Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

bed pillows, dragging the Persian sisters with her. “You girls can leave now. I have a bodyguard.”
    The Teen Queen candidates pitter-pattered out, the young and the sleep deprived, a herd of blonde bunnies.
    Temple regarded her bunny slippers, a Christmas gift from her mother. They belonged with the herd. The rest of Temple/Xoe did not.
    “You want me to take the chaise lounge?” she asked Rafi in a West Side Story teen-gang accent, using Savannah’s misnomer.
    “No. I can handle both sides of the door, girly. Take yourself back to your bunk bed.”
    “My little sis is probably having hysterics,” she conceded.
    When she ankled out into the hall, Louie was making like Saran Wrap on her ankles again.
    Everyone had accepted him as some stray mascot that had adopted the house. Cameras lingered lovingly on his liquid feline progress through the rich environs and the gathered Teen Queens. He strutted like a sultan with a private harem.
    Temple decided she could do worse than to adopt the attitude everyone else had.
    Mariah was waiting at the door to their room, as ordered, but barely.
    One foot and an elbow and an inquisitive nose were in the hall.
    “What happened? Who screamed?”
    “Savannah Ashleigh and her cats.”
    “Oh.” Mariah instantly diagnosed a false alarm. “That airhead gives Clairol a bad name. Every time anything male crosses her path, including that black cat there, she swoons. I thought that went out with corsets.”
    “No one told Savannah. And corsets are back in, since Madonna. But Miss Ashleigh is a judge, so good little contestants don’t want to be caught on camera dissing her.” Temple looked up. “Although I’m betting all the cameras are trained on Savannah Ashleigh’s bedroom after tonight’s scare.”
    “I need a shower,” Mariah declared. She looked in Temple’s direction and sniffed. Pointedly. “Where have you been? Smells gross. Let’s go.”
    This call for a private talk was about as subtle as Emeraude perfume, but Temple retreated into the bathroom with Mariah for a quick consultation. She actually relished the moisture falling hot water would pump back into her desiccated sinuses. That “secret” passage had been as deserty dry as a pharaoh’s tomb.
    “No!” Mariah, red faced and dewy from the makeshift sauna a few minutes later, was rapt. “A secret passage.”
    “Packed with recording equipment. Nothing Gothic about it. Just high-tech snooping.”
    “And with that bodyguard guy. He looks hot.”
    Temple wasn’t ready to hear this from Mariah but allowed for teen exaggeration. “He’s just a middle-aged private cop,” she said carefully. “Nothing glamorous like a Day-Glo boy.”
    “My mom hates those guys.”
    “Day-Glo boys?” Temple asked, startled. From Max to boy bands? Where would Molina’s prejudices end?
    “No, private cops.”
    Maybe, but her mom hated this particular private cop even worse.
    “He’s right, though,” Temple said. “All the pranks here smell like producers’ tricks to up the ante on the competition.”
    “Cops have no imagination,” Mariah said authoritatively.
    Nor did cops’ kids, thank goodness.
    “Is that cat going to sleep with us?”
    Temple considered Louie. And the fact that Mariah had seen him once, months ago, with Matt, and didn’t know he was Temple’s cat. Or, actually, he wasn’t Temple’s cat. She was Louie’s person. As such, he would sleep with them.
    “Probably,” Temple said. “He’s an outcast. Savannah would never let him bunk with her precious Persians.”
    Giggles were Mariah. “I’d love to see that! Her cats sure are pretty, though. Mine are kinda scrawny and stripey.”
    “They’re delightful. I remember them as kittens. They were the cutest things.”
    “‘Cute’ doesn’t cut it.” Mariah had suddenly plunged into one of those teen dives on a bungee cord to selfesteem hell.
    “Look. I’ve been ‘cute’ my whole life, and I survived it.”
    “Yeah... but.”
    “I am not a ‘yeah... but.’ I am a real girl. Remember, your police professional mom hired me to look after you.”
    “She did, didn’t she? That was weird. My mom doesn’t depend on anybody but herself.”
    “Maybe that’s a problem.”
    Mariah reared back. She had bought into Supermom herself.
    “She can’t be everywhere,” Temple pointed out. “And you gotta admit some strange things are happening here.”
    “But none of them are really real, are they? They’re all threats but no