Jen finally found the courage to sign, “Okay?”
Sosie nodded, smiling. She snuggled closer and threaded her fingers through Jen’s, holding fast. There was more truth and hope in that one gesture than in all the things that had come before. These were the moments that kept you going, Jennifer thought. When you looked up to the sky and cried “Why?” sometimes the sky shrugged. Yet other times it answered with the warm assurance of linked hands. “Sorry,” it whispered on the wind. “Sorry for all the pain and loneliness and disappointment. But there is this, too.”
It was enough.
The girls had lost track of how long they had been on the island. During the daylight hours, they dove into the surf with abandon, emerging tanned and sure-footed, as if they were selkies who had let their timidity float out on the tide like a false skin. Only Taylor remained vigilant in her pageant work, getting up every morning, rain or shine, to go through the paces of her routine, from first entrance to talent to final interview.
“When we get rescued, I guess I’m the only one who’ll be in fighting form,” she’d say while circle-turning and practicing a stiff wave.
“I’ve been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island,” Mary Lou said to Adina one afternoon as they rested on their elbows taking bites from the same papaya.
“Lord of the Flies. What about it?”
“You know how you said it wasn’t a true measure of humanity because there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls?”
“Yeah?”
Mary Lou wiped fruit juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. “Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one’s watching them so they can be who they really are.”
Adina gazed out at the expanse of unknowable ocean. “Maybe.”
There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping.
They were becoming.
They were.
A WORD FROM YOUR SPONSOR
The Corporation would like to apologize for the preceding pages. Of course, it’s not all right for girls to behave this way. Sexuality is not meant to be this way — an honest, consensual expression in which a girl might take an active role when she feels good and ready and not one minute before. No. Sexual desire is meant to sell soap. And cars. And beer. And religion.
The Corporation would like you to know that they are deeply regretful of this tawdry display. So often these books for our young people do not enforce a moral. The Corporation would like to take the time now to present this moral in the following montage.
ALTERNATE SCENES:
1. The beauty queen made the first move and kissed the prince. “You know what I really like?” she whispered into his ear. Seconds later, he was sliding his mouth down the curve of her stomach. As he did, she looked up and saw the boulder teetering on the edge of the cliff above them.
“Oh my God! Look out for that boulder!”
“What bould —?”
The rock fell off and killed her dead. The prince was blinded in the accident, but was later healed by the love of a goodly, virginal maiden who suffered a lot first.
The End.
2. The savage warrior girl raised her spear. “I’m not going to keep quiet anymore! I’m going to say what I need to say and not worry about whether or not it upsets somebody or makes me seem unfeminine. Because you know what? I have opinions. I have feelings and needs, and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t voice them or I’ll get ridiculed or attacked!”
In the firelight, it was easy to see that she was the least attractive girl of the bunch and she probably smelled bad. Just then, a giant snake lurched out of the trees, bit her in two, and swallowed her down. And the other girls realized they should probably keep their mouths shut.
The End.
3. The girl felt feral and strong. She felt feral and strong because, of course, she had been contaminated with the alien virus, which made her not like a normal girl, but more like an alien. With alien desires. The kind that are not normal.
“I killed everybody I ever kissed,” the beautiful, long-legged girl with raven hair and full lips purred.
“I knew it. You’re an alien,” said her former best friend, the pale, bespectacled creature with the spectacular cleavage.
“Yes, I’m an alien and I still made cheerleader. And now I’m going to steal your boyfriend to prove girls can’t really be friends.”
“I sat back timidly when you torched my house, killed my parents, and ate my dog. But now you’re stealing my boyfriend? That’s a step too far!”
The bespectacled good girl with the nice rack plunged the jousting lance — constructed in Latin club — through the hot alien cheerleader’s stomach in a deeply Freudian display.
“Hasta la vista, bitch27.”
The End.
4. The wind blew the beauty queen’s skirt higher, exposing the curve of her butt beneath her panty. The humidity made her perspire in a sexy way, almost as if she’d been squirted with a mixture of water and baby oil by a makeup crew. She arched her back. “This jungle heat sure is all hot and stuff. Mind if I take off my top?”
“No! Let’s all take off our tops!” said the other girls.
“Mmm, if there’s anything I like better than taking off my clothes, it’s using new Tan-So-Right28 to keep my skin sweet and supple,” the beauty queen said. She reached behind a rock for the bottle of liquid tanner and spritzed herself. As it hit her skin in a slow-motion mist, she gasped in pleasure and bit her lip.
“Hot,” said a redhead in a thong.
“So hot,” they all agreed.
“Oops, I just dropped my bottle of tanner. I’ll just bend over slowly to pick it up,” said the beauty queen.
“That’s hot.”
“Totally.”
“You know what else is hot?” said a nameless blonde as she put her arm around the one black girl.
“What?”
“Bisexuals.”
“Totally. Well, not like real bisexuals who are just sort of your everyday people, but, like, the kind of bisexuals you see in magazines wearing nothing but body paint and kissing both boys and girls to promote a new single.”
“Totally, totally hot.”
Laughing and frolicking, the girls jumped into a bubbling island spring that was a lot like a hot tub, and then a rugged explorer type jumped in. The girls fawned all over him because he had used Stud Muffin Body Spray for Guys29.
The End.
MISS TEEN DREAM FUN FACTS PAGE!
Please fill in the following information and return to Jessie Jane, Miss Teen Dream Pageant administrative assistant, before Monday. Remember, this is a chance for the judges and the audience to get to know YOU. So make it interesting and fun, but please be appropriate. And don’t forget to mention something you love about our sponsor, The Corporation!
Name: Nicole Ade
State: Colorado
Age:16
Height: 5’ 5”
Weight: 130 lbs
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Best Feature: My smile
Fun Facts About Me:
My dad and my Auntie Abeo are both doctors. My mom is a former Laker Girl.
My personal motto is You Gotta Go Along to Get Along.
I am pre-premed. I like to read Gray’s Anatomy just for fun.
My hobbies include meteorology, bowling, skiing, and drumming.
My favorite Corporation product was Miles of Smiles toothpaste. I really loved that it came in mint-choco-chip flavor. It’s too bad about the recall. Salmonella is no joke*
The thing that scares me most? My mother.
27This is perfectly acceptable language. After all, that bad, bad girl IS stealing her boyfriend.
28Tan-So-Right, The Corporation’s revolutionary self-tanner
that gives you a perfectly even tan, even “down there.” You are beautifying “down there,” aren’t you?
29Stud Muffin Body Spray for Guys: Get your stud on with Stud Muffin Body Spray for Guys, the only body spray made with beer and man sweat and guaranteed to make girls frolic with you in a hot tub.*
*Results may vary. It could also make your dog hump your leg and have your grandma asking if you’ve sneaked a cold one into the retirement village for her.
*Note: Don’t refer to Corporation recall. Class action suit still pending.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For her whole life, Nicole had been playing a part in a story shaped by everyone from her mother to her friends, even to her beloved auntie. But now, she was ready to make up her own story, even if she was less than sure how that worked. And so, armed with a sharp stick in one hand, a knife in the other, and a bag of shiny hair accessories and jewelry tied to her rope belt, Nicole set off to explore the island. She decided to go left, toward a part of the jungle she had yet to see, promising herself that if it got too frightening, she would turn back. On her way, she passed Miss Montana and Miss Ohio, who were lying on their backs in the warm sand. They’d positioned scraps of silvery metal from the plane’s wing at chest level and were using them to reflect the sun.
“What are you doing?” Nicole asked.
“Working on our tans,” Miss Montana said. She had placed coconut shell quarters over her eyes. They looked like hairy brown sunglasses.
“I usually go for a fake-n-bake every week during pageant season,” Miss Ohio said. “Otherwise you look like Gothzilla. The judges like a tan.”
Nicole bit her tongue. The judges only like artificially darkened skin, she wanted to say. “Don’t you know anything about SPF? Skin cancer?”
Miss Montana eased herself up on her elbows and removed the small coconut shells from her eyes. “Are you always this much of a bummer?”
Fine, Nicole thought. She needed to be about her adventure, anyway. The knife hacked at the thicket surrounding her. Below her feet was a tangle of vines and roots, and she had to be careful where she stepped if she wanted to avoid a turned ankle or wrenched knee. High above her, a flock of colorful birds perched on a limb, their aqua-and-orange tails trailing down like the fishtail hem on an evening gown. Nicole wiped away the mist that collected on her skin. As she walked, she affixed shiny doodads from her bag to the trees to mark her passage. Once, she thought she heard someone behind her, but when she turned, there was nothing but thicket. The vegetation grew less dense, and finally she came to a clearing where the land looked ruined, burned.
“What happened here?” she said. Totems still guarded the top of a hill, ghosts of an older civilization. It gave Nicole a funny feeling, as if she were trespassing, and she found herself thinking of the restless spirits who inhabited the forest in stories she’d heard from Auntie Abeo. “I hope I’m not intruding,” she said. “I don’t mean any harm.”
The wind was still, and so Nicole sensed that she was welcome. She set about looking for a piece of wood she could turn into an ekwe30. At last, she found a suitable piece and sat down with her knife to carve the slits that would make it a good drum. Her head itched. In the island humidity, Nicole’s hair had gone rogue; the new growth was tight. Her mother would have an absolute fit if she saw it. For years, Nicole had submitted to the relaxers and her mother’s big tub of Icon Pass Hair Grease. “This’ll set you right,” her mother had said, dipping fast, sure fingers into the grease and working it through Nicole’s stubborn curl, pulling so tight, her eyes watered. Nicole focused on the tub’s label, where a smiling black woman in pearls touched a hand to her shiny-straight coiffure. “Smooth and controlled,” the label promised. But to Nicole, the woman’s hair seemed girdled and anxious, like it was just waiting for the right moment to stage a coup.
Her mother was always on her about one thing or another — hair, skin, nails, figure. “Well. I guess you got your father’s color,” her mother would say. Her tone, aggrieved, aggravated, made it clear that this was simply one more cross the universe had asked her to bear.
Nicole’s mom had been a Laker Girl. She’d enjoyed being in the spotlight, and when her own ambitions hadn’t worked out, she’d turned her attentions to making Nicole a star. “Because my baby is special,” she’d say. My baby is going to nationals in ice-skating. My baby is going to be a Grammy winner. My baby will be an actress. My baby is going to be a star. And when her baby could barely stand in skates, couldn’t sing on pitch, and mangled her lines in the school play, her mother only became more determined.
“Those people are just stupid,” she’d say, tugging on Nicole’s hand as they left agent after agent’s office. “There is no way my baby is average. We’ll show them. I’m going to get you an audition with Sweet Sixteen Gone Wrong31.
Nicole had wanted to please her mother, but she knew she didn’t really have any talent for being famous. What she wanted to be was a doctor. Instead, she sat through countless DVR’d episodes of teen shows where the only girls of color were the sassy best friend, the Girl with Attitude who came in to swivel her head, snap out a one-liner, and fall back like a background singer. They had one thing in common, though — they were all light-skinned.
One day, Nicole’s mother came home with a new jar of something called Pale & Pretty, which promised to “brighten the skin.”
“Bleaching cream,” her Auntie Abeo clucked, and Nicole could hear her mother and auntie arguing in the kitchen.
“She needs to do something with herself,” her mother said at last.
“Fine. She can come help me out in the office.” Her auntie stuck her head into the living room. “Come with me, Ne-Ne.”
When they were alone together in her aunt’s office at the clinic with her take-apart anatomical models of the uterus and copious medical books, Auntie Abeo held Nicole’s chin firmly but lovingly in her soft hand. “Don’t you ever use that cream, do you hear me? What it takes from you, you can’t get back. And I’m not just talking about pigment. Here, got you your own copy of Gray’s Anatomy. A book doesn’t care what color you are. Bleaching cream, my foot.”
Nicole took comfort in the clinical book. When you peeled back the skin, you were dealing with bone and muscle, blood and nerve endings. It was all the same. She liked the beautiful logic of the circulatory system, the elegance of the neurological, and the fierce warrior spirit of the heart. The body had rules and it had quirks. Nicole respected that. Nicole’s mother couldn’t. She couldn’t revel in the way synapses fired and blood cells defended against foreign invaders. She could only see her body’s failings.
“Look at these stretch marks, girl. It’s like a road map to ugly. I better cut out the fried clams if I don’t want to look like your grandmother and have to wear nothing but size twenty-four housedresses the rest of my life.”
Nicole worked the knife over the softened bark, cutting long, rectangular slits in the log’s flanks. With her hem, she wiped away the wood filings, then made slightly wider cuts, curving away layers of casing to deepen the drum’s sound. As she carved, she thought about her mother’s crazy diets: Juice fasts. Cayenne pepper and lemon. Low-carb. No-carb. Grapefruit and steak. Nicole had suffered through them all. “We’re getting rid of all the refined sugar in this house,” her mother would announce out of the blue, carrying in bags from Whole Foods, eco-friendly tubes of rice cakes and no-salt-no-sugar-no-wheat-no-taste cereal, food as punishment. The next month, it would be something else.
Sometimes, her mother would come up behind her while Nicole sat at the kitchen table studying and wrap her arms around her daughter, kiss the top of her head, and for a fleeting moment, Nicole didn’t want to be separate from her. But then her mother would inevitably say something — “How come your skin’s so ashy? Aren’t you using that cream I gave you?” “I don’t think I like what you’ve got on.” “I swear, my baby’s just like me” — and the affection would be undone.
“I’m not you; I’m me!”
Nicole wanted to scream.
Instead, she would speak in chewed fingernails and mauled cuticles, nervous scratching and upset stomachs, habits that frustrated and angered her mother, but in the anger, there was space. There was separation.
It was while watching an episode of Vampire Prom32 that Nicole saw the commercial for Miss Teen Dream and figured out the perfect solution to her problem: pageants. They offered something Nicole actually wanted — scholarship money — and it satisfied her mother’s craving for the spotlight. So Nicole learned traditional Nigerian drumming, which she didn’t totally rock at but it wasn’t like the judges knew anything about Nigerian drumming anyway. She let her mother relax her hair and oil up her skin with cocoa butter. Over afternoon teas, she made nice with the alumnae of Delta Sigma Theta so they’d sponsor her for regionals. She even let her mother pick her platform: Beautifying America, because there was nothing controversial about cleaning up litter, nothing that would make the country uncomfortable.
Now, out in the jungle by herself — by herself! — she felt at peace. In fact, she was giddy. She hummed an old Boyz Will B Boyz tune as she tested the drum. Not bad. A sharp cracking sound reminded Nicole that there were other dangers out here. She crouched and held her stick ready. The sound came from her right. Someone or something was definitely there. Nicole ducked behind a tree and held her breath. The cracking sound came closer. And closer. She’d heard once that the best defense was a good offense. She grabbed the stick in one hand and her knife in the other. With a loud “Keee-yaaaaah!” she leapt out.
“Aaaahhhh!” Shanti cried, arms up.
Nicole blinked. “Bollywood? What are you doing?”
“I was following you. And I told you, don’t call me Bollywood. So,” Shanti said. “What are you doing out here?”