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drugs. Ray shook his head and threw back the tiny paper cup like a shot of tequila. In an hour he would be feeling … something. It was something to look forward to. Just then his eyes landed on a pamphlet he’d never seen before. Three smiling, ethnically diverse women sat in a gazebo surrounded by wildflowers: “The Breast Self-Exam Guide.” Ray stared at it and tried to imagine the breasts of the women in the picture. They were just models, probably never even had cancer, so thinking about their breasts didn’t seem inappropriate. Ray looked at his watch: six fourteen. He was going to be late. Adjusting his still erect penis, nurse Ray Miller snatched a copy of “The Breast Self-Exam Guide” from the rack and quietly slipped out the back door by the used-needle incinerator.

 
    chapter four
    Stiff-arming the horn, Miranda slammed on the brakes of her 2002 Chrysler Town & Country and slid into her mother’s driveway, an unwelcoming patch of dirt and gravel that had spent the last twenty-five years winning a war of attrition against the backyard. It was seven forty-seven, and Miranda was already behind schedule. The boys had refused to share a bath again, so they didn’t get one, and the drive-thru line at McDonald’s was too long so they didn’t have breakfast, either.
    “Why don’t you enter the boys in pageants?” Ray had once suggested. “They’d probably enjoy it, and it might help you connect with them a little more.”
    But Miranda just sighed and shook her head. Yes, there were little boys who competed in pageants, but Miranda suspected that they all grew up to have sex with each other, and she was not about to raise a couple of gays. Not that she considered herself homophobic. Most of the best pageant coaches were homosexual, and she genuinely enjoyed their company, even considered them friends, but spending a few hours with one on the weekend was different from having one as a son.
    “Is that what you want, Ray? A couple of gay boys?”
    “I don’t think that’s how it works,” he replied, genuinely concerned.
    But Miranda wouldn’t hear him. She knew her boys would be better off if she just let them be, so that’s exactly what she did.
    The sign on the bank downtown said it was already eighty-six degrees, and Miranda’s pregnancy hemorrhoids felt like she was smuggling fried grapes. Bailey was slouched in the passenger seat scrolling through the pink iPod she’d won at the Miles of Smiles Perfect Face Invitational (Hendersonville, Tennessee). Pageant weekends were always stressful for Bailey, but something about this one felt heavy. Not only was she relinquishing her title of Junior Miss Beautiful, but her mother had decided to take a risk and enter her in the Most Beautiful Princess division, fudging her birthdate by three months to meet the age requirement.
    “Isn’t that cheating?” Bailey asked when Miranda informed her of the scheme the day before.
    “I like to think of it more like a gamble, ” her mother said.
    A gamble that if unsuccessful could get them both banished from the Southeastern Pageant Association for life, but Miranda believed it was worth the risk. The SPA sponsored only four pageants a year, and two of them weren’t much better than dog shows.
    “And sometimes gambles pay off big time,” Miranda said with a wink.
    “But why?”
    “What do you mean?”
    Bailey looked her mother in the eye, knowing the answer before she asked. “Why are we lying about my age?”
    “Well,” Miranda tiptoed, “I was thinking about your diet, and how we could turn what has become a negative into a positive.”
    Bailey crossed her arms. “Explain, please.”
    Miranda looked at her daughter. Recently, she had started to think that Bailey was saying things just to mess with her, asking questions she already knew the answer to just to study Miranda’s reaction, as if Bailey was a scientist conducting an experiment and Miranda was a rat. She would never say it out loud, but it