Nobody thinks of Lee Petrova as a smart girl. A grade A beauty queen with a crown in eight states, no one has ever spoken to her long enough to know. But something brutal is coming into Lee's life. Something vicious, something lethal. And, come the hour, Lee's going to find out that she has talents beyond just smiling and singing. Lee's a survivor.

- what's your poison? -

Every convention centre in the world has the same carpet. And every Community Togetherness hall, and every sports complex lobby, and every paint-by-numbers hotel pretending it's a Hilton just because it's got floor-to-ceiling windows either side of the front door. Trust me. I've studied all of them.

You will totally know this carpet when I describe it to you. You've seen it a thousand times. This carpet is a red-wine colour, and it is patterned all over with slashes-through-circles and flecks of kindergarten yellow. See? Don't you know it? Sometimes it's red on blue or blue on green or yellow on blue. Don't let that fool you. It's the same, always the same, sickening, deliberately designed to make you dizzy. You can even make it move, if you stare at it hard enough.

Actually, can you even call that a pattern? If you can never find where it repeats, or any two patches that look identical… Like a game in a kid's comic, a dozen boxes all with tiny differences, a cruel trick that swears two are identical but every time you look again you've lost track of yourself, or they've changed. There has to be a pattern, though. Has to be. Think of all those millions of miles of it. Every inch couldn't be unique. Sometimes I dream it might be and I feel a little sick.

Then Francesca says, "Keep your head up." I stop looking at the carpet. The second I lift my head she hairsprays me again, shooting the toxic cloud right in my face. I've barely got time to close my eyes. I don't have time to close my mouth. Smog films over my teeth. Francesca says, "Everything slides forward when you mope like that."

Francesca married my dad. Sometimes she lies. Like, for instance, there is already a can and a half of that spray on my head. Every hair is copper wire. What I mean is, not one strand of it could even possibly be sliding anywhere.

Francesca says, "Honestly, precious, you can't let yourself get so… melancholy. It makes you look ill." Liar. I glow a healthy brown, though Francesca always thinks I could be browner. My skin is iridescent, like a bird's feather. There's a different spray for that. "Chin up, Miss Coppelia. Look at me. Let's see the smile that wins sashes."

I smile. It pulls my lips back from the chemical-sticky on my teeth. And it is a pretty smile, okay? Whether I want to smile or not doesn't come into it; it is really pretty. It is demure and graceful and grateful. It ought to be grateful; it has so many people to be grateful to.

The dentist, for instance? And the orthodontist? They make sure all the smiling equipment is in good working order and properly aligned. Francesca too; she reminds me morning and night what my contribution should be. There's the smile technician too, who has a little storefront in the city near us and makes sure everything is clean and painted pristine. When there are home treatments, and there always are, Francesca supervises to make sure I don't miss a spot. Then there's Miss Sidonie, my coach, who has drilled it into me that the smile has to connect to the rest of my face. It's useless if I don't light up. If your smile doesn't go to your eyes, what even is the point? Miss Yvonne, my stylist, is responsible for presenting the finished product in the proper frame.

Guess who arranges my sessions with Miss Sidonie and Miss Yvonne?

I smile and Francesca beams back like my reflection, "There you go!" My smile is grateful that she's happy. Things go way easier when she's happy. "Don't you feel better when you smile? That's a scientific fact, y'know. When you fake a smile, you start to feel happier. They've done research. So you just keep that on your face, y'hear?"

All of this, getting my hair petrified and coming out of my melancholy, have brought us to the hall. The huge double-doors are propped open, because the heat is already killer, but they don't seem to let any sound out. It's all muffled, a hundred voices talking at once, but none of them can get out of the hall, all trapped.

Then we step inside and, because we're trapped too, because we're inside the bubble, we hear everything. A kid screams, a mother yells, the two things could be connected or not, some little foot is getting stamped hard close by one of the stalls around the back wall. Those stalls, I think I hear them creak, they get so heavy with all the rhinestones and tantrums.

Francesca fires off the hairspray can again. This time she waits for my eyes to be closed. See, this time she is aiming for my face, to varnish on my makeup. Spray before you smudge, and this particular brand has a little shimmer in it too. When I turn in the spotlight, I will catch sparkling fire.

We're early. The last twelve-to-thirteen is still gliding through her step-step-turns.

The stage is wide, but not deep. Practically zero catwalk. I will be okay on poise and grace; movement and personality will be tougher. The curtain to the back is tacky black sateen. I'll have to hold in my net godets on my way up the side steps or they'll catch. No judge wants to see you take the backdrop on stage with you.

All of this, I see on the first heartbeat. On the second, Francesca sweeps down close and hisses it in my ear. She is using her special, secret voice, sharing her crazy-intelligent, wildly observant insight just with me and no other contestant.

Francesca says, "See that bald head on the panel?"

Like, twenty seconds ago. He liked me at Miss Candy Sweet, end of last year.

"He liked you at Candy and that was far from your best day, precious. And be careful of your feet-"

The Korean lady on the end used to be a ballerina. Or she wanted to be or she nearly was, I don't know the whole story but there's dancing in it. Anyway, she said I didn't point my toes, sometime, somewhere…

"That Oriental bitched about your feet in Indiana."

In Indiana, one of the Indianas.

Looking at the rest of the panel, Francesca says, "Other two must be locals. Be a pushover." Then all of a sudden she snatches down hard on my mother-of-pearl shoulders, her hands shaking so hard with so much excitement that I shake right along with them, "You've got this, sweetheart, one-hundred-and-ten, you've got this!"

For the record? For anybody that wants to know? My head is still up, okay? I've still got my smile on.

The emcee calls for line up, fourteen-to-fifteen. Francesca leaves me to elbow her way to a seat at the front and I finally get to step out of the last cloud of shimmer and suffocating and all-day hold. It's a little easier to breathe as I join the other girls starting to drift over by the stage-left wall. Just a little, though; this gown is last summer's aqua taffeta. I've grown since the last time I was laced into it. We knew that, me and Francesca, yesterday when she was packing. But the beading on my pink got damaged at the cleaners, my green has to be kept good for winter, she regrets ever buying the white and the sweat-weather just does not permit my violet silk. So I breathe in shallow, drawing more air to my stomach than my lungs. The air's no good anyway. It's stale with the crushing ballroom heat, chalky with powder, tangy with struggling antiperspirant. I don't know if anybody else can taste these things when they breathe, but I can.

My lashes shift on their glue, so I try not to blink.

With my back to the wall I can watch the competition as they gather. Actually, I shouldn't even call the fourteen-year-olds competition. They are gangly or starved or still rich all over with puppy fat. No threat. Girls my age tend to be better built. There's one, I don't know who she is, but she is what Francesca would call a perfect Cornflake Girl. You know what I mean; blonde hair, blue eyes, wide open features. If she's got any lingering fat, it's all on her chest. But her dress ruins her. It's too short for her figure, makes her Bo-Peepish, fancy dress. Kind of inappropriate, actually. It could be a worry with a bald judge, maybe.

Then someone else appears and I forget Cornflake forever because my life just got so much harder.

Hannah-Beth is here.

In the same heels, Hannah-Beth is six inches taller than me. Lithe, half-Hawaiian – the good half, her nose is totally Anglo-Saxon – Hannah-Beth's mom once told Francesca that she does two-dozen crunches four times a day. Hannah-Beth has abs. Francesca says someday she'll be wearing a white bikini in a beach hammock advertising for Malibu. I've come up against Hannah-Beth seven times. Seven times, we have been the very last two girls standing, holding out for the two highest titles.

That's not why I'm worried, though. Five out of the seven, I beat her. I beat her hard, actually, beat her by ten points or more.

But Francesca won't think of that. The second Francesca sets eyes on Hannah-Beth, my life is over. She'll be consulting the scorecards from those two pageants to see where I stumbled. She keeps photographs of all my scorecards on her phone just for days like this. She'll be retraining me before the next round, showing me videos of myself, of Hannah-Beth, of other girls who have beaten one or both of us. If I wore shell pink lips last time, the colouring of my skin and dress won't matter one bit – they won't be shell pink today. Short version; Francesca will go into overdrive. She'll wind up, her face getting redder, her voice climbing and climbing the scales, blood pressure ticking higher by the second until the final crown flattens the final curl and that curl had better be mine or I won't be able to live with her.

It's too hot; I just don't know if I've got the energy to keep up with that.

Like she doesn't even know what she's doing to me, just being here, Hannah-Beth floats right up and stands at my side smiling. "Hey," she says, "Hey, guess what? You're the only redhead again."

I glance around. Honey-blonde and Cornflake-blonde, chestnut and Spanish and too-dull browns, Asian raven. I'm the only redhead. My smile, yes, maybe, gets a little wider. But it lasts all of a second, because it only takes a second to realize that Hannah-Beth must be feeling super-confident today. Why else would she tell me that? When to be unique in any way is always such an advantage, why would she say that to me at all?

I don't want Hannah-Beth to feel confident. I don't want her to do a thing but shut up. If she had any idea how hellish she makes my life just standing there with her abs shifting under her gown, she wouldn't open her mouth to me ever.

The emcee starts calling names so we can get in order. Somebody's mom moves down the line, pinning our numbered ribbons to hips and straps and asymmetric shoulder ruffles. Number seventeen is, crime of crimes, missing. Someone sprints away to drag her out of her hotel room, but it's too late; the emcee is reminding the judges to knock off points for the hold-up.

While we're waiting, Hannah-Beth steps out of her spot in the order, right at the back, and comes rushing back to me. "What'd you get?" I lift up my ribbon. She reads my number before I can. I'm twenty-six, apparently. Hannah-Beth is thirty-two. "It's a really big division," she whines. "I hate how I'm always last."

Then she shouldn't be so tall, or have her birthday so late in the year, or have a stupid surname that starts with W. Whatever way they organize the line, Hannah-Beth's always going to be at the back. If you ask me, she needs to get over it; it's not like it's going to change. But you didn't ask me, and it wouldn't even occur to Hannah-Beth. To think, she would have to stop talking and she's not doing that, not for a second. Here I am not knowing why she's talking at all, and yet she keeps talking. She's got a new routine for Talent and can't remember half of it and new espadrilles for Swimwear with straw heels and she doesn't like them and there's a girl in the division beneath us who's been wearing the same mint green dress to every event for months, which bothers Hannah-Beth personally, somehow. I don't understand, but I don't have to; she just talks. She talks and talks until Number Seventeen is hauled down the line by her diamante wrist.

I don't look at Seventeen. She might as well go home. She's out. Her mom catches my eye, though; brows together, mouth scrunched up, glaring, so thoroughly and utterly disappointed she doesn't even have words for it. Seventeen withers. Mom finally manages to mutter something and Seventeen nods like she's accepting a jail sentence.

I look again, however, when that contestant (can hardly call her a 'competitor' anymore) is on stage. And you see, like you always do, Mom in the centre aisle, with her fingers jammed up in her cheeks. Pageant sign language; smile, baby! It's got to go to your eyes, don't forget! Smile!

If there is anyone out there who didn't spit at the very mention of 'Garmonbozia', I've abandoned you all for so long, and you've come this far, just know you mean the world to me. Everybody who ever read a fic of mine, every hit, for love or for hate, got me to this.

If you want more hit up the author site at

[jude][Nicholas] dotcom(brackets out, dot in, obviously)

There's a five chapter sample there. And for those of you already enamoured, the amazon links are there too. (I know! The cheek of me!)

Hoping to hear from old friends again! See y'all on insta, lol

Both my burning hearts,

Garmie B/Jude