Beauty Queens

Beauty Queens Page 19

Fun Facts About Me:

I’m pretty mechanical. My mom worked in the auto industry and I can pimp your ride rebuild an engine in a hot minute.

I’m a total comics fiend, and my favorite shop is Galaxy Comics in Flint. Shout-out to Mohammed and Akilah!*

My favorite Corporation show is Patriot Daughters.11

I came to Miss Teen Dream via a new program for at-risk girls that takes them from juvie to pageants, or, as I like to call it, from one correctional facility to another.**

My personal motto is: WWWWD?: What Would Wonder Woman Do?

8 Loch Lomond, the sexy and manly spy in a series of popular Scottish crime capers. Known for his fancy gadgets, fast cars, beautiful women who often end up dead, and his trademark phrase, “I’ll have the haggis — boiled, not fried.”

9Fabio Testosterone, former teen star of the nighttime soap Study Hall, where he spent ninety percent of his time shirtless, and host of this year’s Miss Teen Dream Pageant, where he will wear a rip-away tux.

10Sandeces, a denim line sewn by small Peruvian children and adorned with the face of one’s celebrity avatar on the back pockets. Each pair is blessed by droplets of local holy water said to ward off unhappiness.

*Pageant officials think this makes me sound Muslim. Want to know if we can change it to “Shout-out to Mo and Alice.”

11Patriot Daughters (Tuesdays, 9:00 P.M. EST), The Corporation’s drama chronicling the lives of three teen girls during the Revolutionary War as they fight the British, farm the land, and take off their clothes to secure America’s freedom.

**Pageant officials didn’t think this was funny. Pageant officials not big on the jokes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When the muddy waters receded, Jennifer found herself in a part of the jungle where nothing was familiar anymore. 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. She called out for the others, but there was no response.

Being alone didn’t scare Jennifer. She’d been alone since she was ten, when she begged her mom to stop sending her to stay with Grandma Huberman, the religious nut, who told her God could see into her wicked, wicked heart. While saying this, she’d waved the copy of Women’s Basketball Weekly she’d found under Jen’s bed, the one in which Jen had drawn a heart around the picture of star point guard Monica Mathers.

“God doesn’t like lesbians,” Grandma Huberman hissed, throwing the magazine in the trash.

Jennifer knew what lesbian meant, and she knew she probably was one. But she couldn’t understand why God would hold that against her or against Monica Mathers, who’d never started a war or killed anybody, and whose deadeye three-pointers were straight-up amazing. After all, hadn’t God made both of them? But people were like that, she’d noticed. They’d invoke Godly privilege at the weirdest of times and for the most stupid of reasons. Jen decided that if God wasn’t putting any faith in her, she wasn’t putting her faith in Him. And so, now, alone in the jungle, she did not call out for special favors. As far as she was concerned, that would be cheating. Jennifer played rough sometimes, but she always played fair.

A long rope of root formed an almost-bench above the mossy ground, and after testing its solidity, she sat on it to think. It was only moments later that she heard off-key humming and saw a girl marching between the trees, a spear in one hand. The girl had a strawberry blond bob and an impish face. 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.

“Hi. Uh, hello,” Jennifer said. “I’m Jennifer Huberman. Miss Michigan.”

The girl didn’t respond.

“Hey!” Jennifer waved her arms. “Over here!”

The girl looked up. Startled, she dropped the spear, which stuck fast in a fat tree root. A flock of shrieking black birds spiraled skyward as the giant, gnarled tree seemed to uncoil, and Jennifer saw that it was not a mass of roots looped about the trunk but a freakishly big snake the length of a custom RV.

Jennifer leapt to her feet. “Holy {bleep bleep}12! Get your {bleep}13 out of the way!”

Too late, the girl looked up just as the snake opened wide and swallowed her down in a giant gulp.

“{Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep}14!” Jennifer said many, many times.

The snake, with its girl-size, midthroat bulge, turned to Jennifer with a strangled hiss.

They say in near-death experiences that one’s life plays out before one’s eyes. Jennifer’s brain went to scan, flitting from one random image to the next: her mom coming home from the factory, bone-weary, angry, and utterly defeated, the bills sitting untouched on the chipped, Rent-A-Racket dinette set. Tommy, her little brother, riding around the crappy, one-bedroom apartment on a dumpster-dive Big Wheel till Jennifer thought she would scream from the constant whine of it. The days of ditching school to hang out at Galaxy Comics and talk mutants and Watchmen with Mohammed and Akilah, who ran the place and sometimes paid her in old comics if she’d help them stock. Getting busted for stealing a pack of Ho Hos from a Gas-It-N-Go and landing in juvie. The counselor who saw Jen as the perfect do-gooder project on her resume, offering her a chance at beauty pageant redemption meant to save them both. The crash. The island. The snake.