Cat In A Topaz Tango

“Whatever floats your barge. Just trust me. Bring him.” Temple turned to Mariah, who’d watched their battle of wills with sharp eyes and ears. She was getting a whole new take on her mother.

“Come on, big-time manager,” Zoe Chloe told Mariah, who sat beside a dazed EK, “we gotta get tight with our homegirls before any more of them end up dancing on hot coals.”

“She’s a little bitch,” Mariah said as they left, trailing the mothers shepherding their dancing daughters. EK, her eyes bigger than dinner plates, trailed them. Mariah was her ersatz mother. “Isn’t she, EK?”

The girl nodded, and from her wince at the phrase, Temple guessed Sou-Sou had been meanest to the most defenseless of her competitors. And maybe the most talented. EK had a quiet intensity and intelligence that was almost disturbing in a girl so young, if you didn’t know she’d escaped a terrible political situation.

Who knew what EK had already needed to do to survive? Maybe a bit of sabotage was child’s play compared to what she’d already faced—loss of home and family, starvation, and death. Who could guess how badly she wanted, needed, to win to ensure a scholarship to guarantee staying in this country?

“Wow!” When the party arrived at the elevator to the suite, one of the girls ahead turned back to regard the trio taking up the rear. It was skateboarder Patrisha. “Zoe Chloe is hanging wi’ us, sistahs! Kewl.”

The mothers frowned and blinked at the gaudy Zoe Chloe persona, mystified.

“For sure,” ZC answered, moving forward to high-five her fans. “I’m gonna see you girls and mamas get safe home to your hotel suite, so these hunky boys in uniform can guard your door.”

One of the two security guys who’d joined the party, probably on Rafi’s orders, was under thirty, but one was fat, bald, and on social security.

He was the one who chuckled and said, “You betcha, ladies. We’ll keep the big, bad bedbugs from your door. You can count on Roy.”

The three girls collapsed in giggles at the idea of this old guy being hunky.

“I’m Hank. Hank Buck,” the younger, buff one said. “I’m in charge of operations for this jamboree, so you’ll be seeing me around. You’ll never know when and hopefully anybody bad won’t know when either. I’ll be looking out for you girls, trust me.”

“We are getting more security than Los Hermanos Brothers,” Meg-Ann boasted to her friends as they rode up in the elevator.

“That rocks!” Patrisha agreed.

Zoe Chloe stood outside the suite’s double doors as mothers and daughters and mini-manager filed in, the girls still giggling, as they passed the guards, eyeing the younger one.

“Don’t you belong in there, miss?” Roy, the older guard, asked. “It ain’t very safe out here.”

“No, sir,” Zoe said, all pretend pouty. “I guess media stars like Los Hermanos Brothers and me don’t rate attempts on our performances and sanity. Pooh! We’ll never make Excess Hollywood that way.”

The senior citizen guard glowered at her irresponsible attitude, but the young one eyed her overexposed fishnet-clad gams. He was only, like, twenty-nine and had no idea she was an older woman.

Kewl.

Temple bopped Zoe Chloe Ozone outa there into the hall before she triggered a response from some lethally jealous tweenybopper. Girls just want to compete.

Maybe to the death.

Hotfooting It

If there is anyone in this entire place who is fully qualified to smell a rat, it is I.

I mean this quite literally.

A lot of scents assail my highly developed sniffer during these recent, critical moments since I pushed my way past a phalanx of human legs to the side of the little doll who was most cruelly afflicted.

First, human foot odor. Arghh!

This alone is enough to knock a sensitive dude—a short, sensitive dude—off his four pins. Why will they insist on confining and cooking the unhappy aroma of their pathetically unclawed feet inside these thick leather and canvas boxes?

Air, my fellow Americans! Please! We four-footed citizens only ask that you aerate your tootsies as fully and often as we do ours. You will notice that we are not subject to such ills as bunions, corns, hammertoes, and athlete’s foot, although we are better natural-born athletes than the whole kit and caboodle of you put together.

Having fought my way through this chemical hazard of foot odor, I am able to insinuate myself next to the maternal unit, which is swamped in a chemical cosmetic haze of other, supposedly pleasant odors.

A word to the wise: cover-ups never work.

In the confusion, and under the cover of this one large, hysterical lady who goes by the appellation “Mama,” I am able to thrust myself into the heart of the problem: the tiny dancer’s still twitching feet.

Whew! I will give credit to the heat of the dance. This little doll’s feet are sniffing up a storm. It is not the unnatural natural odor I am accustomed to.