Page 6 of The Accidental Beauty Queen
“Are you ready for dinner? I’m starving.” I’d eaten my body weight in theme park food, but I’d also walked a few million miles. And unlike every other person in the building, I won’t be strutting across a stage in a bikini in the coming days.
Ginny plops on her bed, crisscross applesauce. She’s at least five shades tanner than she was earlier today, and she’s dressed in a glittering red gingham top, white skinny jeans, and her Miss Texas American Treasure sash.
She had a pageant luncheon today, where I presume they served kale or something. She’s probably hungry, too. “Sure. I was thinking maybe we could get some room service, order a rom-com on one of the movie channels, and have a little picnic. What do you think?”
“That sounds like heaven.”
And it is.
We spend the next few hours mooning over Ryan Gosling, laughing and picking food off each other’s plates. Ginny meant what she said earlier—it really is like old times.
My twin and I haven’t seen much of each other in recent years. After high school graduation, I went away to college at the University of Texas in Austin while Ginny stayed back home in Dallas. It was the first time we’d lived apart, and the distance had seemed even greater as she’d devoted herself full-time to her pageant career and building her social media following while I embraced Austin’s laid-back vibe and the campus’s progressive atmosphere. As Ginny was modeling swimsuits, I was writing my thesis on feminism in classic literature.
Being away from home changed the way I looked at pageants. I’d never been as crazy about them as Ginny, but they’d always been a part of our family life. Though once I was on my own, I no longer saw them as a sweet family tradition. The more I read and the more I saw Ginny’s bikini and tiara pictures pop up in my social media feeds, the more archaic the whole thing felt. I couldn’t imagine Virginia Woolf, for instance, competing in a beauty pageant.
When I was home for Christmas junior year, I tried to convince Ginny she needed to do something different with her life, something more meaningful. That conversation didn’t go over well at all. We tend to avoid the topic now, but it’s always there, hanging between us.
After graduation, I moved back to Dallas and started working at the library. My twin and I once again became a permanent fixture in each other’s lives, but things are somewhat strained. As much as I’d like to blame our uneasy relationship on my twin’s pageant obsession, I can’t. Not entirely, anyway. I just sometimes feel like we’re competing against each other, and I’m always the one who ends up losing, while my twin walks away with the crown.
When Ginny learned she’d lucked out and scored one of the few private rooms this week—instead of being assigned a roommate—and invited me to come stay with her, I was a little surprised. I almost said no, but I’m suddenly glad I came to Orlando. It might give us some much needed time away from our usual routines so that we can get back to us, but I shouldn’t get my hopes up, since this is probably the last chance we’ll get to just hang out together and have fun. Pageant preliminaries start the day after tomorrow.
But for the duration of our little picnic, I forget all about the pageant. It’s not until the movie is over and we’re getting ready for bed that I’m reminded why I’m actually here.
“Can you take Buttercup for a quick walk?” Ginny yawns and crawls under her covers.
My gaze flits toward her sash, hanging neatly over a hanger in the open closet. Would it kill her to put it on and take her own dog outside?
I sigh. “Sure.”
I clip Buttercup’s leash to her collar and pick her up before she can repeat her earlier temper tantrum. For obvious reasons, I bypass the elevator and take the adjacent stairwell.
We’re about halfway down to the ground floor when I hear another set of footsteps. They seem to be heading in our direction, and I cringe, wondering which state beauty queen I’m about to run into.
I glare at Buttercup. “I swear, if you fart again, you’re on your own from now on. Got it?”
She belches in response. Lovely. Why does this dog hate me so much?
We round the corner, and I keep my head down. Maybe if I don’t make eye contact, I won’t get trapped into a conversation about hair extensions or world peace.
But the first thing I see when I step onto the landing is another dog, and it looks so much like Buttercup that I stop dead in my tracks.
“Wow.” I blink. It’s another Frenchie mix, or maybe a purebred. The dog is the same blue-gray color as Buttercup and has the same roly-poly eyes and comically oversize ears.
“Twins. What are the odds?”
I drag my gaze from the dog to its owner, who’s definitelynotwearing a beauty queen sash. On the contrary, the person on the other end of the leash is a he, and he’s wearing a tie. A very posh-looking tie, silky smooth. I have the irrational desire to reach out and touch it.
“Twins,” I echo, because I can’t seem to come up with anything else to say. The exact odds of identical twins being born to humans is one out of every two hundred and fifty births, but I’m pretty sure he meant that question rhetorically.
He smiles, and it’s a very attractive smile. Very swoon-inducing. This stranger might not be a beauty queen, but he’s still pretty. In a chiseled, roguish sort of way, of course. Like Rhett Butler in Armani.
Am I the only average-looking person in this entire hotel?
He nods toward his dog. “This is Hamlet.”
A Shakespearean pet name? My librarian heart beats a little faster.
“Let me guess.” He glances at Buttercup and lifts a brow. “Fluffy?”
