He let me lead him upstairs, quiet as he looked around. When we reached the hallway on the second floor, he paused, staring up at the wall. My mom’s numerous framed photos smiled down at us, chronicling my life from infancy until now. The majority of the pictures were from beauty pageants, including glamor shots spanning throughout the first twelve years of my life.

“Yeah, I was one of those kids,” I said, as he inspected them. The photos looked silly; I’d been as young as two for some of those pageants, dressed in sequins and glitter with a full face of makeup. Perfectly straight false teeth hid the gaps left by losing my baby teeth, and poofy wigs covered my soft wispy hair. I’d been a toddler, wearing dangling earrings and lipstick, smiling big and bright.

Manson looked at the photos one by one, and I wished I could see into his brain. I wanted to know what he was thinking when he lingered over the family portraits or traced his finger along the frames.

“Did you enjoy it?” he said, his question catching me off guard. “The pageants?”

No one, not even my mom, had ever asked me that. I wasn’t even sure how to answer.

“It made my mom happy,” I finally said. “She thought it taught me social skills, and she was right. I was never afraid to be in front of a crowd, even when I was really little.”

I’d learned to drown out my nerves with floods of false confidence, to look at every other little girl I encountered as a challenge. I learned to always strive to be the best, to harden my emotions, to view the world as my stage. I’d even had a coach. I could still remember her and my mom making me walk back and forth as I hit all my “points” as I would have to in competition.

“Pretty feet, Jessica, remember? Pretty feet!”

“Give them a nice big smile, come on, nice pretty smile!”

“Don’t clench your fingers like that. Let the judges see pretty hands!”

Be pretty so you’ll win. Be pretty so they’ll like you.

“That’s not what I asked.”

His tone wasn’t demanding, but my first instinct was to lie. Of course I enjoyed it! Why wouldn’t I like dressing up nice, getting attention, feeling like I was the prettiest little girl in the world? What else could I have wanted than to make my mom proud, to have others look at me in envy, to feel like I was the best?

“When I won, I enjoyed it,” I said. “But there was only one winner. And sometimes…many times…that wasn’t me.”