“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You haven’t buckled down to the program,” Honey said. “I hear the coaching team will be reading you the riot act.”
“Shape up or flunk,” Ashlee added.
This was not good. If Temple was totally out of the running, she’d be of less use to Mariah, and her mother. “Outa my way, Blondies.” Temple ploughed through the permanent wave of sugar and spice and everything not nice.
Under the current regime, the house’s den had the feeling of a headmaster’s office. Temple paused at the closed double doors, then opened one and strolled in.
The whole Teen Queen team sat around the big oval wooden table. Only one chair was free, at one end of the oval.
Temple slid onto the huge leather chair, feeling like Little Orphan Annie called onto the carpet in Daddy Warbucks’s office.
Four judges and the five consultants glanced up, away, and shuffled folders. Not promising. Their spandex-shiny hot pink folder covers looked ludicrous lying on the dignified walnut conference table. Arthur Dickson might have been a tad eccentric, but he would be spinning in his presumed grave to see this crew taking over.
“Normally,” Beth Marble announced, “at this point in the competition we’re starting to see real improvement in the candidates.”
“I am too.” Temple nodded sagely. “I met a bunch in the hall coming here. Their high-pitched giggle quotient is way lower and I think they’re all developing larger calf muscles. Must be from the spike-heel footraces.”
“You always have a sassy answer.” Beth shook her head, putting her halo of curls in motion. “That hides nothing but your own anxiety.”
“Hide my anxiety? Not my idea. Anxiety is the watchword of our modern age. I’m visibly neurotic and proud of it.”
“I don’t think so.” Ken Adair, the Hair Guy, rose and walked toward Temple. “Everybody wants to be confident and secure, and you too are going to get that way if we have to browbeat you into it.”
Temple rolled her eyes, trying to think up a suitably Xoe Chloe comeback. “Anybody recording this? Sounds like lab-rat abuse to me.”
Adair reached her chair, spun it to face him, and scalped her.
“Yeow-ouch!” She gazed up at a foot of limp coal-black monofiber filaments dangling from the hairdresser’s viselike grasp.
“You are a fake, Xoe Chloe.” Beth Marble came to stand behind him.
“A freaking fraud,” Dexter Manship added to the chorus, while still balancing on his tailbone in his matching leather chair.
“A spirited but self-deluded girl,” her own Aunt Kit threw in, trying to put a positive spin on this shocking revelation.
“A … a has-been,” Savannah added after a long and visible search for words that hadn’t been used yet. Apparently, she could only come up with phrases that applied to herself.
“So I wear a wig.” Temple/Xoe sat up boarding school straight. “So does Cher. And Dolly. And a lot of performers. You going to tell me that’s not true?”
“Why a black wig?” her aunt asked, playing the defense attorney role.
“Sim-ple. I’ve got red hair.”
“So?”
“So who wants that? It’s unlucky. And mine’s curly too. Who wants to be Shirley Temple in a world where the Good Ship Lollipop is dropping anchor a day away from Guantanamo Bay?”
“No politics!” Beth commanded. “We are an issue-neutral show.”
“Yeah, right. So anyway, curly red hair’s a drag. It belongs in a comic strip. Like I’d want to be mistaken for that loser comedian, Carrot Top? Black is the new red.”
“My dear child:’ Beth said, “wigs are not allowed. We’re going for natural beauty here.”
Temple snorted. “Tell that to the Golden Girls. When they sit in the bleachers, it’s at their hairdresser’s. Right, Mr. Adair?”
“Nothing wrong with subtle colorations, Miss Xoe. Subtle,” he repeated in a voice like a drill bit.
“Subtle sucks:’ Temple said airily. “It’s the refuge of uncertain minds.”
“Well, we’re certain about one thing.” Manship had risen and was staring her down. “That rats’ nest of fake hair has got to go. What’s under there can’t be any more pathetic. Color and restyle, Adair. Right now.”
Temple would have opened her mouth to protest, except Adair had her by the shoulders. He was dredging her out of the chair and marching her down the hall before she could say “Gamier Fructose.” In one minute flat, she was shoved into a room where the reek of hairspray was sickly sweet enough to choke a skunk.
This was a part of undercover work Molina had never prepared her for: beauty boot camp.
For the next ninety minutes, Temple was buckled into a rotating chair where she was washed, styled, spun, dried, spindled, and mutilated.
She felt like a duck in the weeds whose shelter is ripped away one reed at a time. Huddled under a pink plastic cape, she watched tiny feathered remnants of her past haircut fall like residue from a tarring and feathering. Too many people inside the Teen Queen Castle knew Temple Barr, redhead and PR whirlwind. Her cover was being stripped away and blown dry even as she sat strapped to the chair.
“I don’t know why you hate your red hair,” Adair said. “So many girls do. Guess they feel like Raggedy Ann dolls. A shame. Red rocks for me, but change what irritates you. Take a look, pussycat.”
He handed her a mirror.
Temple glanced sideways at her reflection through squinty eyes. How would she face Molina when she admitted to having lost her cover to a pair of barber’s shears, leaving the policewoman’s daughter alone in a house crawling with secret tunnels, cameras, and sick stalkers?
Temple, shrinking in the chair, straightened.
So had her hair. Straightened somehow.
It had been bleached into a medley of warm and cool blonde shades! And straightened and razor-cut into shoulder-brushing length. She looked like … nobody she knew. A stranger. The Power of Blonde: hide behind your hair color.
Her cover was not blown! It was … better than ever. Hallelujah!
Of course, imagining what the grow-out would be like was a nightmare, but for the moment…
“Pretty foxy.” Her Aunt Kit was standing there, beaming down on her niece. “This girl has a chance at the prize if her attitude improves.”
Thanks be to savvy aunts! What an actress! Still, Kit might be onto something. Temple was still studying herself in the mirror. Dang if the blonde hair didn’t make her green contact lenses even more dominant. An eye of another color was a slim sliver of a disguise but it had worked for Max. Temple guessed that her new pale honey hair would even make her real eye color, a wishy-washy blue-gray in her own opinion, resemble the dangerous, deep steel blue of a Fontana Brother’s Beretta.
“Pink is not her color,” Kit told Adair, “too sweetysweet with her pale complexion. If she were on one of my book covers, she’d be wearing Nile green or peach velvet.”
Vanetta, the show’s wardrobe witch had appeared as well. “We’ll go with the icy Easter tones … peach, aqua,and pale lilac for her. This will be one of the more dynamic makeovers. From jet black to liquid blonde.”
Vanetta, a brunette and therefore one who might be expected to have issues with blonde, instead grinned from ear to ear. “I love it. I have to put everybody else but that Molina girl in pasty pastels. This honey-warm blonde at least gives me a mid-tone palette to play with.”
Temple was startled to realize that she and Mariah were the only not-blondes in the finals. And also the reason why: in states with a large Hispanic labor force, Anglo women, even natural-born brunettes, didn’t want to be mistaken for “the hired help.”
On the other hand, not being blonde made the two of them stand out in a crowd. For a wild, wonderful moment, Temple pictured Mariah winning her category, in her glory, going—oh, all right, no dog in a manger, Temple—going to her school father-daughter dance with Matt Devine, a “dad” to die for.