She turned around toward the backseat of his car and saw a large section of rope, zip ties, and some silver duct tape. A shiny revolver, probably just a.22, showed from his jacket pocket.
“You didn’t need that gun.”
“Would you have come anyway?”
“I would’ve hopped in the car with the devil himself,” she said. “To get free of that place. Is that who you are? Mr. Satan himself come up to Alabama to find Miss Cassie Lyn, former pageant baby all growed up?”
The man didn’t answer, a long strange silence between them as they passed Cherry Road, and headed onto I-65 South that ran from Birmingham down to Mobile. His face flickering in and out of darkness from the tall lights along the guardrail.
“I wanted to hear you sing,” he said. “It’s sad you don’t sing anymore, Cassie Lyn. It makes me so very sad.”
“What do you want me to sing?”
“Come on,” he said. “You know. Everybody on this planet knows your song.”
“‘Lady Marmalade,’” she said. “Shaking my little tail in that French maid outfit? Like when I was a kid, on the show.”
“Exactly like the show. I even brought you that very same outfit. I bought it on eBay for a hundred dollars.”
“That all you want from me?” she said. “For me to shake my tail? Or are you wanting a whole lot more?”
“I don’t know. I guess I want everything.”
Cassie Lyn could never remember a time she wasn’t famous. Big Nadine said she’d been born wanting to perform, strutting right out of the womb and giving a big dazzling smile to the doctor. Ta-da, I’m here, covered in placenta and blood. When she was an infant, her mother sewed custom outfits for her, satin and rhinestones, denim and sequins, little cowboy hats, berets, and big straw sun hats. She learned to dance at ten months, got her ears pierced before she was one. Cassie Lyn not recalling what life was like without blush and lipstick. Big Nadine saying that God had given her a gift, a pinkish light shining across the sky the night she was born, never mentioning her no-count daddy who she’d only met twice. Their life nothing but pageants, from Baby Miss to Petite Miss all the way up to Little Miss. The plan — to hear Big Nadine tell it as they crisscrossed Alabama from one high school gym, church rec center, or livestock arena to the next — was work your way up to the big show. Miss Alabama. Miss America. Or Miss USA if that didn’t work out. On the cable show, Cassie Lyn got famous for saying she was all about the money. Money, honey. Where my money at, Big Daddy? Twitching that little behind and shaking her index finger.
Those were the good times, the high times, when she and Big Nadine split their time between Gu-Win and their condo in Orlando, Florida, shooting their reality show. Her new stepdaddy with the boat in Tampa. The money had been good, real good, almost enough to make her forget what it had been like when her momma didn’t have a car that would run or having to sleep in some crummy old trailer. They went to Universal Studios and Disney World for free. Pictures with Minnie and Goofy. A princess makeover at Cinderella’s castle.
Momma said she was proud. So very proud.
Folks comped them rooms at hotels in Las Vegas and over in Branson, Missouri, her big blue-eyed face with big red lips on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and her own line of gentle hand soaps. Momma said the design had been inspired by something called the Shroud of Turin.
But then there was that breakdown at Legoland, caught on a thousand different iPhones for the whole world to see. Cassie Lyn taking her little fists to that sculpture made in her image, the damn thing fat and blocky and seeming to mock her — index finger raised. Big Nadine said that’s what killed them. And that woman never forgot, telling Cassie Lyn that was the reason things turned out the way they did, how their whole damn life crumbled and turned to Shit City, making them both broke and unimportant and worse yet, a sideshow treasure back in Gu-Win. Snickers behind their back at the Piggly Wiggly. Folks wanting to lay hands on them at the Shell station, praying for their future. More little kids — cuter and brighter, shaking their asses even harder at Big Nadine’s classes at the Baptist church and finally that metal prison where they kept all those cameras. Cassie Lyn TV.
Watching “Sweet, Sweet Baby” twenty-four hours a day on the Internet... Rick, the agent’s idea. It had something, a revenue stream is what Rick called it. Kept them fed and clothed. But Cassie Lyn knew that wasn’t even a proper way to keep a dog.
She worked that goddamn trailer day and night, nothing to do but eat ice cream, stare at those six eyes watching her everywhere but the toilet, while she watched real TV or exercised in her underwear. All you had to do was sit there and take requests from subscribers. A man once offered her a thousand dollars to eat a banana real slow. Most wanted her to get nekkid but that wasn’t part of the deal. Her mother called Cassie Lyn TV wholesome online entertainment. The video trailer was just another step in reality entertainment is what Rick said. This would be just a stepping stone back to the cable network.
But when that man, BIGDADDY88, offered her a way to escape, she didn’t give it a second thought. How the hell could it be worse?
“What are you thinking about?” the man asked.
“That trailer,” she said. “Cassie Lyn TV. Big Nadine never did tell me how much money we made.”
“It was a subscription service,” he said, heading toward the bright lights of Birmingham. Cassie Lyn hoping she was getting kidnapped back to Florida. Florida sure would be something. Palm trees, sand, warm breezes across her bare legs. “It cost nineteen dollars for the first month and then thirty-five after that. If you paid up front for a year, it was an even two hundred. That was really the best deal.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Well, that didn’t include the tokens,” he said. “You probably made most of your money on token sales.”
“I know all about the tokens. They make a jingle sound every time they slip into the virtual piggy bank.”
The van smelled like hamburgers, burned meat, and onions. There were fast-food wrappers and empty cups down at Cassie Lyn’s feet. The man fumbled with the radio, finding a local Christian contemporary station playing that song “Only Jesus” by the Casting Crowns. Big Nadine sure loved their music, saying she’d first heard them on Mike Huckabee’s radio show, being real impressed they’d been one of the only American bands to perform in North Korea.
“You can make real good money on the Internet,” Cassie Lyn said. “I just wish I knew how much. Big Nadine told me that I didn’t need to mess with all that business.”
“What your mother did to you wasn’t right.”
“Momma says she did her best.”
“She used you,” he said. “You should be a star on the Disney Channel right now like that Selena Gomez or Demi Lovato. That tall pasty girl from Bunk’d, Peyton List? You’re a hundred times prettier than that skinny Peyton List.”
“That was the plan.”
“What happened?” the man asked. “How could Big Nadine screw it up so bad?”
“Guess you didn’t see what happened at Legoland?”
The man snorted, the engine revving them up past seventy miles per hour, passing signs advertising VISIT MOBILE, “America’s First Mardi Gras” and billboards proclaiming HELL IS REAL, the front of the van all black and slick, reflecting light along the darkened interstate. “That’s not what did it,” he said. “What happened is your stupid mother devalued the Cassie Lyn brand. She took it too far, too fast. It didn’t bother me when they first started selling your dolls on QVC, but when y’all did the skin-care line, shampoo, and costume jewelry, it made me sick. Even before the spinoff show and the meltdown, you’d already become overexposed.”