Beauty Queens Part 45

"Jen ..."

"This douche nozzle tried to kill us. A lot."

"Apologize!" everyone screamed.

"Okay! I am sorry ... Man Flower."

The agent wrapped her in a big hug. "It's PowerPoint."

"I apologize, PowerPoint," Jennifer said through lips crushed against Agent Jones's chest.

"The system is PowerPoint only. Harris forgot to change it back. Let's communicate with our fingers."

"Agent Jones! So ... we have to make a PowerPoint presentation to override the system?" Shanti slapped a hand to her forehead. "Are you kidding me?"

"Mmm-hmm. Pretty pictures and bullet points." The agent sat, lotus-style, on the table.

"Oh, hey," Nicole said, averting her eyes.

Shanti sat down at the computer. "We're making a PowerPoint, Teen Dreams."

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

"How's it coming, Shanti?" a nervous Mary Lou asked six minutes later.

Shanti concentrated on the laptop. "Almost there."

Tiara looked over her shoulder. "Ooh, put in the picture with the mountains. That one was so pretty."

"Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven ..."

"Less than a minute to go, Bollywood," Nicole said.

"h.e.l.lo! Well aware, thank you. 'Kay. Uploading now ..."

Shanti pressed PLAY, and the PowerPoint presentation was in motion. It was an image of Ladybird Hope waving from a Corporation private plane.

Fun Facts About Ladybird Hope & The Corporation!

Tried to kill us Kept rescuers from finding us Made secret arms deal with Republic of ChaCha a.s.sa.s.sinated world leader Her pageant-wear line poorly made Again, tried to kill us "Go to second screen!" Nicole said.

"Give it a second," Shanti said. "I put it on slide show. That's how we do it in IP."

Two seconds later, an island scene came up.

"I picked that shot," Tiara said, clapping. "Isn't it pretty?"

There Is a Secret Corporation Compound!

Polluting environment Harming animals Making weapons Avoiding taxes Forming secret alliances "Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six ..."

"Come on, come on," Adina pleaded softly.

A shot of Ladybird Hope and MoMo B. ChaCha in the heart-shaped hot tub appeared onscreen. Ladybird Hope had been caught midspeech. Her mouth was twisted and her eyes were half closed.

"Not her best," Sinjin said. "Still. Total MILF. Paranoid and very wrong, but MILF."

Ladybird Hope and The Peac.o.c.k!

Secret alliances = treason Illegal weapons sales = also treason Illegal campaign contributions = bad Human rights violations = super bad Killing defenseless Bambi = just plain mean Totally having s.e.x in that hot tub = conflict of interest, unethical, unsanitary "Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen ..."

"It's a whole new world of pretty ..." Agent Jones sang, rocking softly on the table.

Shanti glanced at him, then looked to the ceiling. "Please don't let this be the way I die."

The fourth and final panel was of Ladybird Hope smiling and waving between The Corporation's logo and the White House.

America's Presidency: Reality TV Show or Commodity?

The screen faded to black and the words The End.

"Did it work?" Adina asked.

"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 s.h.i.+t!" Sosie said.

"Beautiful," Agent Jones murmured.

"OMG," Shanti gasped.

"Totally phallic," Tiara said. "Oh. That means like a p.e.n.i.s."

"That means trouble," Petra said. "The volcano, not the p.e.n.i.s."

"Thank G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed. 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. Gla.s.s part.i.tions shattered. Screams. Shouts of "This way! This way!" A strange man in a fig leaf pus.h.i.+ng 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, h.e.l.lo, 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 swoos.h.i.+ng 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.

"What happened?" Nicole asked from a deck chair. Ahmed had made her a cup of tea. In s.h.i.+fts, the girls and pirates told the tale of what had happened. The volcano hadn't erupted so much as burped. It was the storehouse of Lady 'Stache Off that had exploded, destroying much of the compound. The area around the volcano was a mess.

"You got, like, totally thrown by the explosion," Shanti explained to Nicole. She hugged her. "I'm glad you're okay."

"Thanks," Nicole said, hugging her back.

"Because I totally need a place to stay in Colorado when I go skiing next spring break," Shanti said, and the two of them burst out laughing.

"I could get used to this," Sinjin called. He lounged on a deck chair in his MoMo find. "Yachts are the new s.e.xy. You heard it here first."

"Pretty sure yachts have always been s.e.xy," Petra said.

Ahmed sat with Shanti. "So you mixed Beena's48 'Mumbai Love Song,' the groove from Hip-Hopera's La-La Boheme,49 and Elvis Presley? That's dead brilliant!"

Shanti grinned. "Yeah. I think so."

"My brother runs some clubs in London. I could get you a night. Prolly a s.h.i.+te time slot to start, but it's something."

"Okay, seriously? That would be, like, so totally awesome! I could apply to Cambridge," Shanti said in awe. "I could apply to Cambridge and DJ in London. Yes!" Shanti frowned. "Um, no offense, but I can't ... this can't be, like, a dating thing."

"What? Oh. Oh! Um, no worries, mate. It's just business. Maybe Nicole and I could come to the club, yeah?" He looked hopefully at Nicole.

"That could work," she said, smiling.

"What about you and me, Adina?" Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. "I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?"

Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock 'n' roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable ba.s.s-playing girls from New Hamps.h.i.+re. But he didn't exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she'd invented as much as he'd invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn't be the same mistakes. Starting now.

"Sorry," she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. "Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. b.i.t.c.hes will take your a.s.s down if you try to publish that. Peace out."

"Ahoy, mateys!" Mary Lou shouted as she emerged from the captain's cabin. She wore breeches and a poufy pirate s.h.i.+rt. She'd tied her Miss Nebraska sash around her waist like a belt and had tied a scarf across her forehead in true pirate fas.h.i.+on.

"Mary Lou!" Adina waved.

"I've talked it over with Sinjin and the guys, and I am officially taking over command of this vessel," Mary Lou shouted. "The Captains Bodacious have a stylin' new boat and a bodacious new captain."

"That is hot," Jennifer muttered.

Adina smirked. "Wow. Kind of braggy, Novak."