sophie.

Chapter 11

A.N. :: I've come to create a thing called the Timey Wimey Alert [TWA] for anyone who isn't very interested in hearing Sophie talk about the different implications of time travel. These'll probably appear periodically throughout the story and are marked with the words [TWA] in bold, and conclude with [/TWA].

JULY 26TH, 3750 

I guess I should go back and explain the whole Miss Polo Princess Pageant thing, and all the shit that followed. It's not something I generally talk about and not a topic I really enjoy, but Sawyer used to tell me all the time that if I didn't enter that pageant, I wouldn't be the person I was today. I'm not exactly the happiest person, if you couldn't tell already. And I can't take full responsibility for becoming that way; it sort of stemmed from the pageant, and thereafter evolved on its own.

I honestly was a very compliant, very well-behaved child. I did things, like help my mom clean the dishes or cook because I was that kind of kid, the kind that goes out of their way to make their mother happy, because shut up, that's what I enjoyed. Just picture one, everybody knows one. I'm sure you do too. I did things like wear dresses and not run through the house with mud on my shoes, was quiet when I was told to be quiet, and lined up all my toys via alphabetical or size order. I liked girly stuff. I believed in cooties. I laughed a lot. I was pretty much any other child, minus the traits that might've caused a disturbance in the overall run of things. And that's not to say I was any less naive than, say, the child next door -- namely being, Sawyer, who was the very thing that I was not: obnoxious -- just that I knew what my boundaries were and continued on in that fashion.

It was when I was ten that the accursed pageant came around. My mother and I had both casually talked about it beforehand, but we only really started to get caught up with dresses and socially-accepted talents and appearances in the last week before competition. It was an event held during the Marco Polo Jubilee, and obviously, since the title of the pageant was Miss Polo Princess, there was a mirrored pageant in Marco, the only difference being that they got the title of Miss Marco Queen instead. They legitimized the higher title of "queen" in the fact that they apparently had more competitors and obviously a bigger town, so Polo really had no counter statement.

That's when I started to feel a blooming sense of competition inside me. There were seven other girls in the pageant besides myself, and I looked at every single one of them and thought, I'm going to murder you all. And for any kid, a thought like that was... well, violent, so imagine it coming from the innocent girl that I was. It shocked me, but I didn't really do anything to combat it. I was in a competition, after all. I wasn't there to murder, I was just there to kick some butt and take the crown.

And that's what I did. I thrilled the judges with my dresses and kicked the snot out of more than half my opponents when I showed off my talent, twirling, and only solidified my win with the interview, where I mentioned all the attributes of myself that my mother made me memorize. But there was this other girl. Chelsea Salmon. You might remember her, because she worked with me at the Garrison Diner. Anyway, she was still the same megabitch back then that she'd been in 2013, and didn't seem to like me at all. But what was worse, was that she was good at faking it. Very good. She blew away every single judge when she mentioned near the end of her interview that she'd designed all of her own dresses, an attack on me, the frontrunner, who simply got mine from some local shop, and nearly took the crown away. 

But I won because her talent,  i.e. telling jokes, sucked hard. If she didn't already hate me, I figure that's when it started. 

Anyway, I'm getting off track. After I won the crown, there was supposed to be a photo shoot between me and the Miss Marco Queen, a girl named Cassandra Livingston, and it wasn't immediately obvious that she hated me. We started the photoshoot off nicely, with pictures taken from family members, a reporter, and a few Jubilee scrapbook-ers, I don't know, but it was between those pictures that she looked down on me (that's not entirely an expression -- she was at least a foot taller than me). She called me crap, she called me worthless, said that she was the Queen and that everyone else was a Queen, and I was given the princess award because I was a loser and they wanted to acknowledge that I was a loser, and a lot of other shit. I'd immediately taken to defending myself, first genuinely, but then I started playing really dirty between smiles and flashes of the camera. She thought she could win this war, but no, I was a sixty to seventy pounds and carried a decade's worth of pent-up childhood rage based upon my hidden insecurities of mediocrity, and there'd be hell to pay before I let her win this mudslinging battle.