Beauty Queens

“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 the 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.