Free Prettiest Doll by Gina Willner-Pardo Page B

there, if she didn’t find the note first. My throat closed up, thinking how she would whisper “Oh, sweet Jesus” as she read it.
    The bus rumbled away from the station and out onto Mound. On the ramp up to the interstate, it started to gain speed. I watched as the leafless trees became a gray blur, slipping away. I remembered that people in cars we passed might be looking up at me, so I blinked the terror out of my eyes and made sure no one could see what was in my head.

eight
    THE land on either side of the interstate was part patchy grass and part weeds the color of straw. We thundered past landmarks I recognized: Kum & Go Gas, the Elms Shopping Center, the cracked Café sign for a restaurant that had closed down before I was born. I’d seen them all before, on drives with Mama to pageants in Joplin and Springfield, on the fourth grade field trip to the air and space museum in Tulsa. Today they looked unfamiliar. I wondered if places always look strange when you’re leaving them behind.
    The smell of cow manure. Billboards for Adult Superstores, Fred’s Radiator, Branson Radio 1550 AM, University of Missouri Southwest Center. Flying past, I really paid attention, memorizing everything, making sure I wouldn’t forget.
    The distance was thick with trees. Some stayed green all year, some had turned, and some were already bare. Even in the rainy murk, the yellow and red leaves were like flames, like danger, in all the green. Soon they would burn out, leaving the gray, twiggy skeletons of tulip poplars and Autumn Blaze maples and crape myrtles, my favorite. And then there would be snow.
    â€œHey,” Danny said, “you’re fogging up the window.”
    I sat up and rubbed at the glass with the arm of my hoodie. Now I could see more clearly the passing highway signs: to Racine and Neosho and Fort Smith, Arkansas; to Diamond and Duenweg; to Carthage and Kansas City.
    â€œI went to Kansas City once,” I said. “Little Miss Adorable Missouri was in Kansas City.”
    â€œAre you kidding? That’s what it was
called?
”
    I thought about saying what I always do: that it’s just a name, it’s all about inner beauty, you’re not even allowed to wear flippers, which are the fake teeth some pageants make you wear if your adult ones haven’t come in yet.
    But I didn’t. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
    â€œI can’t believe you do those things,” Danny said.
    â€œIt was at the Marriott, I think. There was an indoor swimming pool and a whirlpool, and I wanted to sit in it, but Mama said we didn’t have time. The pageant was in one of the rooms off the lobby, and the people at the front desk stared at all of us in our gowns. I think I wore the blue tulle with the violet sash.”
    â€œHow old were you?”
    â€œSeven. This one girl at the desk, she was probably twenty or twenty-one. She couldn’t stop staring. She came around the desk and leaned down toward me, her hands on her knees, all smiley. ‘She’s so
cute!’
she said, still staring.
She.
Looking right
at
me. Like I couldn’t hear her. Like I was somebody’s beagle.
    â€œShe stood up and said it again to Mama. ‘She’s so
cute
!’ Then she said, ‘Have you thought about having her ears done?’ And Mama said, ‘Oh, they been pierced since she was three.’ And the girl says, ‘No,
done.
Like, pinned back. It’s an operation. So they don’t stick out so much.’ ”
    Danny sat forward and looked at me. “They don’t stick out. Your ears look fine.”
    â€œThat’s what I think.” Out of habit, I ran my fingers through my hair, making sure that it puffed in just the right way around both sides of my head. “Mama, she just said something polite, like ‘Maybe when she’s older.’ But really, she would have done it if she could. If we’d had the