Page 27 of Beauty Queens


  A man ripped the hood from Tane’s head. The man wore sunglasses even though it was night. “What are you doing here? Who are you working for?”

  “I told you, mate. I’m just an ornithologist on a research trip.”

  “Ornithologist my ass. Put him in solitary.”

  The others dragged him — dragged her Tane! — toward the volcano. She watched, astonished, as they flipped up a panel in the rock and entered a code and a door slid open, revealing another world inside. She had to warn the others. She had to rescue Tane. She needed to get away from here right away.

  She turned to run and heard the click of the gun pressed to her temple.

  Sinjin watched Petra sleep for some time, weighing his options. Finally, he woke the others and had them meet up by the ship.

  “What’s up, Cap’n?” Ahmed asked, wiping sleep from his eyes.

  Still in Petra’s bathrobe, Sinjin paced on the narrow strip of sand. “Lads, something’s a bit dodgy here. That black shirt couldn’t be a coincidence. He must’ve followed us here.”

  “How? We rubbished the radio.”

  “Don’t know. But you can’t deny that body was one of them. And if they’ve found us, the ladies are in trouble as well.”

  “Cor,” George said, shaking his head. “What we gonna do?”

  Sinjin cast a glance toward the camp where the girls still slept. “We’ve got to leave. Now.”

  “We can’t just leave the girls here without so much as a ‘ta for the grubs,’” Ahmed insisted. “They’ll think we’re absolute wankers.”

  “Better that than we put them in danger, yeah?”

  The pirates fell into hushed argument.

  “We don’t even know if the ship’ll hold, Captain,” Duff said.

  “Well, we’ll just have to suck it and see, mate. We’ll find land and rustle up help.”

  Ahmed rubbed at his chin. “What if this is a trap? What if it’s what they expect us to do?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Sinjin said. “Look, are we naff reality-TV, fake rock-star pirates, or are we something more? Time to be noble, lads. Who’s with me?”

  “Aye,” they whispered in unison.

  They took just enough provisions to last a few days, then the pirates pulled up anchor and pushed the boat quietly into the deeper water. In the moonlight, the beach where the girls still slept was a series of undulating curves.

  “I hope they’ll be all right,” Sinjin said. ‘"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’44 Take care, Petra.”

  “Captain?” Ahmed asked. The men looked to him for orders.

  “Hands on oars,” he commanded.

  The pirates bent over their paddles, rowing in rhythm until they were a safe distance from the island. They hoisted the sails and headed out to sea.

  In the sheltering canopy of a giant tree, Harris used his binoculars to watch them go. Good. They’d taken the bait. He’d left them a little present on the boat, a bomb made from Lady ’Stache Off. Once they were farther out to sea, he’d detonate it using his phone. Jonesy might not have told him about the pirates, but Harris knew. He didn’t need Agent Jones telling him what to do. Everyone misunder-estimated Harris Buffington Ewell Davis III. He snickered, thinking about how he’d set this up by himself. Now The Corporation would have to see that he was a player. CEO by the time he was thirty? Shoot, he’d be running the ROC before he was twenty-five.

  44Play the A Tale of Two Cities head-lopping game, available as a Corporation Phone app. Void where prohibited in states where the school board has banned A Tale of Two Cities because Charles Dickens is clearly a pornographic name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nicole woke with a feeling of unease she could not shake, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was left over from her dream in which an unseen monster made its way toward her small fishing village in Japan, and she was expected to do battle with it. She left the hut and made her way to the beach, where she realized that something really was wrong. The pirate ship was missing. So were the pirates. So, too, were the girls’ stores of rainwater and smoked fish.

  “Bastards!” Adina growled. The girls had assembled in their horseshoe formation.

  “And after all we did for them,” Miss Ohio said.

  “We fixed their freaking ship!” Jen kicked at a tree. A coconut dropped dangerously close to her head.

  “I got their computer up and running,” Shanti added.

  “I let Sinjin have my best heels,” Petra said. She wanted to cry, but she was too angry. She looked around, counting. “Hey, anybody seen Mary Lou this morning?”

  They searched the camp, the lagoon, the fishing lines, the jetty, everywhere they could think to look. Mary Lou was nowhere to be seen.

  “Do you think she went with the pirates? Or maybe they kidnapped her and held her for her booty.”

  “Booty is treasure, Tiara.”

  “Oh. Noted.”

  “She said she was going off into the jungle to search for her prince,” Petra said.

  “Great. Swell,” Adina growled. “Stupid romantic fantasies can get a girl killed.”

  “That’s just being bitter,” Petra said.

  “Yeah? Your BF just sailed away with our food, water, and your best shoes, Petra!”

  Petra winced. “Harsh. I have faith in Sinjin. He’ll send help.”

  “Oh my God. You guys just don’t get it, do you? We got hosed! We got all moony-eyed over a bunch of pirates and let everything go just to take care of them. Even on an island in the middle of nowhere, we can’t seem to change the dynamic. Pathetic.”

  Jennifer raised her hand. “Exception to the rule.”

  “You’ve got your own distractions.” Adina jerked her head toward Sosie, and Jennifer blushed. “Now, listen up. It’s your team leader, Miss New Hampshire, speaking. Here’s the plan: Pack whatever you’ve got. We are going to march into that jungle to find Mary Lou, and then we are going to bring Taylor back, and then we are going to build our own freaking ship or rocket or Sparkle Pony from Hell and get the hell off this island! Screw this waiting around. No one is coming. It’s up to us. But we are not leaving without our friends.”

  The girls armed themselves with sticks and small rocks, curling irons and bottles of tanner.

  Petra brought along a can of hair spray. “Anybody or anything messes with me and they will get a face full of chemical nasty that will stick their eyes open for weeks.”

  They set off into the dense growth, and they weren’t coming out until the job was done.

  They came upon the Empire of Taylor. It was like a forgotten hermitage — the cave hidden beneath the growth, the strange fertility goddess statue of Our Ladybird with her tattered Miss Miss sash in place. But it was well camouflaged, as if it had long been part of the island. As if Taylor were hiding in plain sight.

  Taylor had built another weird sculpture. This one looked a lot like a catapult. She opened a jar of Lady ’Stache Off and emptied the contents inside, adding the bleach from the girls’ teeth-bleaching trays.

  “Hey, Taylor. What’re you doing?” Adina called.

  “Getting ready for the pageant. It’s very important, Ladybird.”

  “Have you seen Mary Lou at all?”

  Taylor cocked her head to one side as if listening to music only she could hear. “Five-six-seven-eight. And step-ball-change!” Taylor launched into a series of dance moves punctuated by ninjalike kicks and strikes. “Don’t believe their lies, Sparkle Ponies. They don’t want to save us.”

  Taylor shimmied up a tree, swung to another, and disappeared in the unkempt green canopy overhead.

  “Man. I thought she was bad before.” Nicole shook her head.

  The girls pressed on. The jungle was thicker here, darker. Every breath was a struggle.

  Shanti gasped. “You guys.” She held up Mary Lou’s St. Agnes medal.

  Adina swallowed hard. Anything could have happened to her out here. “We’re going to find her
.”

  “I want to go back,” Tiara said. “This isn’t fun anymore. I’m scared.”

  “What if an animal got to her?” Nicole said in hushed tones.

  “We’re not going back. We’re not giving up on her. We’re all we’ve got. Don’t you understand?” Adina was near tears. She was exhausted, so exhausted that she thought she imagined the sound. It was the faint rumble of a car engine, like something remembered from a dream. Something that reminded her of normalcy.

  A long, Jeep-like vehicle crested the hill, trampling down bushes as it came. The headlights blinded the girls till they had to put up their arms to block the sudden light. They heard the motor stop. A car door opened.

  A man in camouflage and mirrored sunglasses blocked the army transport’s headlights. He stood, hands at his hips. He wore a reassuring smile.

  “Well,” he said, “we sure are glad to find you girls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  In the back of the transport, the girls talked with the manic quickness of those who’ve been given second chances. “Like, I can’t wait to take a shower and put on clean clothes,” Shanti said.

  “I’m going to catch up on Ragnaroknroll, find my guild,” Jennifer said.

  “I am going to eat a piece of cake the size of Petra’s head,” Sosie said.

  “I hope you’re hungry. My head has a circumference of twenty-four inches,” Petra shouted over the wind, and they all laughed.

  It was good. Everything was good — the sun on their faces, the wind drying the sweat on their skin into itchy spots, these people who had come to rescue them, to take them back to civilization and malls and hair removal and Alexandra’s Clandestine Closet45 catalogs. Everything would be like it was before.

  The transport carried them to the other side of the island and traveled through a barbed wire fence with No TRESPASSING signs posted on it. Two guards in black shirts opened the gates and waved them in, and for a moment, Adina had an uneasy feeling. She caught Nicole’s eye and they both looked away quickly, as if neither one wanted to ruin the happiness of this rescue with some distant, probably unfounded fear. The transport stopped at the base of the volcano. Here, the land had been cleared and flattened out.

  The agent ushered the girls into a plain white tent outfitted with chairs and a desk. Two assistants in black shirts offered sweating bottles of water, which the girls drank down in greedy gulps. It seemed that nothing had ever tasted so good. For a moment, there was a fleeting memory of those shirts, but it was gone with the realization that they had been rescued at last.

  “Thank heavens we found you girls,” the agent said, smiling. The mirrored aviators hid his eyes. “We’d just about given up hope when a satellite picked up the plane’s image. You’ve managed to survive for all these weeks on your own? Outstanding!”

  “We had to eat bugs!” Tiara said and shuddered.

  “No!”

  “We did! Jennifer fought a giant snake.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “And Petra had to pee on a pirate,” Brittani added.

  “Could you not make that sound like a fetish site please?” Petra complained, but she was still grinning. They all were. At last! A rescue! There would be shampoo and real beds and food.

  Adina looked around at the bustling compound. It was hard to believe that it had been here the entire time. If only they had marched farther, gone looking, they might have been rescued much sooner. But the jungle had been too forbidding, and the girls had stayed close to the beach. Except for Taylor. Taylor! She could be seen by a doctor now.

  “We lost one of our friends. Mary Lou. Have you seen her?” Nicole asked before Adina could say anything about Taylor.

  “We did,” the agent said after a moment’s pause.

  “I knew she’d be okay,” Tiara said, clapping.

  “Can we see her?” Shanti asked.

  “She’s … already headed back home. On a ship. There was a ship here that took her. She’s the one who told us to come looking for you.”

  “Why wouldn’t she come looking, too? Doesn’t sound like Mary Lou,” Adina said. Something scratched at the door of Adina’s subconscious, wanting to get in. Female intuition, her stepfather would say. She wasn’t sure of what was on the other side of that door, so she kept it closed.

  “People do funny things,” the agent said. “Now, if you’re anything like my daughters, I know you girls must be dying for a shower.”

  For a moment, Mary Lou was forgotten as the girls fell into raptures about the simple pleasure of a real shower.

  “How old are your daughters?” Shanti asked.

  “Uh … fourteen and sixteen,” the agent answered.

  “Can we see pictures?” Shanti asked. Normally, she would have said this to be polite, but she found she actually did want to see pictures of this man’s daughters. She was not the same Shanti who had arrived on this island.

  The man frowned. “I … uh … left them in my other wallet.”

  A college-aged guy in an Ask Me About My Trust Fund T-shirt took a seat and offered the girls a box of cookies, which they scarfed down two at a time.

  “Hey, careful there — don’t want to get fat.”

  Jennifer flashed the guy an annoyed look. “Dude, careful we don’t roast and eat you.”

  “Ha!” the Dweeb said. He tried to take back the cookies and Miss New Mexico grabbed hold with both hands.

  “No take the cookies. Cookies are the best thing ever! Cookies. Are. Life!”

  Reluctantly, the Dweeb let go of the box. “Okay. Kinda scary,” he said under his breath. “I’m Harris. Harris Buffington Ewell Davis III.”

  A woman in camo pants and a black shirt whose name was given as Ms. Smith interrupted. “I’ll take you to a place where you can get cleaned up. We ladies have to stick together,” she said with a smile. Shanti had the idea that she should be comforted by this comment and this smile, but she wasn’t, and the disconnection troubled her. It reminded her of the time in fourth grade when Bethany Williams had said her poncho was “really cool” before dissolving into mean-spirited giggles with the other girls.

  “Watch your step,” the woman cautioned.

  An enormous pipeline snaked over the broken land and disappeared farther into the jungle. It smelled of sulfur and the water looked muddy and diseased.

  “What happened here?” Nicole asked.

  “Oil and gas pipelines,” Ms. Smith explained. “This place is rich with natural resources. And The Corporation is working hard to bring those comforts to America, where they belong.”

  “Don’t they belong here?”

  “These resources make our way of life possible!” Ms. Smith chirped with a smile. “Without them, you wouldn’t have your bottled vitamin water, your eye shadows, the packaging on your favorite perfume, your colored contact lenses, clothes, hair color, and nail polish.”

  “What happened to the people who used to live here?” Shanti asked.

  “Relocated.”

  “Where?”

  “To places where relocated people go. Trust me, they’re better off,” Ms. Smith said crisply. She opened the door to a gleaming gym and led them to a large, clean bathroom with individual shower stalls. “Enjoy your showers.”

  Smiling, Sosie tugged on Jennifer’s shirt. “Cool, huh? This looks like something that could be in the Flint Avenger and Sosie, right?”

  “It’s just the Flint Avenger now,” Jennifer said, and pushed ahead.

  After they’d showered and shaved, moisturized and conditioned, Agent Jones appeared. “Got a surprise for you girls. Come with me.”

  Outside the volcano, he lifted the panel in the rock, punching in the code that opened the secret door.

  “Whoa. Holy Loch Lomond movie,” Jennifer said in awe.

  “This is our headquarters,” the agent said. The girls entered a gleaming, stainless steel elevator. A pleasant, British woman’s voice asked for the floor.

  “Four,” the agent said, and they roc
keted down.

  “How many floors are there?”

  “Five.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Product development. Marketing. Packaging. Corporate.”

  “You said five. That’s only four.”

  Agent Jones held up one finger — “Product” — then another — “Development. We’re here.”

  The doors opened into an open room divided by half-wall cubicles and desks. The employees clapped and cheered as the girls came through, and it was almost like walking up the aisles of the hotel ballrooms where most of the girls had performed in various pageants.

  “Thanks,” Nicole said. She smiled and waved, but it felt odd, like laughing at a joke you no longer found all that funny.

  They entered a conference room where Harris sat at a computer. On the wall above his head was a flat-screen TV. A table and chairs dominated the center of the room.

  “Hey! You girls smell a lot better — no offense. Have a seat.”

  The girls settled into the big black chairs.

  “Those babies cost five thousand dollars a pop,” Harris said. “Ergonomically correct.”

  “Oh,” Tiara said, sitting uncertainly. “Springy.”

  “Somebody special wants to talk to you,” Agent Jones said. “Harris?”

  Harris clicked on the screen and Ladybird Hope appeared, wearing a red suit with a flag pin on the lapel. Her hair had been styled into a poufy twist. She waved and her charm bracelet rattled.

  “Hello, Miss Teen Dreamers! I cannot tell you how happy I personally am to see you. I told the world, I said, ‘Don’t you count my girls out. A Miss Teen Dream never gives up. She’s a bright light in the world!’”

  The girls were overcome. Ladybird Hope!

  “What do you think of my new suit?” Ladybird asked.

  The girls agreed that it was very nice. They were still dazed from the rescue and all that had come after. They talked excitedly, telling Ladybird everything that had happened to them since the crash, about how they, Miss Teen Dreams, had risen above and survived. No. More than survived. Thrived.