Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

considered put together no matter how ragged you look.”
    “Thanks, kid.” Temple dashed into the hall where she ran into the Golden Girls, advancing in a pack and sniggering at her approach. This was not a promising sendoff to her lifestyle consultation.
    “Are you going to get it,” Silver predicted.
    Temple’s faux-green morning eyes blinked in the glare generated by so much pink, shiny spandex in a group. Even if they were all as stick-thin as flamingos.
    “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 War-bucks’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