“This is not a game,” Adina said.
Ladybird stopped filing. “Honey, everything’s a game. There are winners and losers. I am a winner. And you …” Ladybird pushed a button on her remote. Steel doors slammed down, sealing them inside. “… are the losers. Now, I’m real sorry to tell you this, but I’ve rigged the island to blow. See? The detonator is a remote and it’s right here in my God Bless America crystal flag pin. Course, I won’t be selling this particular pin on the Armchair Shopping Network.” Ladybird laughed. She snorted at the end like a corgi. “Oh. But I am giving you a countdown, ’cause that’s classy. Prepare to take your final walk on the runway, Teen Dreams. Rest assured you’ll be more famous in death than you’d ever have been in life. There’s a small comfort in that, isn’t there?”
“No. Not at all,” Adina said.
“Well. With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder you’re in this position.”
A disembodied woman’s voice came over the speaker system. “Commencing countdown to destruction in ten minutes. Nine fifty-nine. Nine fifty-eight. Nine fifty-seven …”
“Oops. Looks like it’s time for me to go on Barry Rex Live and break the news about your deaths to a frightened nation looking for guidance. So long, Teen Dreamers.” Ladybird smiled and waved a stiff hand in a beauty queen salute. “Sorry you won’t go out pretty.”
The screen went dead.
“I am so not voting for her,” Tiara said.
“Nine thirty. Nine twenty-nine. Nine twenty-eight …”
Adina ran to the control panel embedded in a long desk beneath the TV screen. “There has to be some way to turn this thing off, right? Like a-a whatchamacallit… .”
“Off switch! Do-over button!” Miss Ohio said.
“Voice recognition software, maybe,” Shanti said, searching the control panel for some hint.
“One of those palm-reading things?” Jennifer offered. She and Sosie pushed buttons in random sequences, hoping for a detonation-stopping bingo.
“Eight fifty-one. Eight fifty …”
“Crap!” Adina said. “What’s the name of that thing that always stops the bomb in the movies?”
“Manual system override,” Agent Jones said dreamily.
The girls turned to him.
“Manual system override,” Nicole repeated.
“Mmm-hmm. Stops it.”
“Agent Jones,” Nicole asked carefully. “Do you know how to override the system manually?”
“Screw the system, man. You’re beautiful. I’m beautiful. This table is beautiful.”
“We are all beautiful. You know what would be most beautiful? Overriding the fucking system, asswipe!” Jennifer yelled.
Agent Jones frowned. “Men have feelings, too. You bruised the petals of my man flower.”
“Christ,” Jennifer hissed.
“Apologize,” he said.
“What? No way.”
“Apologize or no system override.”
“Jen …”
“This douche nozzle tried to kill us. A lot.”
“Apologize!” everyone screamed.
“Okay! I am sorry … Man Flower.”
The agent wrapped her in a big hug. “It’s PowerPoint.”
“I apologize, PowerPoint,” Jennifer said through lips crushed against Agent Jones’s chest.
“The system is PowerPoint only. Harris forgot to change it back. Let’s communicate with our fingers.”
“Agent Jones! So … we have to make a PowerPoint presentation to override the system?” Shanti slapped a hand to her forehead. “Are you kidding me?”
“Mmm-hmm. Pretty pictures and bullet points.” The agent sat, lotus-style, on the table.
“Oh, hey,” Nicole said, averting her eyes.
Shanti sat down at the computer. “We’re making a PowerPoint, Teen Dreams.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“How’s it coming, Shanti?” a nervous Mary Lou asked six minutes later.
Shanti concentrated on the laptop. “Almost there.”
Tiara looked over her shoulder. “Ooh, put in the picture with the mountains. That one was so pretty.”
“Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven …”
“Less than a minute to go, Bollywood,” Nicole said.
“Hello! Well aware, thank you. ’Kay. Uploading now …”
Shanti pressed PLAY, and the PowerPoint presentation was in motion. It was an image of Ladybird Hope waving from a Corporation private plane.
Fun Facts About Ladybird Hope & The Corporation!
Tried to kill us
Kept rescuers from finding us
Made secret arms deal with Republic of ChaCha
Assassinated world leader
Her pageant-wear line poorly made
Again, tried to kill us
“Go to second screen!” Nicole said.
“Give it a second,” Shanti said. “I put it on slide show. That’s how we do it in IP.”
Two seconds later, an island scene came up.
“I picked that shot,” Tiara said, clapping. “Isn’t it pretty?”
There Is a Secret Corporation Compound!
Polluting environment
Harming animals
Making weapons
Avoiding taxes
Forming secret alliances
“Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six …”
“Come on, come on,” Adina pleaded softly.
A shot of Ladybird Hope and MoMo B. ChaCha in the heart-shaped hot tub appeared onscreen. Ladybird Hope had been caught midspeech. Her mouth was twisted and her eyes were half closed.
“Not her best,” Sinjin said. “Still. Total MILF. Paranoid and very wrong, but MILF.”
Ladybird Hope and The Peacock!
Secret alliances = treason
Illegal weapons sales = also treason
Illegal campaign contributions = bad
Human rights violations = super bad
Killing defenseless Bambi = just plain mean
Totally having sex in that hot tub = conflict of interest, unethical, unsanitary
“Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen …”
“It’s a whole new world of pretty …” Agent Jones sang, rocking softly on the table.
Shanti glanced at him, then looked to the ceiling. “Please don’t let this be the way I die.”
The fourth and final panel was of Ladybird Hope smiling and waving between The Corporation’s logo and the White House.
America’s Presidency: Reality TV Show or Commodity?
The screen faded to black and the words The End.
“Did it work?” Adina asked.
“Five. Four. Three. Two …”
They held their breath.
“Awesome PowerPoint! System override successful. Thank you. Have a productive day.”
The metal doors and shutters rolled open. They were free. The girls and pirates collapsed onto the floor in relief. Agent Jones hugged one of the ergonomically correct chairs. “I think you’re special. Do you think I’m special?”
A powerful rumble shook the room.
“What’s happening?” Tiara said, grabbing hold of George, who didn’t seem to mind.
Adina sat up, panicked. “I thought we overrode the system!”
“We did!” Shanti shouted.
“Then what’s that scary sound? Earthquake?” Miss Ohio asked.
Tane’s face was grim. “It’s the volcano.”
“The dead volcano?” Mary Lou’s eyes opened wide.
“Maybe the system override activated something?” Tane pointed to the monitor. On the screen, the volcano’s opening spewed smoke and ash.
Jennifer gaped at the image. “Whoa.”
“Holy shit!” Sosie said.
“Beautiful,” Agent Jones murmured.
“OMG,” Shanti gasped.
“Totally phallic,” Tiara said. “Oh. That means like a penis.”
“That means trouble,” Petra said. “The volcano, not t
he penis.”
“Thank God, luv,” Sinjin said.
“Give it a rest,” Adina muttered.
“What do we do now?” Nicole asked.
The ground shook, knocking Corporation graph charts from walls.
“Run!” Mary Lou shouted just as the alarm flared red and everything began to crumble.
CHAPTER FORTY
Nicole had the sensation of floating in a gray-white haze. Fabio Testosterone called her name. Streamers fell from a ceiling. Cameras flashed. Girls in sashes clapped for her. The Miss Teen Dream theme song played under the audience’s thunderous applause. She dipped slightly and let last year’s winner place the crown on her head. It was surprisingly heavy. And then she was walking down a runway, roses cradled in her right arm. With her left arm, she waved and blew kisses. Down in the front row, her mother sat, looking proud and a little scared. She mouthed, “I love you,” and Nicole mouthed back, “Love you, too.”
Auntie Abeo was there. So were her father and her brother. Sherry Sparks nodded sagely as Nicole passed. I did it. I won! Nicole thought. But coming back up the runway, Nicole remembered strange things. A plane crash. An island. Fighting for survival. She remembered a red warning light and bolting down hallways as rivets popped and supersecret high-tech equipment tumbled from desks. Glass partitions shattered. Screams. Shouts of “This way! This way!” A strange man in a fig leaf pushing her and others toward safety. The ground trembling. A great roar of smoke and ash billowing from a volcano. An explosion. And then Nicole was tumbling through the air, head over heels. Now she was here, wherever here was, and everyone was clapping for her.
She remembered something else. Faces of other girls. Friends. The best friends of her life, perhaps. And now she saw them clearly. They waited just outside the open doorway of the auditorium beside a painted school bus. A girl in a pink hoodie emblazoned with the word Bollywood across it and oversize shades, a small diamond in her nose. “Like, hello, are you coming or not, Colorado?”
Nicole still stood on the runway. But she wanted to follow the girl in the pink hoodie. So she stripped off her sash and tossed it into the crowd. Then she handed the crown to Sherry Sparks, who looked regal in it. “No thanks,” she said to the judges. She kicked off her heels and ran toward the promise of the open doorway. It seemed to her that she was not so much running as bobbing. Applause transformed into the swooshing of waves. Overhead, the sky brightened from night to early morning white haze.
“I told you to stop using that bleaching cream,” she murmured to the vast expanse above her. A Shanti-shaped cloud drifted into view, blocking the light.
“Nicole?” the Shanti-shaped cloud said. “Nicole!”
Nicole blinked. “Hey, Bollywood.”
“I’m going to let that one slide,” Shanti said with relief. “Welcome back.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The girls and the pirates gathered on MoMo’s blinged-out yacht, huddled in blankets and towels and robes. Sinjin wore MoMo’s black leather 1968 Elvis Comeback Special jacket. It only came to his rib cage, but he wore it anyway. “Hot!” he said, waggling his eyebrows. The morning sun lit the island like a painted backdrop from an old Hollywood movie, all greens and golds, pinks and blues.
“What happened?” Nicole asked from a deck chair. Ahmed had made her a cup of tea. In shifts, the girls and pirates told the tale of what had happened. The volcano hadn’t erupted so much as burped. It was the storehouse of Lady ’Stache Off that had exploded, destroying much of the compound. The area around the volcano was a mess.
“You got, like, totally thrown by the explosion,” Shanti explained to Nicole. She hugged her. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Thanks,” Nicole said, hugging her back.
“Because I totally need a place to stay in Colorado when I go skiing next spring break,” Shanti said, and the two of them burst out laughing.
“I could get used to this,” Sinjin called. He lounged on a deck chair in his MoMo find. “Yachts are the new sexy. You heard it here first.”
“Pretty sure yachts have always been sexy,” Petra said.
Ahmed sat with Shanti. “So you mixed Beena’s48 ‘Mumbai Love Song,’ the groove from Hip-Hopera’s La-La Boheme,49 and Elvis Presley? That’s dead brilliant!”
Shanti grinned. “Yeah. I think so.”
“My brother runs some clubs in London. I could get you a night. Prolly a shite time slot to start, but it’s something.”
“Okay, seriously? That would be, like, so totally awesome! I could apply to Cambridge,” Shanti said in awe. “I could apply to Cambridge and DJ in London. Yes!” Shanti frowned. “Um, no offense, but I can’t … this can’t be, like, a dating thing.”
“What? Oh. Oh! Um, no worries, mate. It’s just business. Maybe Nicole and I could come to the club, yeah?” He looked hopefully at Nicole.
“That could work,” she said, smiling.
“What about you and me, Adina?” Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. “I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?”
Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock ’n’ roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn’t exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she’d invented as much as he’d invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn’t be the same mistakes. Starting now.
“Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. “Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.”
“Ahoy, mateys!” Mary Lou shouted as she emerged from the captain’s cabin. She wore breeches and a poufy pirate shirt. She’d tied her Miss Nebraska sash around her waist like a belt and had tied a scarf across her forehead in true pirate fashion.
“Mary Lou!” Adina waved.
“I’ve talked it over with Sinjin and the guys, and I am officially taking over command of this vessel,” Mary Lou shouted. “The Captains Bodacious have a stylin’ new boat and a bodacious new captain.”
“That is hot,” Jennifer muttered.
Adina smirked. “Wow. Kind of braggy, Novak.”
“Yeah. It is kind of braggy, isn’t it?” Mary Lou smiled. “Well. What can I say? I’m just cool like that.”
“Right on, sister.” Nicole went for a fist bump, but Mary Lou bungled it. “Man. You are still so, so white.”
“What about Tane?” Adina asked.
Tane was supervising the crates of supplies being hoisted on board.
“He’s staying with us. He’s going to teach me to navigate by the stars. He has good hands. I can tell.”
On deck, Chu stood at attention. “Queen Josephine? What course shall we set?”
“Toward adventure! And don’t drop anchor till we get there!” she called.
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
“And by adventure, I mean toward Hawaii. I’ve never been there.” Mary Lou let fly a wild wolf call. “This is soooo awesome! And we can drop you home on the way.”
Agent Jones was coming down from the Mind’s Flower now. The pirates had thrown a blanket over him. He sat, shivering, on the deck of the yacht.
“You okay?” Jennifer asked. “You want something hot to drink?”
He nodded.
Jennifer handed him the cup. With shaking hands, Agent Jones took it and sipped. His lips twisted into a squiggle.
“Sorry. There’s no milk or sugar that I could find,” Jennifer said.
The squiggle became a smile. Agent Jones took
two big gulps and leaned his head back against the railing, enjoying the breeze. The coffee was hot and strong. It was also Hazelnut.
Shanti toggled a DVD in her fingers. “One last thing to do, Teen Dreamers.”
LIVE ON BARRY REX LIVE
BARRY REX: Good morning and welcome to a special edition of Barry Rex Live. Today, disturbing images — and even more terrifying allegations — from that Miss Teen Dream Pageant gone wrong last night. Joining us this morning is someone who has a personal investment in this terrible tragedy: our special guest, presidential hopeful Ladybird Hope. Good morning, Ladybird.
LADYBIRD HOPE: Good morning, Barry. It is very disturbing news. You can see in this grainy footage Republic of ChaCha soldiers, under direct orders from The Peacock himself, aiming for the girls. The explosion. What we’re hearing is that our Miss Teen Dreamers have been murdered. All of them. As you know, the Miss Teen Dream Pageant has always been special to me. I was a Miss Teen Dream. It is the ideal of femininity. This is a direct act of war, Barry, and —
BARRY REX: Excuse me, Ladybird. Looks like we’ve got some special callers on the line. Let’s go to live feed, please.
On the studio screen, the girls waved. They had gotten pretty good at waving, but they had never enjoyed it more than they did right now. Ladybird Hope broke the pen in her hand into two pieces.
BARRY REX: How about that? They’re okay!
ADINA: Hi! You would not believe the crazy night we had, Barry. What with Ladybird Hope trying to kill us and all. So, you know, sorry if we look like shit. Anyway, it’s such a long story, and we are currently on vacation, so we’re just going to leave you with this video and a PowerPoint presentation. Enjoy! Bye!
Ladybird Hope’s smile twitched at the corners as the video came over the feed. Barry Rex’s eyes widened.