Pageant Question: If you can choose to be beautiful, intelligent, or rich, which quality do you choose?

Early morning in the West Side indie coffee shop, most people run in and out with their lattes and crullers, but one woman sat in the front window, nursing her tea and reading.  She was early, but liked to be the first to arrive.  Marla was always the first, and she knew it bugged her sister Melanie, which was the best reason.  Moira never noticed.  Marla had also chosen a Richard Feynman book for the same reason.  She'd already read What Do You Care What Other People Think, but it was one of her favorites.

When the two college guys at the table next to her stirred and began craning their necks toward the service counter, Marla knew Melanie had arrived.  She buried her nose in her book.

"Marla, sweetie, if you sat up, you'd look ten years younger."  Melanie's silken voice and light touch filled Marla with a rage she suppressed from years of practice.

"Mel," she smiled.  "You know all the tricks."  Marla pulled her eyes away from her book and couldn't hide her surprise when she saw her sister's face.  Yes, it was beautiful, as always, but it was tight and had dark shadows.

Any question Marla might have had was stalled by their final sister, Moira.  A limousine pulled away as she swept into the cafe, instantly making the room look dingy and worn.

211

I was always envious of bands that shot to stardom.  Comics who landed on Saturday Night Live.  Actors who won an Oscar on their first movies.  Assholes.

I realized later that these "overnight successes" weren't really.  These were people who worked and slaved unrewarded for years, decades before finding fame and glory.  The "sudden" part was only my perspective.  I began hating instead people who made home videos that went viral, lottery winners and fortune inheritors.  Those were the undeserving twats.

I mostly hated them while I was in my slaving away years.  Who every knows if your unpaid work will ever pay off.  A creative art isn't like working your way up in a company.  In a company, you get paid no matter what you do.  When you're working in a creative art, you practice and practice and work at your craft completely unpaid and unrecognized without any inkling if it will pay off eventually at all.

Standing in my crappy apartment surrounded by crumpled notes and a beat to hell drum set I was the asshole.  All my parents' disheartening advice was sneaking back into my brain, this time betraying me even more by using my own voice to say it.

173

She wondered what they were talking about.  She always wondered what they were talking about, and she lamented, yet again, her inability to learn the language.  Haro tried to learn, she really did, but she had been told by her prep tutors that not everyone was able to comprehend the complex turnings of the alien tongue.  At their best guess, it was an actual physiological barrier to learning, but that didn't stop Haro from being mad at herself and at Joh, who had picked it up easily.

154

Sharon stood on an overturned bucket to peek over the neighbor's privacy fence.  The grass really was greener on the other side.  In truth, it wasn't difficult to be greener than Sharon's weedy, pitted yard, but the new neighbor's yard was greener than any she could imagine.