Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [40]
On our way home from the pageant, Momma drove with one hand on my sister’s trophy—the first-prize kind, not the stuffed kind. Taffeta sat in back, wearing a rhinestone tiara, her feet tucked beneath her blue dress. I sat in the passenger seat with the window open, breathing in the wind.
It was during our epic pageant road trips that Momma used to tell me about the wildwinds.
“They push all the ozone out of the air,” she would explain. “Ozone’s the electricity that keeps us sane. That’s why we’re all a little bit crazy.”
I never really understood what she was talking about, although when I read about the hole in the ozone layer in second grade, I feared an onset of global insanity even more than global warming.
“Did you see the looks on the judges’ faces when Taffeta finished singing?” Momma asked now, as we rolled through town.
“Not really,” I muttered.
“Like they were sucking for air? They’d all gone pale! I’ve never been so proud in my whole life.” She tap-tapped her fingernails against the trophy. Its chrome plating was networked with a billion hairline cracks. “This is it, my darlings! The beginning.”
I glanced back at Taffeta, who was sucking on her fingers.
“Next comes the tri-county pageant,” Momma continued. “All the best and brightest little girls in the three counties. And after that comes the state pageant.”
“The whole state?” Taffeta asked.
“The whole state! And I just know you’ll win that one, too, hands down. Can you imagine their reaction when a six-year-old beats all those seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds?”
This time, my sister didn’t respond. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Momma’s joyful expression falter a bit.
“Don’t you want to know what’s after that, honey?”
“Okay.”
“The national pageant! The whole entire United States of America. Fifty girls, one from every state. There’ll be music scouts and TV producers. All the important people in the entertainment industry. And it’ll be held in California.”
I snapped my head around. “California?”
Momma glanced at me, like she’d forgotten I was there.
“Well, you can come too, Grace. But only if you’ll be supportive.”
I turned back toward the window. My eyes trailed along the barbed wire fence outlining somebody’s front yard, as if it were a ranch or a pasture. Trespassers beware. Beyond the streets and houses, I could make out the dark haze of the horizon. As usual, it seemed unnervingly far away.
When we arrived home, I shot up the stairs into my room and slammed the door. From the back of my closet, I withdrew my deepest, darkest secret.
My pageant album.
I’d stolen it from the junk drawer in Momma’s room. She hadn’t missed it. Taffeta’s album, crammed full from cover to cover, sat on the coffee table in our living room. Mine was only half filled. The other half would have been reserved for future accomplishments, except I hadn’t had any.
The first pictures in my album didn’t bother me. It was the later ones, the ones I covered with scraps of notebook paper, that turned my stomach. Though sometimes I’d peel back the paper and peek at the tiny face underneath—pink cheeks, gleaming white baby teeth, a cloud of corkscrew curls.
Looking at my former self, I wasn’t sure how much of the dread I felt was a real memory, and how much was a false one planted by the years between.
Because with the exception of the pageants themselves, all my memories of those days were good ones. The photos proved it: me standing in the crispy roadside weeds with Momma’s hand on my head, the camera propped up on the car hood. I was three, and four, and five, and six. Momma was in her early twenties. Both of us grinning, always.
Momma entered me in every Wyoming pageant open to out-of-towners. There were plenty—especially in the towns too small to homegrow enough contestants. We visited the bigger towns