.

The snake. It seesawed its way toward her in an ungainly, almost blind fashion, tongue lashing wildly, mouth pulled back slightly to reveal double rows of grungy, blade-like teeth and puffy, bleeding gums.

And then, as if in answer, Jennifer raced for the spear, which had been thrown free when the girl was swallowed. But the snake’s undulating tail knocked it just out of reach.

“Hello,” she said, practicing her intonation, because tone was everything.

“You know, Comrade Singh, there is one thing I learned during my defection: Everybody loves a happy assimilation story.”

From the corner of her eye, Shanti caught a colorful bird skating above the bushes. It looked at her and trilled one word: fraud.

Another comely sister stuck her head out a window.

The glossy pictures had all been torn from magazines, a collection of pale, blond, hipless women with aquiline noses, bony legs, blank eyes, and thin, wan smiles.

Her mother looked balefully to the collage.

The kid had never held a job in his life and was spending his summer break from the Ivy League here, ostensibly to get training.

Once, Alan had asked her to fall backward with the assurance that he would catch her and that she would see she could trust him. But Adina balked. The only person she trusted was herself.

She was not ending up on the floor with a concussion, and she was not, absolutely not, eating that filthy bug in Taylor’s hand just so she could prove her mettle and get a round of high fives from the beauty queen set.

It kind of reminded me of French kissing Jake Weinstein and his spelunker tongue.

She walked in the direction of the song, following it till she found a small, bucolic waterfall that fed into a turquoise pond.

“I think you’re missing the salient point here,” Shanti said. “Miss Teen Dream is a girls’ pageant. You are not a girl. Ergo, you are disqualified.”