Beauty Queens

Silently, she cursed herself for entering the pageant in the first place. It was a foolish, desperate move, and now here she was, stuck on an island with only a week’s worth of pills. Once that ran out … well, she wouldn’t think about it. Stay positive. That was the thing.

The salt spray kissed her skin, and Petra thought back to the first time she’d played dress-up when she was eight. Sitting at her mother’s makeup table, she’d felt a giddy joy as she’d applied the eye shadow — blue and too heavy — the pink blusher, the powder, and finally, a coat of red lipstick. When Petra had looked at herself in the mirror, she’d felt pretty for the first time, a fairy-tale frog transformed into a princess.

So enamored was Petra of her new self that she didn’t hear her mother come up from her art studio in the basement. Her mother’s lips were parted slightly, as if she were calculating the answer to a math problem that had been in her head a long time but she had only just come upon the answer. She kissed Petra’s cheek and said, “Through playing?”

Petra wasn’t through playing, not by a long shot, but she nodded, and her mother helped her wash her face and then treated her to a special moisturizing mask, which was cold and green and made them both giggle.

“Will I be beautiful like you someday?” Petra asked her mother.

“You already are beautiful,” her mother answered.

“No. Like you,” Petra repeated, and her mother’s expression was unreadable.

“I guess we’ll have to see.”

A bikini-clad Taylor emerged through the skeletal rock’s mouth like a beauty from a Loch Lomond8 movie. Watching Taylor, sun-kissed and bronzed and effortless, Petra felt jealous and more than a little out of her league. What was she doing here? What did she hope to prove? That she, Petra West, had just as much right to the Miss Teen Dream crown as all these other girls? That there was beauty in her, too? She could still drop out, she supposed. Give it all up. After all, she’d been in the spotlight before, and while it had been exhilarating in some ways, it had been a nightmare in others. Would she handle it any differently this time? Or would it implode as it had before?

During her mother’s chemo, Petra had promised she would go after her dreams. “Life is too short not to be who you are, honey,” her mom had told her. She thought of her mom back home in her art studio in Providence, scarred and shorn and still beautiful, full of fierce belief in the rightness of her daughter. And Petra knew she would see it through.

“Good morning!” she called as politely as possible.

“Good morning, Miss Rhode Island. Oh, Miss New Hampshire!” Taylor called out. “How was first watch? Anything to report?”

Adina trudged over sleepily and plopped down onto the sand with a groan. “Yeah. I have five humongous bug bites on my legs and arms, my butt crack has been thoroughly exfoliated with sand, I’m hungry, exhausted, and I haven’t seen a ship anywhere.”

“Don’t you have anything positive to say?” Taylor chided.

Adina glared. “There’s still a possibility this is all a very bad dream.”

“My goodness. Somebody needs to learn resilience. It’s a miracle you’ve gotten this far in the pageant system, Miss New Hampshire. I myself slept just fine.”

“Did you see a green overnight case with an Audrey Hepburn decal on top?” Petra asked. She bit nervously at a fingernail, thought better of it, and hid her hands behind her back.

“Nuh-uh. I did see some weird lights up near the volcano, though. Flashes, like signals or something. At least, I thought I did. I don’t know. I was really tired.”

“Battle fatigue, my daddy calls it,” Taylor said with assurance. She rubbed at the stains on her minidress with seawater.

Adina ignored Taylor. With a stick, she wrote This sucks in the sand. “I had this weird feeling that we were being watched last night.”

“Watched by what?” Petra asked.

“I don’t know. But it gave me the total creeps.”

“Sounds like Most Holy Name Academy,” Mary Lou said, joining them. Damaged spangles hung from her dress on hair-thin threads like some molting bird. “When those nuns say they have eyes everywhere, they are not kidding. I didn’t pee at school for the first two years. I wore a pee pad.”

Petra put a hand on Mary Lou’s shoulder. “TMI.”

“I think we should go check it out,” Adina said.

Mary Lou glanced at the great lava wall protecting the heart of the jungle. “You mean go in there?”