by Megan Walker
This job sounds like hell to me, but I can tell she’s good at it. Even if from the way one of the girls, in a red bikini, keeps turning around and licking her lips at me, I think she ought to be protecting me from them and not the other way around.
“All right!” Carlyle calls. He’s a gay dude in a three piece suit with a hairstyle that looks like he’s trying to simulate the perfect wave. It makes me want to buy him a little surfboard barrette and glue on one of those tiny ninjas you can get out of vending machines. Little dude would be rocking out up there. “Let’s take a break, and then we’ll move on to talents. We’ll save the full showcase for tomorrow, but I want to make sure we can get all your props on and off the stage.”
Girls start scrambling like they don’t know the definition of “break,” and I hop down off the stage and walk over to Allison. She’s standing next to a seat over which are draped several garment bags, frowning at her phone. “Hey,” I say. “How’s it going?”
Allison looks up from her phone and almost smiles. It’s a good look for her. “Well, I haven’t murdered any husbands today, so that’s something.”
“I could see you as the black widow type.”
JT walks up behind her. “This is dark, even for you,” he says.
I ignore him. The corners of Allison’s mouth turn up a little more, and I decide I’m going to make it my mission today to get her to give me a real smile. I’ve seen her smile at several of the girls, and it’s dazzling.
“Did Collette have any idea how many other past-life husbands you’ve killed?”
Closer still. “I think you might be a special case.”
“I usually am.” Next to the row of auditorium seats, someone has left a makeup case folded open to reveal a row of flesh-colored fake breasts. JT kneels beside it, poking at one, though he doesn’t have any effect on it. I bend down and take it away from him, tossing it in the air with one hand.
Allison’s smile disappears, probably because I’ve touched an intimate prop belonging to one of the girls she’s trying to shelter from me. “So these talents,” I say before she can snap at me. “What can I expect? Yodeling? Will anyone be demonstrating tax preparation?”
Allison reaches out and snaps the fake breast from me mid-toss. “While I’m sure you could use the financial advice,” she says, “I don’t think we have anyone scheduled to do that this year.”
“Dude,” JT says, now sitting sprawled across the aisle, so that anyone who passes is likely to walk through him. “You should tell her about those IRAs you made us all get. She’s wound so tight that’ll probably turn her on.”
I shake my head. I’m doing just fine financially, but I don’t like to advertise it. It goes against my irresponsible, fuck-em-all image to tell people I have half a year’s income socked away and investment accounts in excess of that.
I reach down and pick up the opposite breast, pinching it between two fingers and wiggling it at Allison. “What’s the point of these, anyway?” I ask. “Are they supposed to be attractive? They’re false advertising, if you ask me.”
Allison snatches it out of my fingers before I’ve even finished my sentence. “Which no one did,” she says, more harshly than is warranted. I fold my arms and roll my eyes behind my glasses.
So much for making her smile.
“Get back on stage,” she says. “When Carlyle says we’re taking a break, he means get ready for what’s next.”
Down on the floor, JT is making whipping motions again. I don’t exactly want to do what she says, and Carlyle is using his break to yell at someone over the phone about scones, which makes me wonder if there’s a breakfast table around here I’ve missed. So instead I take a leisurely walk over to the guys manning the sound equipment. At least those guys will probably be able to carry on a conversation about something other than swimsuit cuts and my general lack of redeeming qualities.
I don’t make it as far as the sound table before Carlyle is off the phone and shouting about why he doesn’t see any props on the stage. I use the stage door and walk through the wings. I’m not sure if I’m going to be announcing these props, but either way, this ought to be good, and I want a front-stage seat.
Back in the wings, one of the girls—a redhead whose name I originally thought might be Diva, but the script tells me is Deena—is gathering up a collection of scarves. I’m going to need popcorn for this. I lean against the side of the proscenium.
Allison heads backstage as scarf-girl comes out, trailing the scarves behind her in long sweeping movements. Someone backstage is yelling about the amount of space required for her marimba to roll out through the wings. Scarf-girl is still wearing her swimsuit, but wraps the scarves around her arms and begins to dance, the scarves flying in all directions like long-feathered wings.
It’s kind of impressive, actually, and I stand at the microphone and watch her, while backstage someone starts wailing about the marimba squishing her camellias. There’s no music, and I look down at the sound people, wondering if they’ve missed their cue. But no, Carlyle said he wanted to practice getting the props on and off, and that they’d run through the talent numbers later.
Deena swoops through her dance moves, and I begin to understand why she’s doing this. As she does, she sheds scarves and then picks them up again in a whirling melee that begins to match the rise of the fight breaking out backstage. I can hear someone screaming that her prize-winning camellias are now permanently bruised, and someone else screaming that her marimba hasn’t been within a mile of those camellias, which is obviously not true if the marimba is anywhere in the building.
A headache is starting to build behind my eyes, despite the sunglasses, and JT comes over and slings an arm around me. “Come on,” he says. “It’s not so bad. Not like that time we—”
JT is interrupted by a loud crash backstage that sounds vaguely like something huge slamming into a marimba. The sound rattles through my bones, and I jump, knocking over the mic stand. The sound guys glare at me, and my headache sharpens, pounding like an ice pick to the back of my eyeballs. I bend down and pick up the mic stand, hoping that no one will notice the cold sweat beading on my forehead. JT is gone, but I swear I can smell his blood, dripping across the seat, soaking my shirt so much that the paramedics will search for the wound in my side that isn’t mine. My hands feel slick and sticky.
“Hey, man,” one of the sound guys says over the shouting backstage. “Are you okay?”
I’m standing in front of the upright microphone, and I can hear my own breathing through the speakers in front of the stage.
I have to get out of here, but for all I know there’s a cell phone somewhere and it’s taking a video that will spread over the internet, and everyone will know that I’m clearly unhinged. It feels hot in here, but my palms are ice cold. I grab the mic.
“I can’t work like this!” I shout into it. Then I jump down from the stage and storm off toward the green room like I’m having a diva fit.
It’s what they expect of me anyway, and it’s better than them knowing I’m losing my fucking mind.
Four
Allison
Look at these! Look at them!” Becky shrieks, waving a vase of flowers in my face. “My camellias are permanently bruised, and it’s all her fault! Her and her stupid, huge-ass marimba!”
I’m pretty sure she’s going to be bringing a fresh cut of camellias on the actual pageant day, so I doubt it matters how bruised these ones get. Honestly, the camellias look perfectly fine to me anyway, but I know nothing about gardening. I do, however, know very well how stressful the rehearsals only days before the pageant can be. I open my mouth to try to calm her down with soothing assurances—it’s not unlike being the Horse Whisperer, this pageant coordinator role of mine—but Sherry jumps in.
“Please don’t yell like that,” she begs. “It’s making my babies nervous.” She’s crouched down,
furiously petting the back of one of her three white miniature poodles, while in the other hand she holds the rings they’ll jump through as part of her dog-trainer talent.
Gwen gives Sherry a disdainful look before turning her death glare back to Becky.
“My marimba hasn’t been within a mile of your camellias,” Gwen growls, even though her marimba is quite literally right there next to them. “And maybe you should look in a mirror before you start throwing around the words ‘huge ass.’”
Becky gasps and Gwen smirks, folding her arms and turning back to her instrument, and I hold in a groan and make sure I’m standing between them in case Becky decides to lunge. It wouldn’t be the first time in my many years at this job that I’ve had to physically keep a girl from using her new French-manicured tips to do some face scratching.
I should be grateful for having to head off a possible cat fight; this should be the perfect excuse to stop checking out Shane Beckstrom. Which is ridiculous, because no matter how incredibly hot he is—and damn, he is—he’s also a self-centered jerk, and I have better things to do with my time than ogle some entitled rock star who knows all too well how good-looking he is.
But I find my eyes drifting back to him anyway.
He’s out on the stage, turned toward Deena, who’s twirling with her scarves—she has all of them now, thank god, because there was almost another cat fight yesterday when one went missing and it turned out Heather had taken it to use as a chic head wrap. One among many crises I was in the middle of dealing with when our emcee decided to show up forty-five minutes late, which didn’t help my admittedly already-formed opinion of him.
He’s facing Deena like he’s watching her, but his head dips down and he grimaces slightly. Like maybe he’s in pain.
I remember him telling me he had a concussion, and about the headaches.
But when I tried to be a decent person and maybe revisit some of those opinions—because I recognize that snap-judgments of people aren’t always fair, and he was kind of cute there for a second, talking about cat names—he accused me of having a thing for bad boys and stormed off.
I flush, turning back to the girls, my irritation peaking again for reasons that have little to do with the marimba/camellia feud. “Look,” I say firmly. “First, you know my feelings on women tearing each other down, especially with insults meant to body shame.” This with a hard look at Gwen, who purses her lips and frowns at the ground. She’s a bit hot-headed, but she has a sister with Down syndrome who she loves like crazy and would defend to the ends of the earth, so I know she gets my stance on this. “And second,” I continue, turning to Becky, who clearly already knows what I’m going to say, “I know how stressed out we all are, but if you have a problem with another contestant, the respectful thing to do is—”
My long-suffering pageant-mother rant is interrupted by a loud, jangling crash that makes me jump and Gwen shriek.
Angelica cringes at the cart of sound equipment she just shoved into Gwen’s marimba. A speaker from the top of the equipment tower is now on the ground, hopefully not broken. “Sorry,” she says. “I—”
Whatever else Angelica was going to say is cut off by the clatter and then shrill squeal of a microphone as it hits the stage, and I spin back around. Deena’s covering her ears with her scarves, and Shane’s picking up the mic stand he must have knocked down.
He straightens, and he seems paler than he did a moment ago. The microphone stand shakes in his hand.
“My marimba!” Gwen yells, practically throwing herself bodily over the instrument as if to prevent future assaults by sound equipment.
“I’m sorry,” Angelica starts again, “but the cart was in my way, and I needed to move it to get to my paints.”
I should be heading this off now, but I can’t tear my eyes from Shane. His rapid, shallow breathing near the microphone echoes through the auditorium.
I’m not the only one who notices something’s wrong.
“Hey, man,” Trevor, one of the assistant sound guys, calls to him while Henry, his boss, dashes up the stage left stairs to the sound cart Angelica shoved over. “Are you okay?”
Gwen’s chewing out Angelica now, and Becky’s trying to defend her, but I can’t tear my eyes from Shane, whose mouth opens and closes, his Adam’s apple bobbing, the mic in his hand trembling.
“I can’t work like this!” he shouts into the mic, and that, at least, shuts the girls up. He jumps down off the stage and stomps off.
There’s a beat of silence as everyone stares after him.
What the hell was that?
“Oh my god, what a drama queen,” Angelica says, wrinkling her nose. I’m inclined to agree with her, and more than that, to chew him out for it. Showing up late when we’re on a tight schedule is bad enough, like his time is so much more important than the rest of ours, but throwing fits and refusing to work . . .
Except I don’t think that’s what actually happened there.
“Maybe,” Becky says, clutching her vase of flowers to her chest. “But I’d still ride that so hard he’d—” She cuts off when I give her a look. A few other girls snicker.
The girls think I’m a prude, and hell, Shane probably does too. But I’ve been doing this pageant coordinator thing for a long time, and sure, flirting with the cute host seems like it’s all fun and games. Until it goes too far and word gets out and a girl gets dropped from the pageant last minute for breach of contract and disgraced in pageant circles ever after. And the smarmy guy walks away with another locker-room story to tell.
I’ve seen it happen, to one of my friends back when I was competing myself, and then again my second year as coordinator, when I was still too new to do anything about it. Not that I think I could even now—there’s no way Shane Beckstrom’s career would suffer for banging a nineteen-year-old pageant girl, and he’s made it clear he doesn’t care about the actual pageant.
The thought of him skeeving on these girls raises my hackles more than is probably warranted, given that he hasn’t, to my knowledge, done so—at least not yet. But still.
Collette appears next to me suddenly, and I startle. Sometimes I feel like maybe her real talent is teleportation. She’s got this sort of ethereal quality and not just because she claims to be psychic. “I wonder if he was like that when you were married to him.” She tilts her head and squints, like she’s trying to see into my supposed past life with Shane. My body flushes, just like it did the first time she said that. She smiles at me. “Maybe that’s why you murdered him.”
“I probably had lots of reasons,” I mutter.
“Enough about him,” Gwen says. “Carlyle! Come look at what Angelica did to—!” Then she gasps. “Oh my god, Sherry, did your dog just piss on my marimba?”
We all gape for a second. There is indeed a puddle of urine right beneath the marimba leg, and a cowering poodle beside it.
Becky’s nose wrinkles. “Isn’t he supposed to be trained?”
“The noise scared him!” Sherry shouts, ignoring her own previous anti-yelling pleas. “Orville Redenbarker has a nervous bladder!”
“My marimba,” Gwen wails.
Henry inspects the small speaker that dropped. “I’ve got thousands of dollars worth of sound equipment here. If that’s damaged . . .”
Carlyle, who was watching from the back of the auditorium and has now scrambled his way to the front, looks just as stunned by Shane’s rapid departure and all of this chaos as everyone else, and infinitely more pissed—especially at Shane, is my guess—and I don’t think either Gwen or Henry’s hissy fit will help that.
Poor Angelica looks like she might cry. “I’m so sorry, about your marimba and the speaker tower and—” Then her tear-filled eyes widen as she looks at Collette. “The tarot reading you gave me! I drew the upside-down tower card, and you said it was a fallen tower and that meant destruction—”
“It better not mean destruction,” Henry grouses, while the other contestants gasp at this supposed fulfillment of prophecy, and Collette nods, her expression full of knowing sympathy.
“Hey, all of you, it was an accident,” I say, and I squeeze Angelica’s hand. “Why don’t you and Collette go over and help Yvonne with her costume—it looks like her feathers keep falling off.” I personally hope they don’t do anything that makes it more difficult for me later when I promised to help her actually fix it, but for right now I just need to defuse the situation. “And Collette, no more tarot readings, okay?” I don’t believe in that stuff, but I know how easy it is to get superstitious right before a pageant. I don’t need anyone fueling that fire.
They nod and scurry off, but even with everything going on, even though I should probably be much more worried about my girls and their nervous-bladdered dogs and their desecrated instruments, I find my gaze drifting back to the doors where Shane left.
“Did you see that?” Carlyle demands, storming up the stage steps, and I’m not sure which part of all of this he’s referring to, until he gestures back to those very same doors. “He just ran off! In the middle of practice, like—”
“How about I go yell at him?” I say, and that looks like it satisfies Carlyle, at least until Gwen and Henry start hounding him about their speaker and marimba. But I’m already walking to the auditorium doors by then and just barely catch Carlyle yelling, “Practice is over! Over, I tell you!”
I don’t blame him for calling it there. No one’s going to be able to focus now.
I certainly don’t seem to be able to, which irritates me even more.
But even though I told Carlyle I’d yell at Shane—and there’s definitely part of me that wants to—I can’t ignore what I saw on his face, even under those dark sunglasses.
It reminded me of myself, sitting in my car alone, staring at the entrance to the oncology wing of the hospital. Willing myself to go in. Telling myself it was just a checkup, what are the odds it’d be back, especially so soon? Breathing rapidly. Clutching my purse with white knuckles.
