“Wow. Guilt trip much?” Petra said. “And did you get up?”
“No. I kept pitching a fit.”
“Good for you.”
Tiara sniffled as a tear rolled down her cheek and plopped into the sand. “That’s when my mom told me that I was being a bad little girl and nobody loved bad little girls. So I’d better straighten up, stop crying, be quiet, and get my best smile on, or she was gonna sell all my crowns and trophies.” Tiara sniffled again. She wiped her eyes so quickly it was like it didn’t happen. “I stopped crying. Mama hurried me off to get my spray tan and this lady named Mirabella put on my eyelashes and makeup. My mom gave me my princess hair and sprayed it up high. Daddy put the flipper back over my teeth so my smile would be all perfect. And I went out in my big, blue, fluffy petticoat dress, and swished my sparkle hips, and blew kisses to the judges with a wink. That night, I won Miss Grand Supreme.”
“Does that come with fries?”
“My daddy bought me that pink teddy bear but I never liked it. I used to beat it up.” Tiara wiped her nose on her arm. She looked up at Petra through a broken curtain of hair. “You sure you want to be a girl? It’s a lot of work.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Don’t tell anybody, but sometimes, I just don’t want to sparkle.”
“That’s okay.”
“This is all I know how to do.”
“That’s not true.” Petra gestured to the flower-bedazzled hut.
Tiara smiled a little. “Do you really think my hut is cute?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s awesome.”
“Thank you.” Tiara reached over and took one of the flowers from the wall. It was a deep blue tinged with black around the petals. She pinned it to Petra’s hair like an old-fashioned movie star. “You look pretty.”
“Thanks.”
Tiara closed her eyes and blew out five sharp exhales. Then she opened her eyes again. “I’m a winner, I’m a winner, I’m a winner,” she intoned. She fingered a section of freshly hacked hair. “I guess I really messed up my hair, huh?”
“Well, you could start a whole new career as a deranged Muppet. Okay. Not funny. Sorry.”
Tiara bit her bottom lip. “Can you fix it? I don’t care what you do. I just want something different.”
Tiara swung the machete around and Petra jumped back. “Let’s be careful with the sharp objects, okay?”
“Sorry.”
Petra wielded the machete with surprising grace. Chunks of bleach-blond hair hit the sand. Tiara’s hair was darker underneath and there were bits that had been kissed by the sun. At last, Petra stood back and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “All done.”
Tiara’s ’do was short and spiky with a longer strip sticking up in the middle, warrior-style. Petra held the machete sideways. Tiara gazed at her reflection in it. She ran her hands across her scalp, over and back, examining her head from left and right, and Petra braced herself for sobbing. Instead, she smiled and her face opened like a blossom.
“I guess this isn’t princess hair,” Tiara said.
“Sure it is. It’s warrior princess hair.”
And Petra tucked a flower above Tiara’s ear.
That night, the girls cooked up a dinner of slightly burned fish, grubs, and bulrushes. For dessert, they scooped the sweetmeat from coconut shells, licking the juice from their fingers. The fire sent up wispy smoke messengers that vanished before they cleared the tree-tops. The girls were taking turns with the pumice stone, scraping it along the ends of sticks to make spears. The air was warm, the sound of the waves soothing. And they fell into contented conversation, as if they’d been lucky enough to con all their parents into letting them have a colossal sleepover with no supervision.
Jennifer pretended her hand was a microphone. “Miss New Mexico, can you tell the audience about your day?”
Miss New Mexico adopted a fake-cheery voice and an artificially wide smile. “Well, Fabio, judges, I spent my day digging for grubs in the most disgusting mud you can possibly imagine. Then I helped build a desalination still. Oh, and my shoes are by Cheri of Paris.”
“I made a hut out of mud, palm fronds, and ripped-up swimwear. And walking in the sand is toning my calves while I work!” said Miss Arkansas.
“I used seaweed to reinforce the walls on my lean-to,” Miss Montana chimed in. “And worked on my tan.”
“I peed in the ocean,” Brittani said.
Miss Arkansas made a face. “Which part?”
Brittani looked confused. “All of it.”
“I know this is going to sound weird, but this is kind of fun,” Nicole said, grinning. She stuck a piece of fish on the end of her stick and turned it in the fire.
“All we need now is a scary movie to watch,” Mary Lou said.
Miss Ohio snapped her fingers. “Ooh, like that one about the crazy stalker guy who hunts girls down and kills them off one by one.”
“Which one?” Adina snarked.
“I think it was called I See Your Naked Blood Naked.’ Miss Ohio tossed bark peels into the fire. “The main girl has to strip down to her underwear to get away from the killer.”
“You’re thinking of Sorority House Bloodbath,” Miss Montana said.
“No,” Shanti piped up.” Sorority House Bloodbath is the one with Verity Bootay25 where she tricks the psycho killer into watching her do a sexy striptease before she nabs him through the eye with her stiletto.”
“Verity Bootay is kind of hot,” Jennifer said.
“What about Shop to Kill? I love that one!” Brittani said.
“Is that where the killer straps the girl to a dentist’s chair and uses a drill on her, but first he says, ‘Now, this might sting a little… .’?”
“Huh-uh,” Nicole said. “That’s Dentist of the Damned, and the dentist lures ugly girls to his office with a promise to make them pretty, then he tortures and kills them. The sexy girl who’s only going there to ask about cosmetic dentistry for her little sister who was born with a mouth defect is the one who survives. But only after she accidentally has sex with him.”
“Hold up. How do you accidentally have sex with somebody?” Adina scoffed. “Is she all, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see your penis there’?”
Tiara squealed and waved her hands. “Don’t say that word!”
“What? Accidentally? Sorry? Penis?”
“Gah!” Tiara put her fingers in her ears.
“What about phallic?” Petra teased. “Like, ‘Yon volcano is quite phallic, Lady Tiara.’” Tiara looked confused.” Phallic means penislike,” Petra explained.
“Ooh,” Tiara said.
“Right! I remember,” Miss Arkansas said.” Shop to Kill is the one where the girls are trapped in the department store and the killer hunts them down in every department and, like, strangles one with a thong and kills another one with a makeup brush through the head and there’s, like, the most shut up clothes ever!”
“The ribbon vest?”
“Shut. Up.”
“So shut up.”
“I thought there was a shower scene.”
“There’s always a shower scene.”
“I miss showers.”
“And shopping.”
“Movies.”
“Pizza.”
“School.” Everyone stared at Shanti. “What? I like school.” “Me, too,” Nicole said and gave Shanti a fist bump, which Shanti fumbled. “You sure you’re not white, Bollywood?”
“I miss getting in my car and just driving without anybody telling me what to do or how loud I can play the radio or asking if I’ve practiced piano.”
“I miss practicing piano!” “I miss my friends.”
“I miss my playlists I spent two days making and posting to UConnect26.”
“I miss my bed.”
“Flip-flops.”
“Books.”
“Basketball.”
“Shopping.”
“My laptop.”
“Frozen yogurt.”
br /> “Guys.”
“I so miss guys.”
“Yeah,” Jennifer said dreamily. “Sometimes they have nice trucks.”
“I wouldn’t want any guys to see me now. My pits are totally tragic.”
“My legs are, like, man-hairy.”
“No joke. I thought you’d put on kneesocks.”
“You think that’s bad, you should see my —”
“Stop.”
The girls screamed with laughter. It was the first time some of them had laughed in days, and it felt good.
“You guys don’t know about hair trauma. I am a black woman without her grease. My weave is all kinds of messed up right now,” Nicole said.
“I like it natural,” Petra said.
“My mom would freak out. I got my first relaxer at five.”
“Harsh.”
“She wanted me to blend in,” Nicole said with a sigh. “Have you ever been to Colorado? I think there are ten black people in the whole state. I don’t miss people looking at me funny.”
The wind caught the fire and it flared. Somewhere in the jungle, an unidentified bird trilled, cawed, and fell silent.
“I don’t miss the baton twirling,” Brittani said softly. “Or the teeth bleaching.”
“I don’t miss having my dad yell at me for messing up during my talent program. If I make one little mistake, he gets real upset and says I don’t appreciate what he and my mom have sacrificed for me so I can do this,” Tiara said.
“What they’ve sacrificed,” Petra scoffed.
“That sounds like my mom,” Miss Arkansas said. “She’s all, ‘Sparkle, sparkle, sparkle!’ Sometimes I want to say, ‘If you like this so much, why don’t you put down the donuts and get up here and sparkle yourself?’”
Miss Montana stared into the fire. “Sometimes I just want to go in a room and break things and scream. Like, it’s so much pressure all the time and if you get upset or angry, people say, ‘Are you on the rag or something?’ And it’s like I want to say, ‘No. I’m just pissed off right now. Can’t I just be pissed off? How come that’s not okay for me?’ Like my dad will say, ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re hysterical.’ And I’m totally not being hysterical! I’m just mad. And he’s the one losing it. But then I feel embarrassed anyway. So I slap on that smile and pretend everything’s okay even though it’s not. Anyway.” Miss Montana pasted on an embarrassed half smile. “Sorry for the rant.”
“Why do you have to be sorry?” Nicole asked.
“Well … I don’t know.”
“Why do girls always feel like they have to apologize for giving an opinion or taking up space in the world? Have you ever noticed that?” Nicole asked. “You go on websites and some girl leaves a post and if it’s longer than three sentences or she’s expressing her thoughts about some topic, she usually ends with, ‘Sorry for the rant’ or ‘That may be dumb, but that’s what I think.’”
“I say sorry all the time. The other day, this lady bumped into me with her grocery cart, and I said I was sorry,” Mary Lou said, shaking her head.
Shanti raised her hand. “I move we officially ban the word sorry from our vocabularies while we’re here.”
“I second that, if that’s okay,” Petra said, grinning. “If not, sorry.”
“I third it. Sorry.”
“I just scratched my nose. Sorry.”
“I just scratched my ass. Sorry.”
“I’m getting up to stretch my legs. Sorry.”
“Sometimes I just want to burn down all the rules and start over,” Mary Lou said. Everyone waited for the punch line of “sorry,” but it never came.
“What would you really like to say up there to that studio audience?” Adina asked.
Petra pretended her fist was a microphone. “Well, Fabio. I’m glad you asked.”
“Don’t you dare call me Fabio,” Adina said, giggling.
“Would you rather be Fabiana?’Cause you know I’m flexible. I’d say …” Petra crossed her legs, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “I’d say, I am too fucking fabulous for one gender. Oh, and can we please get rid of the cheesy dance numbers? It’s like torture by step-ball-change.”
“I’d say I am not a race. I am an individual,” Nicole said.
Brittani hugged her. “You’re so nice, Nicole. It’s like you’re not even mad at me for being white.”
Nicole cut her eye at Brittani, then looked over to Shanti, who rolled her eyes.
Sosie moved her fingers gracefully, but no one understood. She waited for a moment. “I would say, learn to hear me in my own voice. I’m hearing impaired, not invisible.”
“I feel invisible sometimes, too,” Tiara said softly.
“What would you say, Bollywood?” Nicole asked.
Shanti had been telling her story at pageant after pageant: How her parents came to this country — the land of dreams and opportunity — from India. How they had opened a business, a restaurant, and taught their daughter that with hard work, she could be anything she wanted to be. How they taught her to honor where she was from but to love and embrace the customs of the new country. Shanti had told her story so many times, she had even started to believe it. She’d built herself into something perfect and unassailable. Now, under the clear night sky, she wondered if it might be the time to break it all down like some elaborate pageant set the day after the show. But what to put on the bare stage that remained?
“I’d say I need more fish!” She reached for what was left on Miss Ohio’s plate.
“Hey!” Miss Ohio protested, but she let her eat it anyway.
“You know, instead of some old, backassward pageant competition, we should have a con. A Girl Con! How awesome would that be?” Adina said.
“What would we do at Girl Con?” Jennifer said, giving the words a cheesy announcer’s voice.
“We could have some wicked cool workshops — writing, film, science, music, consciousness-raising… .”
“Comic Nerds with Ovaries!” Jennifer shouted. “I will lead that one. And a seminar on DIY zine production.”
“My platform is about climate change,” Miss Montana said. “It’s so beautiful in Montana. I really do want to save our environment.”
“Miss Montana is down for a Save the Environment panel,” Adina said. “Who else?”
Miss New Mexico raised her hand. “I always wanted to make films. I love French New Wave. Godard. Truffaut. I made a short about my school cafeteria called Meatloaf, Tu Es La Morte à Moi.
“I work at a center for LGBT kids. I was thinking of starting my own nonprofit LGBT center in college,” Petra said.
“Love it!” Adina yelled. She lay sprawled in the sand, her head resting on a tree limb.
“Can we also … sorry! Was I interrupting?” Brittani winced.
“Thou shalt not say sorry!” Mary Lou chided in a deep voice.
Brittani smiled. “Right. I forgot. Sor — I mean, can we do makeovers at Girl Con?”
“Do we have to?” Adina said with a sigh. “How is that empowering?”
“Things don’t have to be empowering all the time. It can just be fun. Way to cut a fart in the middle of the party, New Hampshire,” Jennifer said.
“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 sex and mystery and magic and transformation and fun. And nobody’s taking that away from me. You will pry my Petal Power lip gloss out of my cold, dead han
ds,” Shanti insisted.
Adina rolled her eyes. “Okay. Democracy rules. Makeover panel, too.”
Tiara clapped. “Yay!”
“Dancing,” Sosie called out defiantly.
“Sex Monkey!” Petra shouted.
Miss Montana sputtered. “Sex Monkey? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I just really want to go to a workshop called Sex Monkey.”
“Honoring Your Inner Wild Girl,” Mary Lou said softly.
“Wow. Great title,” 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 passed 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.”
“Damn 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 multitasker. This is not about Girl Cons and Sex 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.”