“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Miss Georgia wins and bursts into tears. While they work the crown into her slightly exhausted-looking curls, I focus my binoculars on the contestants who didn’t even make it past the preliminaries. They’ve spent this part of the evening sitting at the side of the stage wearing virginal white gowns, just watching. Now they’re euphoric, practically orgasmically excited over Miss Georgia’s win—but in a poised way. The woman sitting next to me shouts to her friend: “I figured it out! They say Miss Alaska only went up against eight other girls. No wonder she’s a dog!” [1] She waves her phone around. I catch her eye but say nothing.

I arrived at Miss America a very different person—a good person, the sort who would have defended Miss Alaska, who is only nineteen. But the week has changed me, and now here’s what I think: forty of the contestants are dogs, five are so-so, seven are hot, and I’m somewhere in the lower middle. I view my body as an assemblage of component parts, a patchwork of imperfections. Within hours, I’ll see chunks of corpse on the roadside and feel, literally, nothing.

For now, I focus my attention on the stage, which looks like an Art Deco Lisa Frank binder: ombre-purple and coral-pink panels dappled with digital stars, curtains shimmering electric blue. A cartoon mermaid’s natural environment. Stage left there’s a gigantic golden statue, like the one at the Oscars, only I think this one has breasts. I can’t really tell. My seat is pretty bad. The ladies next to me keep going about Miss Alaska and how “that yellow bikini she wore on night one made her look like an albino dog—ha-ha!” Meanwhile, Miss Alaska smiles ecstatically, hugging everyone around her.

Researchers say that primates smile to submit; if a beta meets an alpha in the wild, he shows his teeth to indicate his status. It’s called a fear grin. Sociologists say human women smile more than men because their lower social status motivates deference. They smile to indicate attentiveness to the needs, goals, and accomplishments of those who are more powerful. If I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that girls are expected to lose like winners, and win like losers. Miss Georgia fingers her crown, continuing to sob.

Day Zero

I pay forty bucks to ride the Academy bus from Manhattan to the Trump Taj Mahal—$15 more than the regular Greyhound bus, which gets in a couple blocks from the boardwalk—hoping that eavesdropping on what’s casually known as the “casino bus” will give me a sense of “the scene.” Unfortunately, it’s Labor Day, so the bus is completely empty except for me and four other people, two of whom are speaking Yiddish. I sit directly in front of the other couple, but they’re mumblers, and all I hear over the course of the two-and-a-quarter-hour trip is “I think that girl is listening to us.” I write it down.

As we pull into the casino’s surprisingly unexceptional carport (white overhang, concrete pillars, a booth just inside the door that looks like the check-in desk at an airport), I discover why the tickets were more expensive: the driver reminds us that they come with thirty credits’ worth of Trump Dollars. After that, I’m on my own in Atlantic City.

To cash in my voucher, I first have to navigate a sea of blackjack tables, free drinks, and blinking slot machines. The lady behind the desk watches as I scan her breasts for a nametag. In my mind, I’m a sly, charismatic investigator. [2] “Hi … Chantelle,” I croon. She glowers. I ask whether she’s experiencing an influx of people for the Miss America Pageant. Has it been overwhelming to deal with a larger-than-usual crowd? She ignores me. I ask again, thinking maybe she hasn’t heard me. She says, “I heard you.”

I smile. “I was just—”

“Well, I don’t get it,” she snaps, handing me my official Trump Card. “I don’t get what you’re saying, not whatsoever.”

I take my swipe card full of Trump Dollars, pass an old man crying alone at the craps table, and sit down at a slot machine called Vibrant Rose (or rather, “Vibrant [Image of a Rose]”). I went to college and everything, but I can’t figure out how this works, so I ask the guy next to me for help, raising my voice a little to be heard over the dinging of slots. He gawps at his screen, hand attached to the machine. “Hello?” I shout, but he doesn’t hear. He’s already gone full cyborg.

I poke helplessly at my console until suddenly a woman motors past me in one of those wheelchairs with a basket and handlebars, reverses, and offers to help. When I say yes, she stands up, and I scream, not knowing whether to fall on my knees in the face of what appears to be a miracle (she can walk!) or shake myself awake. (The negative reaction to that Super Bowl 2000 commercial featuring an ambulatory Christopher Reeve is a testament to how shocking this can be.)

Whoever wins Miss America gets $50,000. That’s enough for 8,333 pretzels.

“What?” the wheelchair woman asks. I explain that I’d thought she was paralyzed, which is when I learn that these are not wheelchairs at all; apparently they’re called scooters, and you can rent them from any of the casinos in Atlantic City if you’ve given up on life.

“You should get one,” she says. “They’re cheap.”

She slides onto the chair next to mine and introduces me to the embarrassingly simple process of using Trump Dollars. Her card is different from mine: it’s attached to a lanyard attached to her belt. I’m not sure whether the lanyard is an actual electrical cord, a way to keep the card handy and avoid losing it, or simply a fashion statement, but regardless, it seems to allow her to sit back and play without even having to press the green SPIN button on the machine. Looking around, I see many of the gamblers wear such lanyards, connecting them to their slots as if by IV. I press SPIN. Within seconds my balance dwindles from $30 to $9. I struggle to mirror their relative calm.

Then suddenly, “Vibrant [Rose Image]” starts ringing and won’t stop. “What’s happening?” I shout to the scooter woman, but she says nothing, glaring straight ahead at her own slot machine. Images of blue and red diamonds and gold coins explode across my screen to the tune of Our National Anthem. As my victory sinks in, an insane thought enters my mind: With this fortune, I will never have to work again.

After cashing out the $220 in winnings, I text my husband explaining how casinos are actually just like ATMs, except it’s not your money. His response—something about “this is how it starts, I love you, don’t give into the allure of Lady Luck, blah blah blah”—does not sink in.

I proceed to go “Money Crazy.” I purchase an enormous pretzel for $6. I buy a hat made out of balloons. I get in a tiny carriage and pay its elderly conductor to push me all the way to my hotel because you can do that in Atlantic City. I count my remaining cash thinking, No wonder! Here I was, reeling over $220. Whoever wins Miss America gets $50,000. [3] That’s enough for 8,333 pretzels.

As the carriage rounds a bend, a poorly constructed fountain sprays my face, even though we’ve circumvented it by at least fifty feet—something that would have enraged me in New York. But I cackle with delight, verbally whipping my man-mule onward to the historic Claridge Hotel, “Home of Miss America.”

Day One

The Claridge’s fancy restaurant, the Twenties, is decorated in the style of the 1980s: brown geo-print carpeting and black chairs. On the morning of the first round of preliminaries, I sit there for hours, hoping to catch sight of one of the contestants. (I’d heard a rumor they all sleep on the fourteenth floor.) Instead I see lots and lots of Teen Misses—who’ve come to “get tips from watching” their idols, one tells me—and toddlers in tiaras who bear more of a resemblance to JonBenét Ramsey than to Honey Boo Boo. Mostly I talk to the waitress, Lee.

“They getting freaky,” she says of the actual Miss America contestants she’s waited on so far. “I’m like, you Miss America, you’re supposed to be nice. But they don’t even leave tips. And they smile, smile, smile, and, yeah, they’re pretty. But you know how sometimes that sort of thing looks wack? Like a mask?” She shudders. “The eyes are wild.”

I recall my wedding, and how badly my face hurt at the end of the night. “It probably hurts to smile all day.”

“Yeah,” Lee says, “but that’s the contest, right?” She shakes her head, like, What a shame.

I nod in agreement. “It shouldn’t be,” I say seriously. “But if that’s the game, and they play it, then they’re exploiting for their own gain the same patriarchal framework that seeks to subjugate them.”

“What?”

I order a Diet Coke.

While she’s gone, I think of the many serious feminist texts I’ve lugged with me to America’s Playground, a.k.a. Atlantic City, a.k.a. the birthplace of Miss America. I also think of one key text I haven’t brought: a book titled How to Win a Beauty Contest, by Miss America 1949, Jacque Mercer. It’s out of print and costs $150 on eBay, but I’ve been told it includes chapters like “What to Do When You Win” (“There is nothing more exciting to an audience member than to see a pretty girl smiling through her tears and saying something like, ‘Oh, Mamma! I won! I won!’”) and “How to Accept Applause” (“Of course, no beauty queen would go so far as to do the overhead clasp of a prize fighter in acknowledgment, but if people are nice enough to applaud, then you should be gracious and charming enough to bow and smile in return”). My favorite is the chapter called “How to Smile When You Don’t Want To.” “There are a few simple tricks that will help you smile more easily on all occasions,” Mercer writes. “If you are walking down the street, make a game of smiling at lampposts or at every mailbox you see.”

I’m practicing smiling through the window at the parking lot when Lee comes back with my drink. “They barely eat,” she whispers. “That’s another thing I forgot to say.” She grins and starts wiggling her head back and forth. “It’s always ‘egg whites, egg whites, egg whites.’”

I laugh, interpreting the impression as the performance of a body-confident woman befuddled by dieting.

She shakes her head. “I wish I could be skinny.”

“You’re perfect,” I lie.

Most non-pageant people know Miss America as a ninety-minute TV broadcast hosted by an orange-colored man and a woman with helmet hair. But no! Here in Atlantic City, it’s a weeklong bonanza.

The competition begins with three nights of preliminaries, allowing attendees to watch every one of the fifty-two talented contestants—one for each state in the union, plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico—in bikinis and evening gowns before the group is narrowed down to fifteen for the final TV night. Here, essentially, is how each night unfolds:

01 One third of the contestants parade onto the stage to the empowering sound of Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” chosen for the pageant by Nick Jonas, this year’s official “music curator.”

02 The contestants rush offstage and return one at a time wearing bikinis for Lifestyle and Fitness, which counts for 15 percent of their preliminary score.

03 Evening Wear is next and counts for 20 percent.

04 Talent—a portion of the night that could be called “Who Is Most Like a Jane Austen Character?” because the majority of the contestants play a little instrument, dance proficiently, or sing a nice song—comes after that and counts for 35 percent.

05 A private ten-minute interview that we never see takes place at some point and counts for 25 percent.

06 Finally, each contestant is required to speak for sixty seconds about her “platform,” defined by the Miss America website as “an issue about which she cares deeply and that is of relevance to our country.” This counts for 5 percent.

07 Awards between $1,000 and $2,000 are handed out for the bikini and talent portions.

08 Winners cry.

On night one, preliminaries host Dena Blizzard, a Miss America loser turned comic (her one-woman show, One Funny Mother: I’m Not Crazy!!, premiered Off-Broadway last April), introduces the Lifestyle and Fitness competition in accordance with the organization’s stance: “First, it’s a demonstration of athleticism and strength,” she intones. “An indicator of how hard the women work, a testament to health, a motivating counterexample, the first step toward a war on obesity.” She lifts a hand like, without further ado. “It’s not about being a size two.” Then out march the contestants, who all look like size twos—except for Miss Kentucky, who’s probably a size eight on bottom, six on top. As she strolls across the stage, audience members shout-whisper mean things about her hopes and dreams (she’s eighteen and wants to be president) and fat ass.

“Eighteen and wants to be president?” one laughs. “She looks forty-two!”

“More like First Lady!”

Beside me, a husky woman sits with her husky daughter. While Kentucky pauses for the judges, thrusting out one thigh for effect, the little girl stands up, wheezing, and nudges her mom, puffing out her cheeks and pantomiming big hips.

“It’s not about that,” the mother admonishes. “It’s how she do.”

In which case, Miss Kentucky should win. She sashays across the stage with the easy confidence of a young Barack Obama. But the judges don’t agree, and at the end of the night, Miss South Carolina receives the $1,000 prize for being the best at wearing a turquoise swimsuit. As Blizzard calls her name, South Carolina sobs a little, and the loser girls hug one another, evidently thrilled that she has beaten them. The fat mother hands her fat daughter earbuds and an iPad. “Show me that pretty smile,” she says.

The bikini march has always been controversial, but it’s the lifeblood of the pageant—no one tunes in to watch the unseen interviews or handing over of an academic scholarship. The most common argument against it is that the barely clothed parade sexualizes women who should be celebrated for their laurels, though often the dig is couched more in derision for the girls [4] themselves, for being bimbos, which also implicitly throws the academic aspect into question. Of course, it’s in the Miss America Organization’s best interest to continue to deflect criticism, and many past contestants and pageant observers (along with pretty much anyone else who has ever heard of Miss America) interpret Miss America’s modern emphasis on athleticism as an attempt to offset derision over its swimwear component by framing it in terms of health.

In the pageant’s early years, the bangable-body requirement was much more explicit, and, in certain cases, defined with scientific specificity. When Norman Rockwell judged Miss America in 1923, contestants were awarded up to 15 points for the “construction of their heads.” Until 1935, judges unfurled measuring tapes to determine whether contestants possessed the ideal bust-waist-hip ratios.

That year, the Miss America Organization recruited Lenora Slaughter, formerly of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Chamber of Commerce, to become the head of the pageant. She instituted reforms designed to make the pageant respectable, which meant forgoing the official cataloging of body proportions and changing the name of the “bathing suit” category to “swimwear” because she thought “bathing” conjured too much sex. She also banned women who were not “of good health and the white race” from competing. Slaughter ran the pageant for more than thirty years and is basically responsible for creating what we think of today as Miss America. (Her whites-only rule was abolished in 1950.)

Based on casual conversations I’ve had about the pageant with naysayers, many people seem to assume contestants want the male gaze above all else. This is silly when one considers that the Miss America hopefuls—physically perfect and young and gorgeous—could simply cross the boardwalk to the beach and receive much more legible lecherous attention. It’s hard to see anybody’s jaw drop with the spotlights in your eyes.

It’s not about that. It’s how she do.

But the idea that participants in beauty-centric circuits crave some sexual satisfaction isn’t new. In his best-selling 1969 book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex: But Were Afraid to Ask, Dr. David Reuben writes that pageant contestants, like strippers, bare their bodies for sexual gratification. “They usually have trouble attaining orgasm and never find much real pleasure in genital sex,” he explains. “They show off their breasts, hips, buttocks and a discreet outline of the vulva (through a bathing suit) to admiring men.” Essentially, he says, the swimwear portion of the event gives participants titillation they can’t experience anywhere else because they are sexually dead inside. The vulvas they display are numb.

So it’s strange that none of the former Miss Americas I talked to said anything about having an orgasm while walking in a bikini across a dangerously slick stage in five-inch heels, or even while being crowned. Miss America 1998, Kate Shindle, author of the 2014 memoir Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain, says that girls have to psych themselves up for that portion of the evening by justifying it to themselves as an athletic event.

“Many [of the girls] are frightened by having to walk down a runway in a swimsuit. Many perspire heavily, shake, gag, or even throw up,” Frank Deford writes in his 1975 book, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America, known to amateur pageant historians as “The Miss America Bible.” According to one of the many moms I speak with in the elevators and restrooms of the Claridge, “Girls stumble, twist ankles—it’s scary! My daughter goes into it very anxious. That stuff really hurts, and they see it hurt their friends.” She confides in me that one of the less reported and admittedly uncommon injuries occurs when the girls are trying to change out of their bikinis after Lifestyle and Fitness is over. Sometimes, if they’ve gotten a little overzealous with the butt glue, which is sprayed onto a contestant’s butt to keep her bikini bottom from slipping into her inner ass, they wind up tearing off a little bit of butt skin.

Once permitted to talk onstage, many of the girls discuss fitness. In keeping with the organization’s stance, a good number of them have taken up some form of health-related issue as their platform. Miss Georgia’s is a group called “Healthy Children, Strong America,” and she describes her commitment to it like this: “I really try to live my platform and exercise all the time.”

About two years ago on Last Week Tonight, the cartoonishly incredulous John Oliver and a team of fact-checkers went after the Miss America Organization’s 2014 claim that it had made $45 million available in academic scholarships.

As a registered nonprofit, Miss America has to file public tax forms, so Oliver and the fact-checkers dug those up from 2012 and found that they showed an annual national scholarship expenditure of only $482,000. “A mere forty-four-and-a-half million dollars short!” Oliver chortled to the camera, nearly choking on his own alarm.

I’m not sure if the Miss America Organization saw Oliver’s bit, but this year’s official program quotes only $303,000 in scholarships made available. Perhaps it’s trying to deflect attention from recent rumors, based on other tax returns, that its current executive director, Sam Haskell III—a pink, sticky-looking man—pays himself as both a boss and an employee, making away with hundreds of thousands of Miss America dollars in the past few years.

Ultimately, Oliver and his team were depressed to find that the organization’s claim to fame—that it’s the world’s number one provider of scholar ships to women—is actually true.

Later in the evening, both members of a drunk couple sitting a few feet away start waving at me. “Smile!” they shout. “You look so sad!”

A few minutes ago, the woman was using binoculars to search for contestants’ cellulite. The combined effects of so much ass-flesh and acid commentary have started to get to me, and I end up shouting back, uncharacteristically and incomprehensibly, some garbled instruction about fucking themselves to Mars and eating my dick. They catch parts of it but think it’s a joke. The lady scoots closer to me, clutching her plastic cup, reeking of sticky-sweet juice and rum. I picture a mail box in place of her face and smile at it.

“What’dya say about that butt?” she asks, throwing an arm around me.

“What butt?”

“The black lady’s butt.” She jabs a finger at my program’s glossy page.

“Miss South Carolina?”

“It’s huge,” the woman says. She turns abruptly to face her boyfriend, or whoever he is, splashing purple drink on me. “Right, babe?”

But he’s asleep. It reminds me of a scene in Deford’s book. “The whole trouble with male judges,” a female judge says, “is that they can look right at a fanny and not even see the fanny overhang.”

“Hey!” She’s back in my face, head lolling side to side. She jabs again at my program, indicating Miss South Carolina.

“I guess it’s pretty big, for a butt,” I hear myself say. In response, she tells me I have pretty hair, and I thank her by saying something about Miss So-And-So’s cellulite. This is how we compliment each other, by denigrating the girls. I bet that sounds pretty bad. But it only gets worse.

Day Two

I sneak between empty sections, trying to find the best sight line. Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall boasts 10,500 seats, but only around seven people are sitting in each section of the risers, and not even the floor seats are full—an embarrassment that does not go unnoticed by those in charge. On the day before the crowning, the Miss America Organization will purportedly have a last-minute panic attack and hand out free tickets so it can have an uproarious, inspiring crowd. Those in attendance for the preliminaries appear to be families of contestants. They arrive with banners draped in LED lights and rally towels printed with image transfers of their girls. I feel like I’ve been in this city for one hundred years.

As is her wont, Blizzard jokes throughout the night about how this year’s ninety-fifth anniversary of the pageant also marks the twentieth anniversary of the year she competed and lost. She is endlessly and joylessly self-deprecating, introducing Lifestyle and Fitness by saying, “When the pageant started, they wore wool! And when I did it—well, you’ve heard of high cut, right?” She pauses. “These were no cut.”

I can see the teleprompter from where I’m sitting, so I know she’s straying constantly [5], abruptly shifting from serious adulation for health and wellness to off-color anecdotes about her own terrible body. As the nights pass, she will drift further off script, compulsively mentioning her age, holding out her microphone so that a girl can talk about her platform issue only to interrupt with some crack about the difference in their ages. She smiles the entire time, but after a while it starts to look like a fear grin.

I sit with the shit-talkers through Talent and Evening Wear. I gasp with them when the clogger slips, and try to remember where I put my feminist rubber band (the one that you’re supposed to snap against your wrist when you have an anti-feminist thought) when they ask whether I’d ever be caught dead in sequins like those. They are really inclusive in their cattiness, and it starts to feel almost friendly—or rather, I would feel unfriendly for not participating. And there’s nothing as ugly in a woman as unfriendliness.

A shit-talker nudges me during one of the platform interviews. “Nose job, right?” I don’t know whether this means he thinks she’s gotten a nose job or needs one. In general, my compatriots are fierce about fixable imperfections, but even fiercer when it appears that any imperfection has been fixed.

“She needs a breast lift,” someone mutters—and then, later, equally critical: “Either that’s a padded bra or she’s got implants.” Flaws are unacceptable, but plastic is unfair.

It goes without saying that the bras are padded. Enhancements like these—called “falsies” in the past—were absolutely prohibited in early pageants. In fact, beautiful subterfuge was so taboo that in 1938, Miss California was rumored to have been blackballed in the finals because she “used too much makeup for the satisfaction of the judges.” (She got runner-up.)

By now, padding, mascara, and hair extensions are part of the game. As one of the maids who cleaned up after the contestants told me, “You go into their rooms, and it’s hair extensions! So many! Lined up on the floor small to big, like a staircase of hair!” The organization now condones what it used to condemn, choosing sponsors that will spray-tan the girls and provide them with shaping swimwear.

Going into the preliminaries, I saw falsies as an act of empowerment that proved gender could be constructed. As feminist scholar Susan Bordo puts it, “Although our cultural work as feminists can and should expose the oppressiveness of social institutions such as the Miss America Pageant system, the pleasure of participation, of decorating and shaping the body, can have subversive potential.” I owned padded bras and wore them as a gesture of my agency. I’d even purchased the Kardashian-endorsed waist trainer, which allowed me to complement exquisitely contoured breasts with a 1950s cinched waist. It also has the unadvertised side effect of helping with my chronic constipation. My favorite shapers are a few thongs with reinforced crotches designed to hide camel toe. The brand name is, hilariously, Camel No. I wonder what Dr. David Reuben would say about these.

Day Three

I wriggle into a pair of Spanx with butt pads and go back to Boardwalk Hall. Every night, the audience stands to sing Our National Anthem. Tonight, I shut my eyes and think of the way my rose-covered slot machine sang O say can you see, recalling a better time when I still had $220—by now I’ve spent it all on pretzels, fast food, and Atlantic City tchotchkes for my husband. The American flag hanging on the rear wall of Boardwalk Hall is maybe three times bigger than the jumbotrons hanging on either side of the stage—both of which are partially obscured by the overhead speakers so that during close-ups, the girls are decapitated.

According to the top brass at the Miss America Organization, winners always go on to do great things. “Great things” include going to war: Miss Utah 2007 and Miss Kansas 2013 both enlisted before competing in the pageant (neither won the Miss America title), but apparently contestants enlist after winning, too.

I just figured if you could learn to be a brain, you could learn to be a woman.

At first, I was surprised by how many veterans are mentioned among the shout-outs to former Miss Americas. But I guess it makes sense from a feminist perspective. In her essay “I Was Miss Meridian 1985: Sororophobia, Kitsch, and Local Pageantry,” Donelle Ruwe, PhD, argues that by learning to think of beauty as a series of movements, outfits, and gender-enhancing prosthetics, contestants learn, perhaps even faster and more clearly than students in a gender-theory class, that gender is a construct. Simply winning Miss America can be seen as an almost militaristic triumph—a sort of Trojan-horse maneuver, whereby the winner manipulates the system by passing among the same forces that oppress her. In an interview with Frank Deford quoted in his book, Miss America 1948, BeBe Shopp, says of her win, “I just figured if you could learn to be a brain, you could learn to be a woman.”

Deford refers to Miss America’s year with the title as a “moral crusade” on behalf of the organization, and to Miss America herself as a “War Cheerleader.” Like soldiers, contestants train for years in the hopes of deployment and are reprogrammed to forget themselves under the mantle of an institution. Miss America hugs the dying and literally rallies troops, shedding her own identity to become someone for everyone. Even the bikinis she wears are named for the Martial Island of Bikini, where, during World War II, the United States secretly tested its atomic bomb. By the time natives returned to Bikini more than forty years later, they knew nothing of that home. (They were forced to leave again not long after due to radiation in the food supply; the island is still considered uninhabitable.)

Winning Miss America, like winning a war, requires an individual to adopt a specific competitive identity, often at the expense of her real one. There’s a part in Deford’s book about Jacque Mercer’s father: “Each year as she grew up, her father had given Jacque a battery of standard personality tests. The development of her character was charted consistently, and in the year before she became Miss America, her indices of drive, ambition, and self-confidence had risen so high that they appeared to have soared off the curve. She took the same tests following her year as Miss America, and found that those three characteristics had been shattered. Her best had been broken.” Mercer won and lost herself.

“How old are you?” the woman sitting next to me asks.

“Thirty,” I say proudly. Since the age of twelve, I’ve always rounded up. And if turning thirty is a socially constructed, anti-feminist preoccupation, why should I be afraid to say I’m thirty when I’m actually younger?

“You look older,” the woman says.

I remind myself that at twelve, I would have taken this as a compliment.

That night, I go straight to my hotel room, collapse on the bed, and snow-angel the covers, relieved that after the Show Me Your Shoes Parade comes the final night of competition, and then I can go home, where my husband is.

A few weeks ago, I went with him to one of those restaurants that specialize in fresh seafood and have tanks full of live lobsters and crabs to prove it. One of the crabs was so huge and terrifying, we spent most of the night talking about how it belonged in the Museum of Natural History behind a plaque designating it as some kind of special sea monster. We watched in stunned horror as it curled one bony arm over the lip of the tank and managed to raise its eyes (were those eyes?) about an inch out of the water.

“Fuck!” my husband said, startling the couple next to us. I gripped his hand, both of us hoping for and rooting against the crab’s escape. It struggled for what felt like hours before losing its grip and falling backward onto the depressed lobsters below. I stood abruptly, but my husband pulled me back into my seat. “Don’t you dare try to save it,” he said. He knows me better than anyone.

I’m trying to decide whether to get out of bed and go do something or just hide under this blanket forever, when suddenly I fart so loudly and forcefully that it drains all the energy out of my body. I curl into a fetal position, imagining a crab version of the giant Atlantic City pretzels I’ve been eating sliding its bready limbs under my skin. All night, I try to remind myself that it isn’t feminist to feel fat.

Day Four

A lost day. I wake up late and go to bed early, spending the interim feeling body-conscious, trudging zombielike in the wake of various flocks of scooter-riding tourists, prowling the local outlet mall, and trying on teenager clothes that are too small for me.

Day Five

Some combination of salty sea air and non-breathable body shapers has conspired to give me a full-blown bladder infection.

On my way back from the CVS downtown with my Cipro tablets and Uricalm Max, I decide that giant cotton underpants are more practical than synthetic vagina hammocks and detour back to the outlet mall. That’s when my symptoms kick in again. I have the sudden, unstoppable urge to pee. I scramble to one of the public toilets at the Atlantic City Greyhound-bus terminal, the refuge of the desperate.

While I’m going, a child’s foot slides under the stall divider, brushing my ankle. I think she’s going to try and peek at me, so I prepare to give one of those kind but stern looks I’d received as a kid when peeking at someone in the bathroom or spitting into the wind and hitting a stranger in the arm. But then the calf slides into my stall, and the rest of the leg, and the head. A young woman with neck tattoos and the plunger of an empty heroin needle clenched between her teeth is melting into my stall. She’s tied off with a cell phone charging cord.

By the sinks, the women who’ve parked their scooters in the waiting area are now murmuring to one another, voices slowly rising for someone—“anyone!”—to call the cops.

I pull up my shorts a little too soon, peeing on myself, and get down on my knees to shake her, dragging her into my stall and thinking, Her arms are so soft. A man shouts from the doorway, “Hey, Cricket, come on, you’re going to get arrested.” Her eyes roll open. Her color’s good. She hasn’t overdosed; she’s just super-high.

I hear walkie-talkies crackling outside the door and wriggle the syringe out of her mouth, thinking maybe if she doesn’t have it on her, she won’t go to jail. I unwind the cell-phone cord and stuff it in her purse. They’re yelling now that they’re about to come in, warning ladies to get out. I try to lift her but she slides back down, and as the cops bang on the stall door, I slide the needle into my back pocket. “Come out,” they shout, so I let them in. They want nothing to do with me—they can tell by my clean hair and my shopping bag that I’ve got nothing to do with it. “I pulled her into my stall,” I mumble. “I was trying to help her—I think she’s just drunk,” but they’re pushing me away.

On my way back to the Home of Miss America, I toss the needle in a trash can, remembering my husband and the crab—“Don’t you dare try to save it.” The truth is, I wouldn’t even have touched her if she hadn’t been so beautiful.

I walk in a daze back to the Claridge, get in the elevator with a stranger, and catch myself sucking in my belly, bloated from yet another pretzel. I hope he’ll ask if I’m one of the contestants, but he doesn’t.

The creased, sepia-toned photos in my mom’s cedar chest speak to our early ancestors’ tendency to age (very) prematurely. They were farmers, slept on dirt floors, and faced life with wind and flecks of horse shit gusting in their faces. They had better things to do than apply creams to their sunburns. They needed to pull up the vegetables, milk the cows, and survive.

All I’ve done so far in my approximately thirty years is attend fancy schools, marry someone I love, write little stories, and take long baths. Yet if this elevator mirror is real, I am blonde and freckled in the way of frowning Dust Bowl people.

The Show Me Your Shoes Parade takes place outside on the boardwalk at 5 p.m., by which time the weather has turned wet. Various marching bands and banner-draped convertibles crawl down the boardwalk. Perched on the backseats, the girls wave and smile and twist one leg midair without rest, somehow managing to hold it at a perfect forty-five-degree angle the whole time.

“See that water pouring down her leg?” some one says as Miss Alabama passes. “This is when it counts. This is when they really have to go for it.”

“She’s perky.”

“This is it, they’ve gotta give it all they got.”

“You can’t even tell she’s cold.”

Meanwhile, little toddler pageant girls march past with dead expressions, because when you’re that young you smile when you’re happy, and there’s nothing happy about being cold and wet and wearing itchy sequins. I remember that age, standing in a poufy-sleeved Easter dress that I hated because it was lavender and I wanted to wear a tuxedo like my ventriloquist dummy. My dad was taking a photo and said, “Smile, pumpkin!” As soon as he prompted me, I couldn’t remember how to do it. I pictured a cartoon, the way the teeth line up on top of each other, and arranged my top and bottom teeth that way, widening my eyes. My dad looked horrified. “What are you doing?” he asked. He thought I was angry with him, lashing out. I quickly learned how to do it right, so that it pleased people. By high school I had a nice, solid reputation for being stupid (people loved me!) because I smiled no matter how I felt. Now I’m soaking wet, but everyone else seems to have acquired one of those umbrella hats when I wasn’t looking. My urethra is burning. I’m not smiling.

“You can tell she isn’t happy,” the guy next to me remarks of Miss Puerto Rico. I try to sneak a shoulder under his umbrella hat, but he shakes me off.

The next group of performing youths are a little older—twelve, maybe. Their eyes are wild, their smiles mechanical and toothy. At that age, you know enough to realize that grinning makes it look like you aren’t embarrassed, but you’re not quite good enough at it yet to make it look natural. One of them does a backflip, and I wince because the boardwalk is slippery. A lady sheltering by herself under a huge golf umbrella claps, yelling, “You go, girls!”

By the time Miss Virginia passes, the rain is coming down so hard that my sneakers and socks are soaked through, and I can feel my toes shriveling into frozen raisins. Virginia’s curls are collapsing, but everyone cheers because she pretends it isn’t happening. I go to a place in my head that’s warm, like Virginia in July. I am in the Blue Mountains now with Miss Virginia. She is calling me beautiful. We are crawling through the foliage in camouflage military uniforms, laughing.

That’s when people start to boo.

I look up and see a car approaching with its retractable top cranked up against the rain. Miss Wisconsin passes, guarded from the downpour, trying to hold her foot up to the passenger side window. She waves at us from behind the glass. People boo louder.

“Now, that’s just ridiculous,” the woman shouts from under her golf umbrella. “We’re out here in the rain, aren’t we?”

“Poor sportsmanship.”

“Not even trying.”

“Did you see her frown?”

But she looks so cramped and uncomfortable, I want to say. Isn’t that enough? Instead, I boo.

Day Six

The sky is still cloudy, but I decide to take a relaxing walk on the beach, prying off my shoes and socks on a sandy wooden ramp leading down to the shore. I ease into the sand, sigh, and promptly cut my foot on garbage. Mangy cats skulk from underneath the causeway, apparently smelling my blood.

“Pussy above, pussy below!” a clever drunk man will yell later tonight, pointing between the Miss America posters decorating Boardwalk Hall and a sign admonishing tourists not to feed the cats.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Sam Haskell III would welcome Vanessa Williams to the judges’ booth for the Finals Competition, which is a huge deal. After she became the first black woman ever to win Miss America in 1983, someone leaked photos of a nineteen-year-old Williams doing a soft-core-girl-on-girl-pussy-licking modeling shoot, and the Miss America Organization forced her to resign. Even prior to the photos, Williams had been getting it from all sides: the diversity groups didn’t think she was “black enough”; the white supremacists found out where she lived and sent strange powders to her mother’s house. In the midst of public humiliation and censure, a weaker woman might have lain down under the boardwalk to be eaten by feral cats. Instead, Williams became famous for other things, like acting and doing that song everyone forgets they know all the words to until it comes on in the car: “Save the Best for Last.”

According to TMZ, there was some kind of mix-up about her coming back. Williams’s people thought she was going to receive an apology from this organization that’s historically hated non-white people for having slut-shamed her in front of the entire nation, whereas Sam Haskell III and the other doughy men who run the pageant thought Williams was going to issue an apology for, I don’t know, posing in a leather harness for naked photos as a pretend lesbian. Twelve hours before the finals were set to begin, Williams allegedly said she wouldn’t put a fucking pinky toe onstage unless Haskell apologized and let her sing a song (or something to that effect), which is the most radical thing I’ve ever heard.

“She looked fat in those photos,” the person next to me remarks as we wait for the finals to start. Someone else says that her breasts looked pretty saggy for a teenager’s. I shrug in agreement. “That’s the problem with big ones,” I say, secretly wishing I had ones as big as hers. We sing Our National Anthem.

Then something crazy happens: they say to each other, ‘I love you.’

All the messiness appears to have been resolved. The hosts announce Williams’s entrance, and she floats onstage in some kind of fabulous, iridescent toga. Then Sam Haskell III enters. He wraps his arm around Williams’s waist, holds the microphone to his wormy lips, and smiles. She smiles at him too, although she arches her back a little, like maybe his breath smells of tuna fish.

“Though none of us currently involved in the organization were involved then, on behalf of today’s organization, I want to apologize,” he says.

“Ohhh,” she responds demurely, like she didn’t see it coming, and also it’s no biggie.

“To you, and to your mother, Miss Helen Williams,” Haskell continues. “I want to apologize for anything that was said or done that made you feel any less the Miss America you are, and the Miss America you always will be!”

The crowd erupts while Williams stares at him with furious little eyes. Then something crazy happens: they say to each other, “I love you.”

The only thing I can think of is that it might be code. Deford writes that Miss Americas win based on poise—a sort of indescribable attribute that he explains like this: “When a judge says that he has found a girl with poise, all the others realize that … it means: ‘I love you.’” So, in this case, by telling each other “I love you,” Haskell and Williams are staging a truce.

This all begins to make sense later, after they announce the winner. As Miss America (formerly Miss Georgia) staggers gracefully down the runway in her crown, the camera cuts to Williams, who’s wearing a look that says, Underneath my rictus of congratulation, I have nothing but pity for you. The look is so fierce and steady it elicits whispers from those huddled around me about whether she’s had too much Botox. I feel an internal swelling that, at first, I think is the pretzels coming up, but then I recognize it: love. I love Miss America. I couldn’t hate her unless I did. As she sobs, I nod soulfully, witheringly, satisfied with her delicate reaction—it’s only proper to win modestly. And although I want to judge Vanessa Williams for her unwillingness and/or physiological inability to smile, I forgive her, because that’s the ladylike thing to do. I smile for both o us. It’s my job as the loser to feign happiness.

As the Bert Parks song ends, the teleprompter stops. The last words from the hosts are “somuchfunthankyougoodnight!” rattled off hastily as though the producer in their ears has hissed at them to wrap things up. They exit. People at home cut to commercial. In the theater, defeated girls clasp their hands, grinning, while Miss Georgia waves and waves. The only noise comes from the people around me getting up to leave.

The Day After

The next morning on my way to Bally’s Atlantic City Hotel and Casino, where another bus is waiting to take me back to Manhattan, I think back on how much emphasis Deford’s book puts on “carriage”—how he says what clinches the win isn’t the dress or the bikini or even the contestant’s body, but the way she carries herself. What does that mean, I wonder? And if it’s true, why was Miss Georgia physically perfect, with the coolest evening gown? When I get to the bus, I don’t carry so much as drag myself onboard. This vehicle has wifi, and immediately I start Google Image searching the girls and Facebooking myself for side-by-side comparisons.

Just outside Atlantic City, traffic grinds to a halt. Fire trucks clog the highway. Black plumes of smoke blow sideways in the breeze. As we get closer, I see men in helmets pacing around the blackened skeleton of a minivan, their faces clenched against heat that makes the asphalt seem to crawl. One of them leaps back, his hose gushing uselessly on the soft tar, and almost slips on what looks like a flattened pumpkin mixed with charcoal and roses and frayed strings of T-shirt. No ambulances.

I sit back, blinking at the Facebook ads for Botox injections, and briefly consider Googling whether it’s normal to see fresh pieces of corpse and feel numb. Instead I email my husband and ask, “Do you wish I looked like Miss Georgia?”

He writes back almost immediately, “Miss Who?”

And then, “Honey I’m so excited to see you!!! My beautiful, wonderful wife!!!!”

My fingers hover above the keys, my thoughts shifting from death itself to how wrinkled my knuckles are. Traffic is at a standstill. I use the delay to search for skin injections, just trying to freeze time.

[1] According to her Wikipedia page, Miss Alaska actually beat twelve other girls to advance to the national competition, but it’s true that Alaska’s pageant is unusual in that the small number of participants often means that everyone who signs up gets to compete. ABC News reports that “in big ‘pageant states,’ such as California and Florida, contestants are required to be local title-holders to make it to state competition. In Alaska, though, a contestant only needs to fill out paperwork to get the chance at the crown, and the money that comes with it.” This piece also includes a photo of four Alaska finalists, one of whom seems as if she were just discovered in the wings conveniently wearing a ball gown and forced onstage at gunpoint.

[2] Dick Clark Productions, which puts on Miss America as well as the Academy of Country Music Awards and So You Think You Can Dance, denied me a press pass, forcing me to bushwhack my own reporting trail. An inside source said it was because the people in charge thought my past writing was inappropriate.

[3] In scholarships, but still.

[4] I’ve tried and failed to call contestants of Miss America anything but “girls,” mostly because that’s what those closest to the pageant call them. “I don’t think they mean it pejoratively,” Miss America 1998, Kate Shindle, assures me over the phone. “That’s always just been the casual term that was tossed around.”

[5] “Sometimes I have things planned,” Blizzard told the Press of Atlantic City, regarding her upcoming gig at Miss America. “Sometimes things just happen.”