Temple shrugged. It directed attention to her shoulder with the temporary tattoo: a tail-lashing crocodile.
“If you don’t know, lady, I don’t know. Somebody said I should. I’m blowing this gig. It’s been unreal.”
“Now wait a minute.” Savannah was squinting at Tem-ple, sans the glasses she obviously needed. “You look—” Temple cringed, expecting the dreaded word, “familiar.” The Ann Landers with the mike seized her arm. “This girl is not all brash insouciance. She’s got goose bumps.” So would anyone with those vanilla-ice-painted talons running crosswise on her forearm!
“You can see she’s trying to make a statement,” Savannah said. “Girls these days think they have to be so hard. You can be a lady and succeed.”
“Why?” Temple answered. “You obviously didn’t.”
“What d-d-do you mean?” Savannah was stuttering. “Succeed or be a lady?”
“Both. I’m outa here. I got a grunge band to run.”
“Really?” Elvis had finally exchanged his shades for a pair of half-glasses to read her entry blank. He regardedher over their rainbow titanium rims. “I think you’re all bluster and sass, young lady. I think you’re a fake.”
Coming from him … now Temple was considering stuttering.
“But a sublime fake, mate,” the Australian Simon was saying. “This girl has cheek. Love that bicep croc. And the underlying sentiment: ‘Green Machine.—
“You would,” Aunt Kit noted. “You’re nearly breaking your neck to see what those hip-huggers are embracing from behind.”
Temple, recognizing her advantage, shook her Cherlocks and her booty at one and the same time. “Dream on, old dude.”
At that moment, the middle-aged angel with the mike—she really did remind Temple of the good witch Glinda from The Wizard of Oz movie, all that chirpy upbeat optimism—thrust herself into Temple’s field of vision. Cameras were rolling from the sidelines.
“I’m Beth Marble, creator of this show. And I sense, dear girl, that despite your bold front, you’re really desperate to make the cast. Isn’t that true?”
Temple eyed the Simon-clone. “I think he’s the one into bold fronts.” Then she stared into the emcee’s impossibly sincere eyes, heard that impossibly syrupy voice, and managed to nod, gruffly. If one can nod gruffly, Xoe Chloe was the girl for the job.
The four judges’ vastly incompatible heads were nodding together as annotated pages passed back and forth.
Scratch “annotated.” Not a Xoe Chloe word. How about … pages scribbled with cool graffiti.
“Do you do anything entertaining?” Elvis looked up over his granny rims to ask.
“The lambada,” she said, “while clipping my toenails.”
“At least she confesses to clipping them,” Savannah ventured. “That’s a start. We could really fix her look, but—” They all frowned at Xoe Chloe. Temple sensed she was losing her audience, particularly Simon Pieman, whose real name was Dexter Manship, and who was sitting back with his arms crossed over his designer Tshirted chest, one bicep bearing a Crocodile Hunter tattoo. No sell, the body language screamed.
Temple thought she knew the type and what pulled his Hell’s Angel’s chain. She boogied around in a tight little circle, all the better to show off the back of her waist-high thong panties almost fully revealed by the plunging low-rise capris. Rise? Heck, they’d never heard the word.
Temple’d seen this classless getup on a teen mall salesgirl at Frederick’s of Hollywood last week, her attention drawn to the outfit by a pair of clucking old ladies. She had proudly and promptly appropriated it for bad girl Xoe.
Dexter was moved to chuckle. “I said she was cheeky. Let her in. We could use a juvenile delinquent.”
Aunt Kit was frowning at Xoe’s sheet, looking like someone about to cast a dissenting vote. Temple nailed her with a quick, pleading look the instant Kit looked up, her mouth already open and the no verdict on the tip of her tongue.
Temple watched long enough to see the surprised expression forming, then looked away, defiantly sullen. Actresses ran on empathy and prided themselves on seeing beneath the surface. Aunt Kit should be a shoo-in now, and Simon Pieman was all Xoe’s—muscles, tattoo, and libido. But the Elvis impersonator … what was he doing here, except maybe as a tribute to the Elvis-loving man who’d built the house and was now long gone. And maybe because Elvis, dead or alive, real or false, always drew a crowd.
Temple did a series of three quick-on-her-feet cramp rolls and assumed a West Side Story stance. “Hey, Officer Elvis, you ever do any break dancing during your film career?”
“Break dancing? I invented it in my `Jailhouse Rock’ routine.” He seemed surprised she had appealed to him as a dancer. No, shocked. His persona was mired in the seventies. His Vegas audiences were determinedly middlemiddle-middle. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road.
“I do the mosh pit thing,” she said. “You’d go over big today if you had one.”
He laughed at the idea of a bunch of moshing middlemiddle-middles, then glanced at the others. “I might be able to teach this one something, if she’ll listen.”
“Why, Mr. Presley, I would always listen to you … sing.”
“You talk tough, Xoe Chloe,” he answered sternly, “but you haven’t worked until you’ve worn your tail and toes off on a rockabilly dance floor. Are you game?”
“Sure. I got rhythm.”
“Thank you. Thank you verra much.”
On that surreal closing note, the judges conferred again, checked their watches, eyed the long line behind Temple, and the anxious face of the woman named Beth Marble who held the portable mike. And was possibly the real power here.
“In,” Dexter Manship declared for them all.
Temple got in a mock curtsy before she allowed herself to be hustled off to the sidelines by another gofer with clipboard. She was in. In! She’d made it, purely on her hidden punk power. Her Inner Bad Girl.
The gofer, one of the twenty-something girls in hot pink who ran errands, sat Xoe Chloe down with another sheaf of papers to sign.
Xoe could have cared less, but Temple read every last word, appalled at giving blanket permission to be recorded in every media known to man and woman but mostly audio-video, in all forms, now and in the future. In the universe.
She’d be ceding all rights to her own self … except that own self was purely fictitious at the moment. Luckily, the phony driver’s license Molina somehow got for her attested that “Sharon Carlson”—please! No wonder “Zoe Chloe” had been born—was nineteen and therefore free to sign away her own rights to privacy.
She finally signed the thing with an X for Xoe and dated it.
Miss Pretty in Pink came back and asked for a real name.
“It is a real name. Mine.”
“We need a normal name.”
“I’m as normal as you are:’ Temple said. Being a teenager again was more fun than the first time! You could act out and act up and everyone thought it was the norm.
“I need a real last name,” the hot pink chick repeated.
Temple rolled her eyes, sighed, grabbed the clipboard and wrote “Ozone” after the X.
“X Ozone? I don’t think so.”
“Have you ever heard of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince?”
“Maybe.”
“He used an alien scribble for years. In purple ink yet. I think it was algebra. Surely you’ve heard of algebra? Why can’t I be X Ozone? It’s better than X Chromosome.”
Miss Pink frowned. “Chromosome. I’ve heard of that name. Somewhere. Maybe it’s Greek.”
“See! I’m famous.”
“Is there an apostrophe between the 0 and the Z?” That gave Temple pause. “Yes, two,” she said. “Just chill.”
The woman put the equivalent of quote marks after the 0 and darted away on her pert pink patent-leather slides.
She was back in about two minutes after conferring with the angel lady with the mike.