Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell

allowed them to believe that I was on my way to being fixed. At least that’s what I assume they thought: naturally we did not discuss it, or not in those terms. They asked me guarded questions about my sessions, my sense of my progress. Usually I told them what they seemed to want to hear. Sometimes I wished I could be more like Carly, who would, I imagined, have been unafraid to tell the truth, to lash out, to make demands.
    I always wished I could be more like Carly May.
    Chloe
    I didn’t have to do as much work on the farm when I got back. I saw that I probably had a pretty brief window where I could bargain, and I totally milked it. I’d go out in the truck with Daddy sometimes to round up cattle or whatever, but my daily chores were lifted, passed on to my little half brothers. I spent a lot of my time in my room. Sometimes I practiced ballet; I was seriously out of shape after a summer with no lessons, and my legs needed to be retrained to turn out properly. Daddy had mounted a barre along one side of my room and a big mirror along the other, and I did endless pli é s until I was strong again. Sometimes I actually did my homework. Otherwise I read trashy novels or scrawled stupid stuff in my diary, mostly about what I planned to do when I finally got the hell out. The diary felt like a Lois thing, although as far as I knew she didn’t even keep one. She was the word girl, though. Scrawling my ugly thoughts on blank pages felt like a way of tapping into Lois’s way of thinking and being.
    And, as always, there were the pageants, an endless circuit of freak shows. Half the time, I was on the road with Gail. Now I wasn’t just Carly May Smith from Arrow; I was Carly May Smith the abducted girl, the miraculously rescued girl. I was a freaking sensation. Reporters always wanted comments from me. The judges knew who I was. The other parents steered clear of me; the other girls seemed shy.
    I could have quit, obviously. I had told Zed I would quit; he had hated my pageants. I think I really meant to at first, but then somehow it felt more rebellious to keep it up. Who was he to tell me how to spend my life, anyway? A criminal. A loser. A dead man. Someone who couldn’t help me now, that was for goddamned sure. It made sense that the world would treat me differently now, since I sure as hell felt different. The truth was, too, that at least the pageants got me out of Arrow. And for that alone they were worth it—worth the trouble, worth spending hours with Gail. Worth the guilt of breaking my word to Zed, especially since the guilt faded a little more every day.
    Gail was always a little pissed off. I had changed, she said, like it was a crime. You used to look sweeter. That was true, no doubt about it; I also used to be sweeter, but of course Gail couldn’t care less about that. She was right, though; the appearance of a certain kind of sweetness mattered, at least to the judges. On stages across the Midwest I would stand in a line with the other girls, shoulder to shoulder. Most of us were pretty much the same height, although at the hick local pageants you always got a few shorter girls—bigger girls, too. Usually, though, I’d be sandwiched between two girls whose shoulders were level with mine, whose arms and legs I might almost mistake for my own if they somehow got mixed up. In a police lineup, I don’t think anyone but our mothers (or coaches, as in my case—I was always careful to make it clear that Gail was not my mother) could have told us apart. We stood angled to the right, left knees crooked gently in front of right knees. This was supposed to be slimming. It also made us look like one of those strips of accordioned paper dolls I remembered from when I was little. Connected at the elbows, each one exactly like the next.
    When it was your turn to step out of line, you were suddenly supposed to be an individual, not to blend into a lineup but to demonstrate how different you were. Suddenly you had to