Prettiest Doll

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

About the Author

Clarion Books
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003

Copyright © 2012 by Gina Willner-Pardo

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

www.hmhbooks.com

The text was set in 13-point Norlik.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Willner-Pardo, Gina.
Prettiest doll / by Gina Willner-Pardo.
p. cm.
Summary: A beauty contestant since she was three, Olivia, now thirteen, has begun feeling limited by her beauty, but a shared journey with Danny, a boy struggling with his own appearance, shows her she has choices and resources beyond her appearance. ISBN 978-0-547-68170-2 (hardcover) [1. Beauty contests—Fiction. 2. Beauty, Personal—Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Self-perception—Fiction. 5. Runaways—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.W6856Pre 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011042315
Manufactured in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
45xxxxxxxx

For Evan and Cara. And for Robert,
who took me to Missouri.

IT'S good to be pretty. I'm really lucky.

I have blond hair that's usually straight, but I can make it wavy with a curling iron or hot rollers. Not everyone's hair holds a curl, but mine does. And I have brown eyes and straight white teeth and a smile that's not too much gum. My mom says that if I'd needed braces, she'd have found a way, but thank the good Lord I never did. She says it would be better if my eyes were blue, though.

So I'm lucky. But sometimes, when I should be feeling lucky, I don't. Sometimes, if I really pay attention, it's like there are other feelings inside me, buried down deep, close but far away. It scares me a little, but then I remember about my hair.

I did my first pageant when I was three. Mama thought doing pageants would give me poise. The one we started with was Missouri's Sweetest Angel, and I came in fourth in the Pee Wee division. Amber Dickerson pinched me backstage to make me cry and even though I stopped before I had to go out, you could see that my mascara was smeared. Amber came in second. I would have won if she hadn't made me cry. Mama always says, “That Amber Dickerson is a piece of work.” Then I forget who I'm talking to and say, “She's a bitch,” and Mama says, “Olivia Jane, that's not how you been raised.”

I keep my mouth shut then, but it doesn't change my mind. I'm thirteen now, so I've known Amber for ten years, and she's been a bitch all along. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Imogene Boggs, who is my best friend and who is into horses, not pageants, always says that if there was an award like Miss Congeniality, only for being mean, Amber would win it.

I don't know what I would do without Imogene. We are nothing alike on the outside. She is tall and has thin brown hair that she wears in a sloppy ponytail. I feel sorry for her about her hair, but she doesn't care. The main thing she cares about is her horse, Honey. She goes out to the stables every day after school. Sometimes I go with her, but I have to be careful about the mud on account of Mama not liking me to track it into the house. Imogene wears riding boots and says she doesn't even notice the mud. It's amazing how different two people who are best friends can be.

“You should take riding lessons instead,” she said when I told her how much I dreaded singing at Prettiest Doll, the next big pageant I was practicing for.

We were in Honey's stall, watching as Honey took a big, slurping drink of water from her trough. The day was warm, the way it is once in a while before Thanksgiving and frost. The trees around the barn were bare, but the air still smelled a little like wet leaves mixed with hay and horse and the sun about to start going down.

“Can't. It's too much money,” I said.

“I could teach you. For free. So we could hang out.”

Imogene is like that. I love her so much.

I thought about what it would be like to be at the stables every day, tending to Honey, riding the trails, laughing with Imogene.

“I've got to have a talent for pageants,” I said. “You can't ride a horse for your talent. You have to sing or dance or play piano or twirl a baton. You can't bring a horse in there.”

“It'd be funny, though, wouldn't it? Leading a horse out on that stage? All the moms going crazy?” Imogene grabbed the rubber curry and began to loosen the dirt on Honey's neck.

I let myself smile a little, imagining. But just a little, because thinking about it too much made me think even more about the singing and how much I hated it, how I was boxed in.

“I don't see why it has to be singing,” I said. “It's the one thing I'm terrible at.”

“Tell your mama,” Imogene said. “She'll let you do something else.”

“You know how she is.”

“She wants you to win, doesn't she?”

I watched Imogene brushing Honey's neck, pushing the curry in perfect-size circles, knowing just how to do it right.

“I don't see what we have to have a talent for, anyway,” I said. “Everyone knows it's mainly about how you look.”

Imogene nodded, still focusing on what she was doing.

“Well, you got that part sewed up tight,” she said. “You're always the prettiest one.”

She said it as though she really thought so and wasn't jealous at all, not like Jenna and Marlena, our other friends at school, who have a way of paying you a compliment that sounds like they really wished you'd get hit by a bus.

Honey flicked her tail at a fly. She stomped her rear hoof, and a little cloud of dust rose around her.

“It's okay, girl,” Imogene whispered, rubbing her side. “Shhh.”

“You know just how to calm her down,” I said after a minute. “You're a horse whisperer.”

Imogene leaned her cheek forward and rested it against Honey's neck, not even minding the dirt.

“It's a feeling,” she said. “It's like you're talking without words. Like words would get in the way, almost.”

Sometimes Imogene gets all dramatic about horses.

There was silence in the barn. All I could hear was a jay cawing. I watched Imogene leaning against Honey. Maybe they were talking in some wordless way. I don't know. To me it looked like nothing was happening. It made me think that riding horses would be something I wouldn't be very good at.

Imogene went back to brushing. Honey snorted. The sun had lowered itself again and was shining through the open side of the stall, directly at me, making me sweat, which I hated. I slid myself over a little along the rail until I was back in the shade.

“What are you going to wear?” Imogene asked.

“A dress I already have for Talent. Green satin, with a pouffy skirt. And for Beauty, a new one. With a burgundy top.”

“Burgundy's red, right?” Imogene asked. When I nodded yes, she said, “Burgundy goes good with brown eyes.”

Judges really like the girls with blue eyes. Amber Dickerson's have little yellow flecks in them.

“You have pretty eyes, Liv,” Imogene said.

“I wish I was taller,” I said, to get myself to stop thinking about Amber. “I wish I was tall and slim like you.”

Imogene doesn't have to think at all about what she eats. She could probably be in pageants if she wanted to.

She shrugged, running the brush down Honey's side.

“You're tall enough,” she said. “You're perfect. No wonder you always win.” She paused for a moment. “But you'd be good at riding, too, if you gave it a chance. You know that, right?”

It was like she was a friend whisperer, too.

“I wish you could do something just for the fun of it once in a while,” she said.

“Well, I can't,” I said. It came out harsher than I meant it. “So how am I going to get out of singing in front of all those people?”

“Well, you like dancing, right? Tell her if she lets you do dancing instead of singing, you'll practice harder.”

“She says all the judges are tired of seeing me dance. She says I have to wow them with something new.”

I've been dancing since I was three. Miss Denise, who is my pageant coach when she's not being a hairdresser, says I have to hold my head up and remember about pointing my toes.

“And baton twirling is out,” I said, thinking of all the times I'd dropped the baton Mama got me for Christmas one year. “I hate that dang baton.”

“What else is there besides singing and dancing and baton twirling?”

“Nothing. That's it.”

“What about painting a picture? Or writing a poem?”

“It has to be talent you can do on a stage,” I said.

Besides, I'm not good at writing or art. I'm not good at anything except being pretty. Mama says being pretty is the best thing to be good at because that's what people really care about. “Being pretty is what opens doors,” she says.

I'm really lucky.

 

We live in Luthers Bridge, which doesn't have an apostrophe because the government says apostrophes are confusing in place names and only makes a few exceptions, like Martha's Vineyard. We learned this in third grade.

Luthers Bridge is famous for apple butter and having more churches than any other town in southwest Missouri. Ours is New Faith Gospel. There used to be an actual Luther's Bridge, but it got torn down in the fifties to make room for the high school. I don't know who Luther was.

Luthers Bridge is in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Most of the people who live here have lived here all their lives. The people who want to go get the hell out fast. Mama says there were fifty-eight kids in her class at Horace Widener High School and thirty-six of them left the summer after graduation. Most of them didn't go far: Kansas City or St. Louis or Columbia, where the university is, which everyone calls Mizzou. But they didn't come back, except to visit. That left twenty-two kids, including Mama and Daddy. They got engaged under the Fourth of July fireworks that year. They didn't even think about leaving because Daddy had a job at the Dollar General. That was before he started driving semis for Smaker Brothers Trucking, leaving Mama alone all the time to take care of me. She always says they were heading for divorce and probably would have gotten one if Daddy hadn't been in that awful wreck and died.

He died in Georgia, on Interstate 475, right by the side of the road, before the ambulance could even get there. And about the second he died, his brother, Fred, up and left Luthers Bridge to go live in Chicago.

So that was the two men I loved just gone, all of a sudden.

Even if they were going to get divorced, Mama still feels bad about Daddy. I know she does. She doesn't talk about him much, but she has four pictures of him in the dining room, over the china cabinet. She says those pictures are for me, so I don't forget. Once I asked if I could hang them up in my room and she said there were already holes in the dining room wall, so no.

Sometimes I practice for pageants in the dining room. There's space to work on my walk and my twirls. Sometimes I pretend it's Mama and Daddy both watching me. I try to smile extra big, the way I think I would always smile if I had a father who came to pageants. It's funny how many fathers don't. It's mostly moms who come.

It was almost five when I got home from Imogene's. I took off my Vans and left them on the front steps so I wouldn't get mud in the house. Mud really sets Mama's teeth on edge.

“Where you been?” she called from the kitchen as I closed the front door.

“Imogene's. I told you.”

“No, you did not.”

“I
did.”

“Well, then how come I thought we were going to practice? How come I took off an hour early? Which I
know
I told you about.”

Mama works weekdays at Creech's Bakery, baking cakes for Jim and Carol-Ann Creech, who were two years ahead of her in high school. Jim is pretty nice to work for, but Carol-Ann doesn't like Mama taking off extra time.

“Don't even
think
about telling me you didn't know,” Mama was saying.

In her spare time, when she's not working with me on pageant stuff, Mama does taxidermy, which means she stuffs dead animals and makes them look alive again. It was Grandpa's business, and Mama grew up just knowing how to do it. When Grandpa died, Mama took it over. She does it at Grandma's, fortunately, so we don't have dead animals lying around. There are billboards all over southwestern Missouri saying
TAXIDERMY BY ROY
, with Grandpa's phone number on them. Thank the good Lord it's not our phone number, or the kids at school might figure it out. I've never told anyone except Imogene. Something about Mama stuffing dead caribou makes me feel ashamed. Mama says she doesn't mind, though. She says you get used to it, and also that it's fun, making dead things look pretty again.