Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [0]
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Kirsten Hubbard
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-375-89750-4
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v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Before
Chapter 1 - Only Weep When You Win
Chapter 2 - Like Mandarin
Chapter 3 - Small Towns Don’t Forget
Chapter 4 - Her Almost Smile
Chapter 5 - Two of a Kind
Chapter 6 - Let Go
Chapter 7 - A Little Piece of Ocean
Chapter 8 - That Girl My Mother Had Been
Chapter 9 - Will You Go?
Chapter 10 - Confectionary Kingdoms
Chapter 11 - All the Way Out to the Sea
Chapter 12 - We’re All a Little Bit Crazy
Chapter 13 - The Fundamentals of Leadership
Chapter 14 - Nobody Else in the World
Chapter 15 - Whoops
Chapter 16 - Weirdos on These Premises
Chapter 17 - Liberation
Chapter 18 - Like Fairy Glamour
Chapter 19 - Stones in My Pocket
Chapter 20 - The Biggest Event of the Year
Chapter 21 - Empty Space
Chapter 22 - A Two-Way Mirror
Chapter 23 - With You I Will Leave
Chapter 24 - The Quarry
Chapter 25 - Dark Places
Chapter 26 - How Good My Life Could Be
Chapter 27 - Way Back When
Chapter 28 - Someplace Magic
Chapter 29 - A Shock in the Silence
Chapter 30 - Personal Kaleidoscopes
After
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The winds in Washokey make people go crazy.
At least, that’s what everybody says. Our part of Wyoming is plagued by winds: hot winds, cold winds, dry winds, wildwinds. Wildwinds are the worst. Not only do they torment us from the outside, but they also seem to bluster inside us: battering around in our lungs, whistling through our capillaries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that wind blew into the passageways of our brains.
On the afternoon of my last beauty pageant, almost eight years ago, the wildwinds had already begun. That was what got into me, I like to think: I acted crazy that day because my head was filled with wind.
But that doesn’t explain why that afternoon sticks in my memory like a tumbleweed blown against a barbed wire fence no matter how much I would like to forget it. It’s because two of the biggest events in my history came gusting together at once: I saw Mandarin Ramey for the first time. And Momma gave up on me for good.
How I despised those beauty pageants. The judges with white teeth and orange skin. The itchy dresses like bathtub poufs. The makeup lacquered on my face, and the shoes binding my feet like those of the Chinese concubines in my chapter book Women of Faraway Lands. The usual girls screeching the same three songs—“I Feel Pretty,” the national anthem, and “Home on the Range.”
Instead of singing, I recited historic speeches. When paired with my classic cuteness, it made me just unusual enough to stand out. I won plaques and trophies. A bowling ball airbrushed with wild mustangs. Gift certificates to restaurants with names like the L & L Hitchin’ Post Inn and the Cow Town Café. Momma entered me in every pageant within two hundred miles, and some even farther away than that. We’d spent the majority of my early life on the road, zigzagging through the state in Momma’s little pink hatchback, from Sundance to Saddlestring, Evanston to Medicine Bow.
The final act of my pageant career could have happened in any one of those places. But to Momma’s everlasting humiliation, I screwed up in our own