“When my kids didn’t clean their plates, I ate their leftovers,” Holly went on, rubbing cocoa butter into the C-section scar on her lower abdomen. “When I was happy, I ate. When I was depressed, I ate. Once I ate a whole carton of Cool Whip and washed it down with peanut butter cups. It was like being pregnant, only I didn’t even get to pop out a baby at the end.”
Mazie adjusted Holly’s bikini strap. “Okay, so your chest doesn’t look like a chicken carcass and you don’t have famine-victim legs. Who decreed that women have to look like hat racks? If some moron doesn’t like the way you look, it’s their problem. Now put on some blusher—you look way too pale.”
It was as though the swimsuit competition were a tsunami they’d been warned about in plenty of time so they could get to higher ground, but they’d chosen to ignore it until the giant wave was sweeping them out to sea. Somehow they’d lulled themselves into thinking the swimsuit competition was not going to happen, and now it was happening and they were experiencing the panic of women about to get their periods and discovering the chocolate was all gone.
Holly was not the only person having a meltdown. Tabitha Tritt-Shimmel was in the bathroom, throwing up—either a severe case of nerves or an effort to obtain a flatter stomach. Sophie Olson was taking such deep breaths she was hyperventilating, Ashley Dorfmann was brushing her teeth with cat litter, and Rosie Martinez was moaning that her bikini top made her chumba-wumbas look too small. Amid the bedlam, only Channing Blumquist, already made-up and wearing a white swimsuit that showed off her perfect tan, remained calm.
Holly tried to pull her bikini bottom down underneath her butt cheeks. “Do you know any liposuctionists who make house calls?” She looked ready to cry.
Mazie unknotted the sarong-sized scarf she was wearing around her hips, a silk batik in brilliant oranges, reds, and blues she’d discovered tucked away in her dresser drawer. It was a bit high on the gaud-o-meter, but it exploded like a firecracker against her plain black bikini and covered up the parts she didn’t want exposed.
Greater love hath no woman than this: that she lay down her wrap for her friend. Mazie handed the scarf to Holly, who snatched it like a lifeline and draped it around herself, working that style juju some women are born with, angling the scarf to create a slash in front that allowed her terrific legs to flash and knotting it just below the belly button. Good thing they weren’t competing in one of those “Who Wore It Better?” photos in People, Mazie thought, because Holly would have kicked her couture-challenged butt.
“Best. Friend. Ever,” Holly said, giving Mazie a hug.
“The rules say two-piece.” Gretchen Wuntz swooped down, a bat out of button-down-collar hell, scrutinizing Holly’s outfit. “I’m counting three pieces here. Top, bottom, and scarf. The rules say two-piece. That ought to automatically disqualify you.”
A more sensitive woman would have withered under the combined glares of Mazie and Holly, but Gretchen had Naugahyde where other people had skin. “Go ahead, check the rulebook if you don’t believe me,” she said, pressing her lips together.
“Gretchen, the last thing I want to do is hurt you,” Mazie said, narrowing her eyes and turning on her psycho-convict stare, “but it’s still down there on my list.”
Before Gretchen could inform her that threatening people was against the rules, there was a sharp rap on the teachers’ lounge door.
Darlene Krumke opened it. “No men allowed,” she barked, blocking the door.
“Don’t think of me as a man, darling,” said the intruder, ducking under her arm and breezing into the room. “Think of me as a sister who fights a daily battle against five o’clock shadow.”
“Magenta!” Mazie rushed over and gave him a giant hug. “You made it!”
“Of course I made it. I wouldn’t miss this for the world!”
The room fell silent, all eyes fixed on Magenta, who was lugging a tote bag large enough to hold the folded-over body of an anorexic model. Quail Hollow wasn’t a town where men who resembled Magenta routinely strolled down Main Street checking out the antique shops. He was six feet tall, with a beaky nose, eyes subtly defined in burnt umber liner, and short, dyed black hair worn in spiky tufts, like a hedgehog who’d tried to mate with a tub of gel. In deference to small-town sensibilities, he was dressed conservatively in skinny jeans, pale peach silk shirt, denim loafers, and subdued earrings.
“Everyone,” Mazie announced. “This is my friend Magenta. He’s been in a lot of pageants and he’s here to help.”
Sophie, who’d bitten her nails down to nubs, stared at him. “Men can’t be in pageants.”
“Let’s not gender-stereotype, sugarbunch,” Magenta said. “I was in the Miss Rhinestone Pageant, the Mr. Gay America competition, and the Ms. Showbiz Pageant in Vegas—where I was first runner-up—and let me tell you, dollface, you have not seen bitch-slapping until you’ve been in a drag pageant. But enough about me.” Magenta clapped his hands. “Let’s get to work.”
He started hauling things out of his bag.
Panty liners. “Use them unless you want a bad case of camel toe.”
Duct tape. “For those of you who want instant cleavage.”
Preparation H. “Smear it on your thighs, then cover over lightly with foundation. For one solid hour, I promise, you will not jiggle.”
Dark beige liquid makeup. “Apply it to your underarms to make your skin flaps less noticeable. Stripe it on either side of your biceps. You’ll have arms like Michelle Obama.”
Double-sided tape. “For your bikini bottoms, so they don’t go for a joyride toward your butt cracks.”
The women were giggling now, loosening up, relaxing; Magenta had that effect on people. He pointed at Ashley. “You there, with the cat litter on her lips. What are you doing?”
Ashley’s face flamed. She spat a speck of litter off her tongue. “It’s—if you mix it with your toothpaste, it makes your teeth really white.”
“Ewww.” Sophie made a retchy face.
Ashley glared at her. “It’s unused cat litter, penis-breath!”
“Is it Feline Pine?” Magenta asked. “Because I’ve used that brand at every pageant I’ve done—it’ll make your teeth shine like a chandelier. Do we have enough to share with everyone?”
One by one, timidly at first, like chickadees being coaxed to eat out of a human’s hand, the beauty queens approached Magenta’s bag; then, as they found false lashes and thigh glitter and extra-hold hair spray, they all crowded around, begging for treats.
Bodelle stuck her head in the room and warbled, “You’re on, ladies.”
There was a last-minute flurry of hair combing and lipstick applying, then the contestants formed up in order. Darlene was first, Mazie and Holly were in the middle, and Sophie, the most recent queen, was last. Darlene took a deep breath, threw back her shoulders, and marched out the door, wearing her floral halter top and shorts.
This is for a good cause, Mazie reminded herself, digging her nails into her palms so hard they left marks. It couldn’t be any worse than the stint in the dunk tank she’d once done at a charity bazaar—humiliating and painful, but over in a few minutes. She tried to tug her bottom into place. It was too tight; it was creeping into her butt crevice. She hadn’t gotten a chance at the double-sided tape because Ashley Dorfmann had used up the entire roll.
“Mazie,” Holly said, sounding anxious. “You’ve got a problem.”
“I know. Butt creep.”
“No,” Holly said. “You’re orange!”
Chapter Twenty-one
“You look like you’ve been swimming with the salmon,” Magenta said. “Who gave you that quick-tan?”
He’d pulled Mazie out of the lineup and back into the lounge. A thrill of horror shot through Mazie as she viewed her reflection. The tanner she’d applied forty minutes ago had now reached its zenith. Arms, legs, back, shoulders—all were the same sickly shade of pumpkin.
“Sophie Olson lent it to me,” Mazie said.
“F
rom now on, do not even breathe air from the same hemisphere as that person.”
“You don’t think it was deliberate?”
He laughed. “Honestly, Mazie, for an ex-jailbird you can be such a goober sometimes. Of course it was deliberate. She punked you.”
Mazie would have burst into tears, but then her mascara would have run and she would have looked like a big, weepy jack-o’-lantern. “I can’t go out there looking like this,” she wailed. “Someone might try to stick a candle in me.”
“Not to worry, dahling. This happened to me once. The antidote is a simple household product. There ought to be some here in the cupboards.” Magenta started rooting around beneath the sink. “Here we go.”
Triumphantly, he held up a gallon jug of Hilex.
“Am I supposed to drink it?”
“External, hon.” Magenta diluted the bleach with water, then splashed the mixture over dish towels and handed one to Mazie. “Work on your legs. I’ll do your back.”
Before long the towels were saturated with orange gunk. The bleach didn’t sting, but it made Mazie smell like a disinfected toilet bowl.
“Why isn’t Bonaparte here?” Magenta asked.
“He’s in Madison, trying to find lights and tripods and stuff. He said it would probably take all day, so I don’t think he’ll be back in time for the pageant.” As they scrubbed off the tanner, Mazie filled Magenta in on Labeck’s plans for the Fawn Fanchon documentary. She’d just gotten to the part about finding Fawn’s diary when she heard Bodelle announcing Miss Quail Hollow 2000. Two more before she was up.
“I’ve got to get out there.” Mazie twisted around, frantically scrubbing at an orange splotch on the back of her thigh.
Magenta shook his head. “You’re blotchy, babe. You look like tomato soup dolloped with sour cream.”
“Please welcome our Miss Quail Hollow of 2000, Tabitha Tritt-Shimmel,” Bodelle warbled, obviously reading from a script. “A homemaker and proud of it, Tabitha volunteers at the public library, teaches Zumba classes, and runs her own ornamental plate business. Her favorite food is seven-layer salad and her platform is Saving the Environment.”
Magenta rooted around in his carryall and yanked out a pair of panty hose. “Quick, haul these on—they’ll disguise the blotches. I have to run out to make sure my car is locked. I left the Jovani in the backseat.”
“The what?”
“The gown, Mazie. The gown.”
Since no one was in the room, Mazie decided to change behind a clothes rack. Wrestling off her bikini bottom, she struggled into the panty hose. A fingernail snagged in the ultrafine fabric. Shit! The run instantly widened and ran down her entire leg. Maybe if she walked with her legs together it wouldn’t show. She tugged the bikini bottom back on, but now the panty hose fabric was clinging to her butt and to the bikini bottom, making her San Andreas Fault problem even worse.
Behind her, the door opened. “Magenta, could you give me a hand?” Mazie said. “I need something for butt cleavage.”
“How about both hands?” The voice wasn’t Magenta’s.
Mazie nearly got whiplash whirling around. Ben Labeck stood there, his eyes devouring her, giving her a rush so intense she had to grab a chair to steady herself. “I thought you weren’t coming back until late tonight,” Mazie choked out, aware that she was blushing all over her body and probably looked like a giant orange Christmas tree light.
“No way on earth was I going to miss seeing you in a bikini.”
“You’ve got to leave, Ben. This is a guy-free zone.”
He was using up all the air in the room. Mazie’s heart was thudding like the Energizer Bunny’s drum. Every corpuscle in her body went on High Alert.
Ben reached for her, then stopped. “What’s that smell?”
“Me.”
“You smell like laundry.”
“God, you’re romantic.”
Labeck looked fabulous. He must have stopped at a men’s store in Madison because he was wearing a light blue shirt, a cream-colored linen sports jacket, and dress slacks. He’d showered and shaved and slapped on cologne that was detectable even above the bleach smell. Comb marks were visible in his hair, but his hair was always a lost cause and would soon revert to its usual chaos. Ignoring the laundry-day smell, Ben moved closer, and Mazie could feel her lust molecules ionically binding with his.
Ben’s gaze lingered on her overexposed mammary glands. “You said you needed help. What would you like me to do?”
Their eyes locked. They formed mental images. Mazie bit her lip.
“It’s my bottom.”
“All my prayers are being answered,” Ben breathed.
“My swimsuit bottom. It’s clinging to my panty hose, which is sticking to my—you know.”
“Nope, I don’t know. You’ll have to show me.”
“…and now here’s Miss Quail Hollow 2001,” boomed Bodelle’s voice, “Miss Channing Blumquist, a familiar figure to our golden agers as she makes her rounds delivering Meals on Wheels. Her favorite food is spaghetti, her idea of a romantic date is a walk on the beach, and the quality she looks for most in a man is honesty. A former all-State champion in swimming and tennis, Channing now puts her talents to use teaching tennis at the YMCA and volunteering as a Tiny Tots swim instructor. Channing’s life goal is to wipe out childhood hunger.”
Not a single word about the Miss Quail Hollow Channing had replaced, not even five seconds of silent prayer for Fawn’s safe return.
“I’m up next,” Mazie said.
“I think I am too,” said Labeck, his voice hoarse, his body language clearly expressing the concept Right here, right now, right on the counter where the teachers store their coffee cups.
“Butt cling,” Mazie reminded him. “You should … you could check whether Magenta’s got something in his bag.”
Seconds later Ben was back, holding a small blue and yellow container.
“What’s that?”
“The world’s best lubricant.”
“It better not be K-Y Jelly.”
“Mazie, your dirty mind never fails to delight me. Now turn around.”
She folded her arms across her chest.
“Trust me, sweetheart,” Labeck said in the voice of a traveling Bible salesman.
She didn’t, not for a moment. But she turned around anyway.
“Now just bend over that chair.”
Holding her breath, Mazie bent.
“Now let’s just ease our bottoms down …”
“What are you—”
“You want to get rid of that nasty old cling, don’t you?”
She eased down her bikini bottom and panty hose. She’d never felt so humiliated in her life. Or so turned on.
“A-a-ll the way, sweetie.”
Something cold sprayed over her butt cheeks. She yelped in shock.
“What is that?”
“WD-40.”
“Are you kidding me? Do I look like a damn sliding door?”
“Honey, WD-40 works on everything. Hold still—I’m not sure I got everything.”
“Oh. My. God!” came a shocked voice from the doorway.
They both whipped their heads around and looked over their shoulders. Magenta stood there, a hand clapped over his eyes.
“This is not what it looks like,” Mazie said, her face so hot she half-expected to set off the fire alarm. Truth be told, she wished it were what it looked like.
“It’s okay,” Magenta said, waving his hand. “Whatever triggers your catapult. Consenting adults and all that.” He cracked up, hooting with laughter. “If you could see your faces.”
“Miss 2002,” Bodelle called out from the stage. “Miss Quail Hollow 2002?”
“That’s me!” Mazie cried. She had to get out there before Gretchen Wuntz came around and told her she was being disqualified for having a man in the dressing room. Fishing her shoes out from under a chair, she crammed on the left shoe and hopped one-footed toward the door, Magenta running alongside,
snipping at the overhanging top of the panty hose top with a nail scissors.
“Wait,” Labeck said, and pulled Mazie against him. He gently raised his hand to her face, moved away a wisp of hair, and tucked it behind her ear. Holding her chin, he kissed her—softly, tenderly. “For luck.”
The kiss carried Mazie, floating, all the way to the stage.
She blinked as she walked into the footlights. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she looked out over the auditorium. It looked as though the entire population of Quail Hollow, starved for entertainment and probably hoping to see one of the beauty queens fall flat on her face, had turned out tonight.
Bodelle began reading Mazie’s bio in a voice that displayed all the bubbly enthusiasm of an announcer reeling off the names of the contestants in a junior high school science fair. “And next we have Mazie Maguire. Her favorite food is pizza, she is a dog lover, and her platform is prison reform.”
Prison reform? Where had that come from? Mazie didn’t remember writing that when she’d dashed off some trivia in the “About Me” form the contestants had submitted to Bodelle. Bodelle must have sneaked that in herself, her reminder to the audience that Miss 2002 had also been Miss Orange Jumpsuit.
Mazie shrank back against the curtains, suddenly as insecure as she’d been at eighteen, wondering why she’d agreed to this whole degrading thing. She smelled like Hilex, and she had toenail polish that looked like paint samples, orange streaks on her thighs, and WD-40 on her backside. Her stomach was tumbling around like a clothes dryer fluff cycle, her nipples were shriveling up like raisins, and she’d suddenly forgotten how to breathe.
Then she spotted him, inching his way through the audience to a seat as close to the runway as he could manage. He’d rushed back from Madison, probably breaking the speed limit all along the way, just so he could be here for her; he’d actually worn a tie and jacket for her, and he’d solved her butt-cling problem. And that kiss! Everything else melted away. She was going to do this for him.
Tangled Thing Called Love: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 14
