Cat in a hot pink Pursuit

blonde. They all look alike. Maybe it was a mistake that I was made a finalist.”
    This gives him pause.
    “Hey, kid, you got it the wrong way around. Looking all alike is not the way to go. You look like yourself, then you’ll know you’re not a fraud.”
    “Girls change their looks all the time.”
    “Right. Because they have not found the way they really want to be.”
    “Like a singer?”
    ‘That what you want?”
    “Yeah." “Okay.” You can tell that Rafi Nadir knows a little about advising girl singers. He leans against the wall. “Sure you want to find a look to perform in but it should be what you like, not what everybody else looks like. You got lots of time—”
    “No, I do not! The finals are just days away. I gotta polish my song and find out what they do to me and—”
    “No, you do not. You do not wait to find out what they do to you, ever. You decide and you tell them, get it?" “But, if I am not sure . .
    “Then make sure before you let them at you. Me, if I was you, I would nix the blonde. They always do blonde. At least half the country is not-blonde. Look at that big old alley cat there. He could be any one of thousands. I bet there are more black cats than any other kind in the country.”
    “Maybe not.”
    “Why not?”
    “I heard Tem... someone say once that they put black cats to sleep more than any other kind.”
    While I shudder to hear the truth so baldly stated, Mr. Rafi Nadir stops to reconsider.
    ‘There are still a lot of them around, so I guess that does not work.”
    “So what are you?” Mariah asks.
    “Not-popular.”
    “Why? What are you?”
    “Me? This is not about me,” Rafi says.
    “You’re not-blonde.”
    “I am worse than that. Arab American.”
    “Oh. I see what you mean about popular. I am just Latina. But even all the girls on the Hispanic stations are going blonde.”
    “You kids. Always gotta do what everybody else does. Grow up. Get past that.”
    Mariah nods to the door behind which Miss Savannah Ashleigh awaits her.
    “She is blonde.”
    Mr. Rafi Nadir straightens and makes a funny face at the door. “Right. Case closed.”
    Mariah giggles, then knocks.
    Point made.



In Old Cold Type

    Newspapers sent out copies of old articles on white paper so heavy it had a chalky feel.
    Temple lay an Atlas’s worth of such pages over the bathroom twin-sink counter. They’d been delivered to the house in a king-size pillow wearing a flannel case in a frolicking kitten design.
    A wretched note accompanied this innocuous delivery: “Please deliver to my little Xoe, who doesn’t sleep well without her kitty pillow. She must have forgotten to take it. Her Mom.”
    Apparently this maternal plea had moved the powers that be, for they had sent the sleekest professional blonde in Temple’s category to deliver it to her bedroom door just before dinner, with the hulking cameraman shooting tape over her bony shoulder. Apparently, now that the crime scene work was done and the detectives were gone for now, the filming ban had been lifted.
    “Here you are, Xoe,” Ashlee announced. “Something special from home for our resident tough girl. Oooh, the coot ‘iddle kitty-wittys. Maybe now you can go beddie-bye.”
    Temple/Xoe snatched the ungainly gift away.
    She must have blushed because Ashlee tittered for the camera.
    Temple was embarrassed all right. Not because of the kiddie pillow but because the note had probably been penned by mother Molina.
    “Thanks lots,” she told the door she had slammed in Ashlee’s face.
    Temple had turned to drop the pillow on the bed while Mariah snagged the note that dropped off it.
    “Hey, this looks like—” She glimpsed Temple’s hasty shushing pantomime and came near. “—like a really soft pillow.” She leaned down (how humiliating!) to whisper in Temple’s ear. “Looks like my mom’s writing.”
    Then they had adjourned to the bathroom. Although Temple was pretty sure bathrooms were a no-film zone, she was paranoid enough about their current task to hang washcloths and hand towels from any possible fixture that might hide a camera.
    The copier hadn’t captured every line. Many were blurred.
    Mariah hunched over the assemblage, scanning the blurry type.
    “Wow. This is ancient stuff.”
    “The mid-eighties.”
    “Right. Ancient stuff. My mom sent this?”
    Mariah looked up and Temple nodded. “At my request.”
    “You tell my mom what to do? Awesome.”
    “I asked her.”
    “Oh. That doesn’t