Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Page A

be the one with the brightest smile, the most graceful walk, the most wholesome air. The sweetest, in other words. But that was also the tricky part: Sweetness alone wasn’t enough. You had to simultaneously pull off blushing-farm-girl-next-door and potential pinup. Really, whatever they said, you had to be both, once you got past the local Dairy Queen contests. And sometimes even then.
    I didn’t win as easily as I had as a preteen—as easily as I had preabduction, you might say. Gail made this connection and, through some twist of Gail-logic, managed to hold it against me. At the Midwestern Cornhusker Teen Queen pageant, I failed even to place, and I thought Gail might actually smack me afterward, she seemed so pissed off. I was slightly disappointed when she didn’t; I was always looking for things to use against her. A reporter approached her about doing a story on my struggles—“Teen Beauty Queen Haunted by Kidnapping,” something like that. Gail actually said no, turning down a chance at publicity for the first time ever. But there were still triumphs: When I was fifteen, I became Miss Nebraska Teen USA. And I learned Gail’s dirty secret. It was a turning point, that weekend, in more ways than one.
    Like the other pageant families, we were staying at a hotel in downtown Omaha. Just Gail and me. Daddy would come down for the competition, he had promised, although he made it clear that he would rather spend his weekend some other way—mending fences in the west pasture, maybe. I wouldn’t have minded if he hadn’t come; his presence made the pageants harder for me. When I saw him sitting in the audience, my mind split in two: half of me saw the competition the way I wanted to see it, as a perfectly valid way to win prizes, praise, attention, whatever. But the other half saw it though Daddy’s eyes, and then it was suddenly gross, a little sleazy, exploitative, degrading—nothing to be proud of. Then I’d remember his contempt for pageants—Zed’s—and his disapproval would get mixed up with Daddy’s, and their contempt would seem to become my own, and before I knew it the whole scene would seem cheap and disgusting to me, too. I’d feel ashamed and pissed off at myself for feeling ashamed. The contests were less complicated for me when he stayed away.
    But before Daddy showed up in Omaha, it was just me and Gail. We didn’t like each other any more than we ever had, but over the last couple of years we had figured out how to deal with each other. It helped that we wanted the same thing, though for different reasons; in fact I couldn’t quite understand why the hell Gail was so anxious for my success. Maybe if she’d had a daughter of her own, I would have been spared. She obsessed over the details: the dresses, the hair, the makeup, the smile, the attitude. She was an expert on mascara. It all comes down to the eyelashes, was one of her favorite theories. Like my teachers at school—and later Martin, of course—she saw attitude as my biggest problem. “Don’t smile like you’ve already won,” she would say. “And don’t smirk like you’re laughing at some private joke with yourself. You have to look sweet. You want to be an actress, right? Act.”
    This was my second year trying for Miss Nebraska Teen and the first year I’d really had any kind of chance, though at fifteen I was still a little on the young side. Also a little on the flat side. The maximum age was eighteen, and the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds had obvious advantages over most of the younger girls. Familiar as I was with Gail’s big, loose, freckly bosom, I was in no hurry to grow large fleshy appendages on my chest. But I worried that my failure in that department had become a drawback. You could do things with tape and strategically designed bodices, but you could only do so much.
    Anyway … Gail’s deep dark secret. I was returning late in the morning from a rehearsal for our opening song-and-dance number. We